Dr. Saumitra Mohan, IAS

 

 

Knowing and Developing Our Invisible Astral Self

*Dr. Saumitra Mohan

 

All of us remain ever so engrossed in our mundane preoccupations that we hardly find any time for our spiritual pursuits, something which is much more important to our eternal self. Many of us are often found saying that they remain so much occupied with their works that they hardly find any time for anything beyond works or personal affairs, let alone spending time for matters religious and divine. Notwithstanding this, we always have expectations that God answers our prayers to grant all our wishes. Isn’t that very conflicting and contradictory.

If we, being so puny a creature in the humongous cosmos, find no time for God, why should we expect God, being the master of the multiverses, to find time to answer our prayers? It is said that our prayers are very powerful and their vibrations, if made with all concentration and devotion, could reach the Almighty. However, a hurried or half-hearted prayer or a prayer with divided attention is never answered by the God. We, being the children of God, should commune with Him like His true children. If we earnestly pray to him as His children, He responds generously.

Let’s take an example. If there are many sons to a father, who shall he be attached to more or favour more? Of the many sons, those remembering him or making an effort to stay in touch with him, shall definitely be more loved or favoured. It is but natural for the father to think that other sons are self-sufficient and happy enough to require his help or favour. Same is the case with the God. Those who remember Him with love, devotion and regularity are more favoured and blessed than those who don’t.

            There are said to be two approaches to reach out to God – Inward and Outward. The inward approach guides us to look inside our soul consciousness to find the God. The outward approach goads us to search Him in the places of religious worship and through the complex religious rituals and sacraments. Hinduism has space for all kinds of paths to God. One should adopt one of these paths and reach out to God with all honesty and true devotion.

One of the best ways to approach God is through yoga (union), as stressed by Hinduism. This yoga or union is the ‘union with God’. Through yoga and yogic practices, we can unite with the God. Many wonders of the science, invented in the West, are used in the entire world including the East. Similarly, yoga is for all even though it was invented in the East, India to be precise. One who practices yoga is called a yogi. And anyone who has established God in his soul temple is a yogi. It has rightly been said that we should seek God in our bodily temple first before visiting a brick and mortal temple. And what better way to seek the God than through yogic meditation.

Across different cultures, meditation refers to focusing one’s attention deliberately - whether on the breath, a sound, a mantra, an image or simply the act of observing the mind itself. In ordinary life, our mind jumps from thought to thought – worrying about the future, reliving the past or reacting to emotions. Meditation gently trains the mind to notice this restlessness and return to the present moment. Through meditation, one can reduce mental clutter and distractions, enhance self-awareness, build emotional stability and improve focus and creativity.

Meditation is, thus, said to reduce stress and anxiety, lowers blood pressure and heart rate, improves attention span and memory, helps manage pain and insomnia, enhances emotional intelligence and empathy and promotes overall mental well-being and resilience. From scientific perspective, regular meditation changes brain patterns – lowering stress hormones like cortisol, improving emotional stability and even increasing gray matter in areas linked with memory and empathy.

While many practice meditation for relaxation or focus; in deeper Indian traditions, it is a path to self-realization – understanding the nature of the mind and the self. In the yogic philosophy, dhyana or meditation is one of the eight limbs of yoga that leads to Samadhi or the union with the higher Self. Meditation is, thus, the art of stilling the inner storm so the self-reflection becomes clear. It is not about escaping life, but engaging with it more consciously. It is not about suppressing thoughts, but understanding them more clearly. And it is not about changing who you are, but it is about seeing who you truly are beneath the noise.

Any posture which keeps the spine erect is said to be good for meditation, according to Patanjali. By penetrating the third eye or concentrating at the space between our eyebrow, we can dive deep inside ourself and experience the Divine. By doing so, we can also develop our intuitional capacity or the sixth sense. When the fog of ignorance is removed by meditation, we see the right path and see the God. God is immanent in the infinite bounties and beauties of creation. If we stay tied to the mundane and the finite, we can’t move towards the infinite God.

We can’t perceive the infinite God with our finite senses. Waves can’t exist without the ocean, but the ocean could exist with or without the waves as the originating source. Even though the wave can’t measure the ocean, there is still a point of contact between them. Where the infinite becomes the finite, there is a point of contact. However, we need to expand these points of contact to extend our consciousness to infinity to be able to experience the infinite God.

We have all actually descended from the infinite into the finite. God has condensed his consciousness into different finite forms, whether animate or inanimate. If we have never seen or tasted an apple, anyone can fool us about what it looks or tastes like. Same is the case with God-realization. As they say, we can’t love something we don’t know. Knowledge of God must precede the love for him. And meditation definitely is one of the most effectively ways to know our real self and the God.

 One reason for God creating us is that we find time to love Him and return to Him. We are fortunate to have been born as a human, who with mediational prayers, can return home, unlike many other creatures. The true practice of religion is to sit still in meditation and talk to God, closing the door of our senses which are outward-oriented. Through regular meditation and meditative practices, we can actually recognize our inherent power. God made us in His image as asserted in Hinduism, in the Bible and many other religious scriptures. We all have the same power as Him. But we need to develop this power.

Being a child of God, we have immense power which we need to recognize and realize through regular deep meditation. By the power of our mind, we can see further than the furthest. But strong meditative practices require strong willpower. Our willpower is what makes us divine. When we stop using this willpower, we become human. Many of us express their helplessness saying they don’t have very strong willpower to engage in such practices. Actually, when we resist something or persist in something, we are actually using our willpower.

We all have this willpower required to engage in uplifting spiritual or meditative practices. We need to recognize the same. Behind the human will, there is a divine will which can never fail. But our willpower develops by right company. If we want to be a singer, we need to go to someone who is a very good singer, has knowledge of singing or likes singing. By keeping company other than those associated with singing will not help our quest for becoming a singer.

Same is the case with spiritual practices. We need to associate ourselves with the right kinds of people with all our dedication and will. A time will come when everything is accomplished by us at will. In fact, proper visualization by the exercise of concentration and willpower enables us to materialize our thoughts. As we continue practicing visualization, our thoughts start getting materialized. If we are able to tap into the inexhaustible source of life through the powerful instrumentality of meditation, we can be freed from the limitations of our body.

Matter is actually materialized mind stuff. Everything we see is the result of an idea. We could not visualize anything without a thought. Invisible thoughts precede and give all things their reality. If we can control our thought process, we can dematerialize and materialize anything by the power of concentration developed through deep meditation. As we all know, matter is composed of different forms of electronic vibrations. Ice becomes water and when the electricity is passed through water, it breaks further into hydrogen and oxygen which are nothing but forms of electronic vibrations or invisible electrons.

So, anything which can be dissolved into invisibility can’t be said to have valid existence. In this sense, matter can be considered as not existing. But the basic building blocks, like invisible electrons or protons, always exist being forms of energy in motion. Thus, a matter exists in relation to our mind and as a materialized expression of invisible electronic forces that do exist, but are unchangeable and immortal. Both water and ice are manifestations of invisible gases and have transitory existence as such. Both our mortal mind and matter are manifestations of Divine Consciousness. In reality, only cosmic mind exists.

As a person remembers everything he creates; similarly, God remembers everything He has created. The ordinary man’s memory can’t hold the consciousness of all experiences, but the underlying divine power or memory retains everything. Put differently, an ordinary mortal may forget things, but his subconscious ‘self’ registers everything. However, his super-consciousness, with divine felicity, remembers everything. Through this timeless memory, He (God) wants us to remember our own divine origin and go back to the same.

But before we can do it, we need to get over and get beyond the mundane temptations of our senses. God’s whole creation is so designed as to disillusion us, disillusion us enough to understand the futility of remaining stuck in sensual temptations and thereby try to explore the unexplored and know the unknown. Through this realization, which dawns as we deepen our longing for Him, He tries to draw us back to Him. While Satan makes us think that God is unattainable, God makes it that much easier for us. However, man’s misuse of God-given freedom and his misidentification with physical body as ‘real self’ is the cause of all our suffering.

The joy we keep searching through physical means is always temporary because the source is temporary. To find eternal joy and bliss, we must find an eternal source which is God. Because of our differential faculties, we face the same challenges differently. Man lives in the body as a prisoner. Love of our body is nothing but the love for a prison. While it is okay to enjoy life, we need not become attached to anything. We, unfortunately, become a slave of our habits.  It is natural for a man to yearn for the role of a king on life’s stage. But if all were to be kings, there would be no play.

By our selfish actions, we are always setting in motion the karmic law of cause and effect which inevitably destroys our own and others’ happiness. The heaven won’t be delivered to us at our doorstep. We shall have to discover or create it ourselves. Even though we all want to go to the Heaven on our death, we can actually create this Kingdom of God on earth if all the societies unite in cooperation and harmony. A federation of all religions and nations is necessary. We must find our heaven by choosing the best from all faiths. We must develop an inner consciousness of divine peace that remain unruffled by the experience of this earth. Bible says, ‘Love thy neighbour’. God made this world. We need to make it better. We can enjoy solitude, but when we mix with others, we should do so with all our love and friendship.

The Hindu idea of social division into four classes are actually not about rigid social stratification, but dynamic qualities informing different members of a society. Thus seen, Shudra is the sense-bound state of existence where souls, as mortals, remain tied to the sensual temptations. Vaishya is the business or creative stage of a man. So, all of us, who are engaged in commerce, business or creative activities, are Vaishyas. Kshatriya is the warrior state of a soul where the man tries to engage in battle with the senses and to conquer his attachment with the senses. Brahmin is the ultimate wisdom state where the individual has overcome all attachment to the senses and immersed in God. 

Our life is actually a dream and we wake up on our death. If we know that we are dreaming, we won’t suffer the bad experiences of different nightmares. Same is the case with our life which is also a dream which we realize on our death. The universe is a divine dream. As we can’t change a dream by imagination or by denying its existence, same is the case with our life. We need to rise above the duality of a dream and reality. Everything in the universe is a product of Divine Mind in the same way that all we see in our dream are creations of our mind.

Dreams are actually lessons in the working of cosmic consciousness. They come to us for a reason. Their purpose is to awaken in us a realization of the dream nature of our life, of the universe and of the method of its operation. In sleep, we have a heightened creative power of visualization and manifestation. The sages of India have spoken of the universe as a materialization of God’s thought. It is necessary that we first develop mindpower to realize this. We may feel sad because of the hurts received in a dream, only to realize on our waking that it is nothing but a dream.

Truly speaking, says Paramhans Yogananda, the visible man is of little importance; the invisible self or soul is of utmost importance. During sleep, we are unaware of the visible self, but we are aware of ourselves, our real ‘self’. Take that away and our outer visibility is meaningless. Without the invisible self, the body would be worthless as a corpse. If one of our fingers is cut off, we still feel the finger to be there. There is an invisible astral part for all the body parts. Behind our physical heart, there is an invisible astral heart. Without it, our physical heart would not beat. We have invisible organs of sight and hearing, an invisible brain, invisible bones and nerves. These parts constitute the astral body of the invisible man. The astral body looks exactly like the visible one, except that its form, being made of light and energy, is exceedingly subtle.

The wire exists merely for the passage of electricity; the electricity does not exist for the wire. Similarly, it is the electricity which lights the bulb, not the other way round. While electricity can exist without the bulb; the bulb has no existence or relevance if there is not electricity flowing through it to make it emit light. So, the body exists for the use of the invisible self, but our real self or soul does not exist for the body. But for our remaining tied to the body, we can actually walk on the water or fly in the sky and re-enter the physical body again.

The astral body of the invisible self has sensory perceptions much greater than those of its physical counterparts. When our consciousness of the physical astral body is developed, it can smell, taste and touch objects far beyond the range of physical senses. And we can make them large or small at will. If there were no invisible man, there would be no visible man. When the invisible man leaves the physical form, the body disintegrates. Those who understand the subtle relationship between the visible and the invisible man can dematerialize and materialize at will. For this, we must learn to live in silence and meditate with deeper concentration more and more.

Similarly, we may feel sad by our failures in the physical life, only to realize on our death that it was nothing but a dream. It is when the human intelligence does not work, we look up to God for help. He being the master of the multiverses, we should, actually, think of God as the highest necessity of our life. Once we realize this, we shall become every so peaceful and happy.