SLOKA 88 FROM DANCING WITH SIVA
HOW ARE AYURVEDA AND JYOTISHA USED?
Ayurveda is the Hindu science of life, a complete, holistic medical system. Jyotisha, or Vedic astrology, is the knowledge of right timing and future potentialities. Both are vital tools for happy, productive living. Aum.
BHASHYA
Ayurveda, rooted in the Atharva Upaveda, deals with both the prevention and cure of disease. Its eight medical arts, with their mantras, tantras and yogas, are based on spiritual well-being and encompass every human need, physical, mental and emotional. Ayurveda teaches that the true healing powers reside in the mind at the quantum level. Wellness depends on the correct balance of three bodily humors, called doshas, maintained by a nutritious vegetarian diet, dharmic living and natural healing remedies. The kindred science of Vedic astrology, revealed in the Jyotisha Vedanga, likewise is vital to every Hindu’s life. It propounds a dynamic cosmos of which we are an integral part, and charts the complex influence on us of important stars and planets, according to our birth chart. Knowing that the stars enliven positive and negative karmas we have brought into this life, in wisdom we choose an auspicious time, shubha muhurta, for every important event. An orthodox Hindu family is not complete without its jyotisha shastri or ayurveda vaidya. The Vedas beseech, ”Peaceful for us be the planets and the moon, peaceful the sun and rahu.” Aum Namah Sivaya.
LESSON 243 FROM LIVING WITH SIVA
CREATING ON THE ASTRAL PLANE
The astral plane is within this world as its etheric counterpart, and when you drop off the physical body, you are in it. You are in it now but are not aware of it as yet. It is a world just like this one. You can travel from country to country on the astral plane. While I was studying in Sri Lanka in 1948, my teacher living in America used to come and visit me in the astral body. When I returned to America, people from Sri Lanka used to come on the astral plane and visit me in America, and I would see them in their astral bodies. While I was in Sri Lanka, I introduced a yogi from the Himalayas to my teacher in America, and they met on the astral plane. The next day, the yogi came back and described my teacher perfectly and told me of their conversation. After I returned to America, one day my teacher asked, ”Who was that yogi that I met on the astral plane?” and then described him perfectly, and told of the same conversation as well.
If we did not use the astral body on a daily basis, we could not move the physical body. It is not the physical body that moves; it is the astral body that moves within it. When we step out of the physical body in the astral body, we cannot move the physical body until we get back inside it. While conscious in the astral body, we are more on the astral plane than on the physical plane. Only when the astral body and the physical body are connected do we seem to be in a physical world.
Because the astral plane is of a higher rate of vibration, or a more intense rate of vibration, prana flows within it a little freer and faster. We have everything there that we have on the physical plane. However, things there are manifested by the mind quickly, whereas on the physical plane they are created more slowly. This is because the physical body needs the muladhara chakra in order to function, and this brings us into a different dimension of time. The first chakra is not so dominant on the astral plane. Therefore, we are in reason and in will. If we want to build a house, we just think about it, and a house becomes constructed within a matter of minutes; whereas it takes a matter of months on the physical plane.
On the astral plane, we see other people–other people that have died and do not have a physical body and people that do have a physical body but have just left it for a time. They have left their physical body sleeping and they are traveling on the astral plane. Therefore, it is a more populated plane than this Earth, but there is more room in it, being of a lighter substance. Then, too, uninhabited land on Earth and the oceans are used on the astral plane.
Why do we sleep? The mental body, which we dream in, is within the astral body and functions through the astral brain of that body. Through certain hours of the day during the waking state, the astral body uses the physical body, and the mental body works through the astral-body brain and the brain of the physical body. There is also another body to be considered, and that is the soul body. This body is what we touch into at least once through the sleeping state, and that gives not only a release of the karmas, often karmas that have been concluded, but also a new flush of energy into the astral, mental and physical bodies. So, we touch into the Divine through sleep. We must remember that the astral body doesn’t need sleep; nor would the physical body need as much sleep if the Divine hookup were always perpetuating or flooding through the energy.
It is a twenty-four-hour cycle of consciousness. Our individual awareness simply moves from physical consciousness into mental, emotional or astral body consciousness, or soul consciousness in the case of deep sleep, where nothing is ever remembered. People wonder why they don’t recall their dreams. It is as difficult to recall a dream that happened last night as it is to recall what you were thinking about between 12 noon and 4pm three days ago. Now, should the dream last night have been a fantastic departure from your personal reality, you would recall it. If your thoughts three days ago between 12 noon and 4pm were a fantastic departure from your personal reality, you would certainly recall that. It is the process of recall that is being challenged, not the connection between the sleep state and the waking state.
We do not usually remember our astral experiences, because the astral brain and the physical brain are of two different rates of vibration. Therefore, when we return to the physical body after being in the astral body during sleep, any knowledge that we have gained on the astral plane begins to seep through into the physical plane during a period of four days afterwards. This knowledge accumulates, and we call it an inner knowing. Ideas seem to come to us from within, but actually we did learn and discuss them previously on the astral plane.
SUTRA 243 OF THE NANDINATHA SUTRAS
SEEKING INNER UNITY WITH THE SATGURU
Siva’s devotees meditate each morning upon their satguru’s inner form, striving earnestly to know his temperament, the contents of his heart and his essential nature, which is eternal, peaceful and unattached. Aum.
LESSON 243 FROM MERGING WITH SIVA
WORKING WITH THE DREAM STATE
We really should have another word for this dream reality, as the word dream has taken on connotations of something that only exists in one’s imagination. These kinds of dreams–when a person is in his astral body and can feel what he touches, emote to his experiences, think and talk–are not what is known as the dream state. This is an astral experience, similar to the death experience, but the astral body is still connected to the physical body. Dreams and death are brothers, with the exception that the silver cord is not broken, which is the psychic cord of actinodic energy, or the umbilical cord between the astral body and its physical duplicate, or of the physical body and its astral duplicate. Therefore, when one begins the regular practice of sadhana, meditation, mantras, correcting behavioral patterns in daily life, the astral body is able to disconnect from the physical body and an astral reality is experienced, which is not a dream when remembered, in the sense that dreams are usually denoted to be.
The English-language concepts of dreams–such as ”when I wake up,” ”when I was dreaming” or ”I tried to remember my dream”–set the pattern for the psychology behind dreams in the Western context. We could say, ”I realized I was consciously active as I reentered my physical body and tried to impress in my physical brain the creative work, activity, thoughts, feelings and experiences that happened throughout the night.” This would be affirming twenty-four-hour consciousness, of which the physical body plays a very small part in its apparent reality.
Because they are experienced, because they affect our waking life and because many of them are portents of the future: these are reasons Adi Shankara gave in saying that dreams are real in many respects. In the West, dreams are thought of as more or less unreal. In the East they are thought of as both real and unreal. The Sanskrit word for dream, svapna, is etymologically related to the Greek word hypnos and includes the content of dream and the form or process of dreaming. It is one of four avasthas, or states of consciousness, given in the Upanishads: jagrat, the waking state; svapna, the sleeping or dreaming state; sushupti, deep sleep; and turiya, the fourth state, also called samadhi.
We have spoken earlier about the twenty-four-hour consciousness of the mind and how even in the waking state an uncontrolled mind is dreaming and fantasizing, and we made the point that it is only the physical body that experiences the phenomenon of sleep. The astral body does not have to. It can remain awake and active twenty-four hours a day, because it is always functioning within the physical body during the physical body’s waking hours as well. We actually live in our astral body twenty-four hours a day. That is the true home of the soul, mind, emotions, seed karmas. The astral body, when fortunate enough to have a physical body, uses it at least half a day every day, when that body is not sleeping.
More and more subtle dimensions of consciousness are dealt with in sadhana. Ultimately, perhaps, one even begins to work with dreams in subtle ways. The Hindu idea that one would not steal or injure even in a dream seems to reinforce this subtlety. A dream that might not mean anything to an ordinary person, say an incident of stealing, might be thought important to an adept. Often religious people suppress their natural feelings in order to live up to religious concepts of virtue and ethics that they have not naturally worked into and earned by clearing up their past behavioral patterns through daily sadhana, self-inquiry and change in belief through belief therapy. This means totally eradicating one belief and replacing it with a new one that is more in line with the religious principles they have decided to mold into their life than were the older ones. Because of this suppression, the expression of the desires is released and experienced during dreams. Many people who have accomplished these repressions exceedingly well have repetitive dreams. Here the guru would take note of the dreams that were occurring to see if they were actually suppressed desires, feelings and emotions that had to be talked about in the light of day and changed, especially if they are recurring. The recurrence of the same or similar dream experience indicates that work needs to be done within the seeker, who has set for himself too high a standard during the waking state and is not performing enough sadhana and tapas to maintain that standard. Therefore, the letdown comes when no one is watching. During dreams he can do what he really wants to do.
The key here for the seeker is not to carry the dream into daily life and then start to do what he did in the dream in the physical world. This would only make more karmas and compound the situation, stop the sadhanas and open a door for perhaps endless other karmas or a complete life change, change of personality. The remedy is, if possible under the guidance of a guru, to perform certain sadhanas, tapas, penance, self-inquiry, even a penance for having the dream, while remembering the high standards of virtue and good conduct that should have been maintained during that sleep cycle. This explains the Hindu point of view that one should not steal even during dreams, commit adultery, harm anyone or act against dharma, the yamas and niyamas, in any way.
