SLOKA 89 FROM DANCING WITH SIVA
HOW DO HINDUS REGARD ART AND CULTURE?
Hindus of every sect cherish art and culture as sacred. Music, art, drama and the dance are expressions of spiritual experience established in shastras by God-inspired rishis as an integral flowering of temple worship. Aum.
BHASHYA
Art and culture, from the Hindu perspective, are the sublime fruits of a profound civilization. Every Hindu strives to perfect an art or craft to manifest creative benefits for family and community. The home is a spiritual extension of the temple. Graced with the sounds of Indian sacred music, it is adorned with religious pictures, symbols and icons. The shrine is the most lavish room. Children are raised to appreciate Hindu art, music and culture, carefully trained in the sixty-four kalas and protected from alien influences. Human relationships are kept harmonious and uplifting through the attitudes, customs and refinements of Asian protocol, as revealed in Living with Siva. Hindu attire is elegantly modest. Sectarian marks, called tilaka, are worn on the brow as emblems of sectarian identity. Mantra and prayer sanctify even simple daily acts–awakening, bathing, greetings, meals, meetings, outings, daily tasks and sleep. Annual festivals and pilgrimage offer a complete departure from worldly concerns. The Vedas proclaim, ”Let the drum sound forth and let the lute resound, let the strings vibrate the exalted prayer to God.” Aum Namah Sivaya.
LESSON 244 FROM LIVING WITH SIVA
AWARENESS, THE TRAVELER
Reading and analyzing dreams from the shumif perspective, of awareness flowing through the mind–the inner mind being stationary, and awareness being a mercury-like substance that is aware in various states–will keep the aspirant emotionally and intellectually detached from areas of consciousness, or mind, which he becomes conscious in as he travels here, there and everywhere, as he does through the day. We therefore know that we need not be emotionally or mentally attached within our dreams to everything that happens. In the very same way we are not mentally and emotionally attached to even two-thirds of what we see and experience in our waking state on television or when we are walking about in public. Therefore, the shumif perspective, once it is well set within the subconscious, aids in understanding dream consciousness juxtaposed to waking consciousness and seeing them as one and the same. Pure awareness, nif, never sleeps. This mercury, mirror-like substance travels here and there, guided by the will of the perceiver. It is the venerable eye of the purusha. It is constantly aware, from the moment of the creation of the soul; and at the soul’s final merger into Siva it experiences super, super, super, superconscious totality. Most people who meditate do not enter the astral plane during sleep. When they sleep at night, they go deeper within than the astral, into superconsciousness, in the beautiful body of the soul. There they communicate with other people who are also in their body of the soul.
On the astral plane, talking is done through thoughts. It is the world of thought. On the inner plane of the soul, intelligence is transferred from one to another through light vibrations. This is a beautiful form of communication. The body of the soul can also appear on the astral plane and communicate with those who are functioning in their astral bodies, even though the body of the soul is a more refined body. It is these two bodies that are predominantly used on the astral plane. The intellectual body is used primarily through the day when we are awake, as is the physical body. Man carries his intellect into the astral as well.
Modern man does not use his physical body as much as his ancestors used to. He sits and walks and occasionally exercises, and that is about all. That is why much of his energy has been transmuted into the intellect. Our astral body, body of the soul and intellectual body all are very definite forms in the inner ether. They are used most by the evolved, educated, modern man. To understand these bodies, we have to forget the way we usually think about things and think about them differently, from a new perspective. Then insights are gained.
Some people do at times see what we call ghosts and wonder what they are. They are astral beings without a physical body. Only rarely are they able to have any effect on anything in our world and are generally harmless. A ghost is a person, a soul, just like all of us, that has lived in a human body and died, and is now in the part of the astral plane called the Pretaloka.
The word ghost generally has unfavorable connotations attached to it such as scary, haunting, perhaps even fear, for most people do not fully understand what a ghost is. From the ghost’s point of view, he feels very much alive, living in the inner world which this outer world mirrors. Ghosts, more often than not, see us, but we don’t see them, except very rarely, and they feel hurt when not included in family gatherings, and sad at being mourned for. Often the realization that they have ”departed” comes to them slowly, but comes especially when they find they can now walk through closed doors, even walls.
There are certain astrological times, such as Halloween, when ghosts are most easily seen. I was in Singapore on one of those days when all the Chinese people were in the street sending prayers through fires to the inner world. The prayers were printed and purchased and then burned in piles on nearly every street. The astral doubles of the prayers were collected by astral helpers trained for the job, then given to the departed relatives to be read by them. When we asked about the event, we were told that this was the time of year when ghosts make their visitations. And actually, in the early morning, upon awakening in our hotel, the mathavasis and myself saw ghosts walk through the walls, stare at us in our beds, then pass on through a wall into another room to investigate the other guests. This was a shared experience, for we all saw the same ghosts. We talked about it at breakfast. Some found it a little bit scary, as the astral beings were all draped in white, which was, of course, their pranic body covering their astral body. They looked white because they still maintained an odic body made of ectoplasmic substance.
SUTRA 244 OF THE NANDINATHA SUTRAS
BLESSINGS FROM AND SERVICE TO THE SATGURU
Siva’s devotees hasten to receive their satguru’s food leavings and the sanctified waters from his holy feet or sandals. They know that in serving the enlightened master, the whole world is served and dharma is fulfilled. Aum.
LESSON 244 FROM MERGING WITH SIVA
THE CONTINUITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS
In India there is the concept that dreams affect not only the dreamer himself but those around him as well. Partially this is because the concept of self is intertwined with everything else: family, community, village, cosmos. Thus, a dream by the guru would affect all of his monks. The dreams that a guru would dream would become the teachings of the guru to all shishyas. But because the shishyas were in tune with his inner mind, the knowledge would be imparted to them at the same time that the dreams were occurring. Therefore, they would very rapidly pick up on the teachings that developed out of the dreams.
Similarly, families, friends, loved ones and relations are all connected. To be connected to a guru would not disconnect you from your family, but only from the members of the family that were not connected to the same guru. They would, all of a sudden, be on the outside of the family looking in, because they would not be in the inner, dream, astral, inner-plane school phenomenon that being connected to a guru provides. When entire families are of the same sampradaya and hold allegiance to the same parampara, all goes well in the continuity of consciousness through the entire life cycle.
There is no reason to think that dreams are individually secret in the vibrations they create and that they do not affect the inner minds of those the person is connected to. But then again, this applies to people who are doing regular spiritual disciplines and are tapping inner resources and through these inner resources are tapping the higher dimensions of the mind and striving for higher consciousness.
The first thing a guru would do, or which you can do, if somebody tells about their dream, is to discern if he is an undisciplined person. If so, the dream obviously reflects his undisciplined nature. If he has been disciplined in the past and is now resting on his accomplishments and has let down on his disciplines, or if he is currently doing yoga at a certain time each day, this knowledge itself will show in the dream’s quality.
In India, dreams are also understood to be good and bad omens. The Atharva Veda’s appendix sixty-eight is all about the symbolism of dreams. Traditional good omens are dreaming that you have been killed, that your house has burned down. Indian dream analyzers actually interpret those dreams as positive. Dreaming that your teeth are falling out is bad. Being covered with oil is bad. Dreaming of a woman in a green or red sari is bad, though dreaming of a woman in general is considered auspicious. If you dream that someone gave you an umbrella or that you are riding on a camel, that is good. It is only ignorance–which is the ability to ignore–to pass over an entire subject area of knowledge with a superficial reason or comment. These age-old traditions which have stood the test of time are obviously a systematic investigation by many learned people of what tens of thousands of men and women have experienced after having had dreams of these kinds and thus formulated these postulations. The Western rationalist would write them off simply as superstition.
The word superstition comes from the Latin superstitio, originally meaning ”a standing still over.” Webster’s Dictionary defines superstition as ”any belief or attitude based on fear or ignorance that is inconsistent with the known laws of science or with what is generally considered in the particular society as true and rational, especially such a belief in charms, omens, the supernatural, etc.” These simple words are very important because they have the power to block out from human consciousness vast amounts of mystical knowledge. The Hindu looks at time not in a twenty-four-hour day, but a cycle of lifetimes, of many lives, and from creation of the soul to its eventual fulfillment of merger in Siva. The Westerner looks at time as a straight line. It has a beginning; it has an end. The line begins at birth and ends at death. Therefore, such a short line of consciousness cannot waste time in superstition, imagination. Whereas the Hindu believes that the knowledge acquired in one life should be carried over to the next life, the next and the next. It is an ever-building, ever-growing maturation of not only the soul but the many bodies it inhabits.
The theme that we are working with is the continuity of consciousness from birth to death, but even more, from the creation of the soul to its final merger into its creator, having fully matured into the image and likeness of the creator and the experiential consciousness, twenty-four hours a day, as creating karmas.
