TRANSLINGUAL The Language of the Dead E-Book

I. H. Elyonor

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 593

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

We approach the world through words, sentences and languages. There can also be hidden knowledge within ourselves that we can discover. We can experience a certain understanding and explore connections if we are willing to listen. The book TRANSLINGUAL explores this skill, the ability to speak a foreign language without having learned it. I. H. Elyonor describes in this work, the experiences and phenomena that transformed her into a medium between the living and the dead. She builds a bridge to meditation and yoga from her own practice as a medium. The poetic language of Pandit Gopi Krishna and I. H. Elyonor is weaved throughout the book. Scientific theses on life after death, higher consciousness and the effect of yoga on humans are explained and substantiated with interviews. This work is also intended as a guide: The book concludes with several meditations so that you too can make your own experience.

Leseprobe

www.elyonor.com

INHALT

FOREWORD

PART I - LIFE AFTER DEATH

CHAPTER 1 - IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH?

CHAPTER 2 - DO WE SURVIVE DEATH?

CHAPTER 3 - LIFE IS IMPERISHABLE

PART 2 - THE MEDIUM

CHAPTER 1 - WHAT EXACTLY DOES A MEDIUM DO?

CHAPTER 2 - THE DEVELOPMENT INTO A MEDIUM

CHAPTER 3 - PSYCHIC PHENOMENA

CHAPTER 4 - EXPERIENCES AS A MEDIUM

CHAPTER 5 - READINGS

CHAPTER 6 - HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS

CHAPTER 7 - NEAR DEATH AND THE PSYCHIC

CHAPTER 8 - MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES

CHAPTER 9 - SPIRITUALITY IN CHANGING TIMES

CHAPTER 10 - MEDITATION FOR SELF-KNOWLEDGE

PART 3 - BIOGRAPHY I. H. ELYONOR

PART 4 - YOGA

CHAPTER 1 - ABOUT MANTRAS

CHAPTER 2 - SCIENCE AND KUNDALINI

CHAPTER 3 - ASHTANGA AND KUNDALINI YOGA

CHAPTER 4 - YOGA AND KUNDALINI ENERGY

CHAPTER 5 - TRANSFORMATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS

CHAPTER 6 - THE MYSTERY OF YOGA

CHAPTER 7 - EASTERN AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

CHAPTER 8 - AWAKENING THE KUNDALINI ENERGY

CHAPTER 9 - WISDOM OF LIFE

CHAPTER 10 - BEYOND CONSCIOUSNESS

PART 5 - THE INNER HEALER

CHAPTER 1 - AWAKENING THE INNER HEALER

CHAPTER 2 - PHYSICAL ENERGIES

CHAPTER 3 - MEDITATIONS

CONCLUSION

AFTERWORD

FOREWORD

About the book and its genesis.

And so it began. When I held the letter with the following excerpt from Gopi Krishna to Mr. Iengar, written on December 25, 1976, in my hands, I knew that this would be the beginning of my book.

" My dear Mr. Iengar… Apart from these two heavy times of work there are 9 partial complete or half complete manuscripts of new books on my hand which need first attention. These include rough drafts of 3 new books which I wrote in Zurich, introductions in prose to 1. Shape of Events to come

2. Correspondence with Sit Julian Huxley and 3. Translation of Vijnana Rheirava. The remaining only half completed manuscripts are:

The Dawn of a New Science Vol.2

Do We Survive Death? And

The Shape of Events to Come Vol.2

I wish to put at least 4 ore 5 of them into final shape as early as possible…"

These are the original words of Pandit Gopi Krishna. Unfortunately, some of these books still remain unpublished. Miraculously, I was able to gain insight into all the as yet unpublished works of Sri Pandit Gopi Krishna and through my ability as a medium, I was able, with his help even after his death, to extract the ultimate masterpieces which in his and my eyes fulfilled the requirements of the wisdoms to be imparted and were also of even greater importance at this particular moment in time and should be published. While I was channelling Gopi Krishna, the writing of this book began by piecing together piece by piece, always with the approval of Gopi Krishna and the Kundalini Research Foundation Zurich.

It is a great honour for me to share ancient wisdom of Gopi Krishna with you. Pandit Gopi Krishna, 1903-1984, was a Brahmin, i.e. a member of the highest caste in the Indian caste system. In Hinduism, it is the duty of the Brahmin to be a teacher of the Veda and a scholar. A Brahmin scholar is called a pandit. From 1920 onwards, he was intensively engaged in meditation and discipline. In 1937, he had his first experience with kundalini power. In 1946, he founded a reform movement that allowed widows to remarry, abolished dowry and worked to help widows, orphans, homeless and displaced persons. 1967 saw the publication of his autobiography Kundalini, the Evolutionary Energy in Man. Gopi Krishna founded the Central Institute for Kundalini Research in Kashmir in 1972 and devoted himself to research on Kundalini energy until his death.

The Kundalini Research Foundation wrote about Pandit Gopi Krishna:

"Pandit Gopi Krishna, from Karan Nagar, Srinagar, Kashmir, had made a momentous revelation in his book titled Kundalini, the Evolutionary Energy in Man. The substance of Gopi Krishna`s thesis is that Kundalini, represented by the symbol of a coiled serpent, known in India for thousands of years as a power centre at the base of the spine that can be awakened to activity through certain exercises to grant mystical experience and samadhi (enlightenment), is in fact a dormant psychosomatic power centre located in the reproductive region and naturally active in mystics and genius people. Gopi Krishna awakened this powerful centre to activity in his thirtyfifth year with yoga exercises which he performed for seventeen years, and after thorough introspection over a period of another twelve years, wrote an autobiography of his experiences. He said that the science of Kundalini is one of the greatest discoveries ever made by mankind, as it is these power magazines that are the basis of all revealed religious teachings, scientific discoveries and artistic or literary achievements of mankind. Gopi Krishna held that the mechanism of kundalini, when voluntarily awakened to activity by means of yoga exercises, bestows upon initiates the same kinds of gifts as are displayed by men of genius and enlightened saints. Methods of stimulating this centre of power, he said, were known in China, Japan, the Middle East, Greece, ancient Egypt and even in America, and were practised down to recent times. "

Moreover, C.G. Jung, the well-known Swiss psychologist, has done some research on this subject, and has traced the connection between a certain class of mental patients and the phenomena associated with Kundalini. This connection, Gopi Krishna said, is due to the fact that when the Kundalini force is actively evoked at will, it leads to certain class of mental disorders and that is why the practice of Kundalini Yoga is considered dangerous. Gopi Krishna explained that his discussions with high-ranking scientists and scholars in Germany and Switzerland had convinced him of the correctness of his premise. He believed that the time had come for scientific research on this subject of greatest importance to humanity and seemed necessary for the world organisation. Such an organisation, he said, had already been established and would begin to function in the future. Some of the highest intellectuals of Germany had agreed to participate in this research and even to come to Kashmir to observe the investigation and the experiment being conducted. If proved, said Gopi Krishna, Kundalini would change many of the existing concepts of psychology and other sciences and provide a sure method for the cultivation of genius, the development of psychic faculties and for the induction of true superconscious states or Samadhi. The existence of this biological centre of power was also a bridge for the existing gap between religion and science and brought harmony between the different religions of humanity. At the same time, by pointing out the spiritual goal of humanity, it had an extremely healthy effect on the moral and spiritual development of humanity as a harmonious whole. No other single factor, according to him, was of such importance to the security of humanity as this research, which was likely to bring to light a number of startling facts about the spiritual nature of man.

This knowledge had been lost to the sceptical attitude of modern science. The life of Gopi Krishna seriously captivated me when I read his book on serpent power, and I was not surprised to find many more delightful writings that you can read in this book. I felt strongly inspired to write a biography, because even though we are two generations apart, I see multiple synchronicities and parallels, in looking at both of our lives, and know that we are all connected, you and I and all the creations of this planet, and that we can learn so much from each other by showing our true selves.

Now I am able to put parts of my life and my personal experiences with yoga into words and bring them to light in the form of this book that you are holding in your hands right now. All guided and inspired by Gopi Krishna thirty seven years after his death through his and my honest and truthful life experiences.

So far science is still in the dark when it comes to the discoveries of certain parts of the brain in connection with the higher subconscious. That is why today I like to tie in with the method of the shamans, where access to the brain is experienced from the inside, unlike the neuromedical scientists who microscopically examine the brain from the outside.

INTRODUCTION

I would like to give you a short introduction on how to use this book and how to understand it. At the same time I would like to inform you that the addresses of Gopi Krishna and myself are written in the masculine form, but they always apply to the females as well.

I have always been in close contact with Gopi Krishna's secretary, unknowingly for thirty years, as I happened to meet her when I was looking for a nanny to look after my children, in the early days of my career and picked her out to look at my children. It was only two years ago that she happened to mention that she had worked for Pandit in her twenties and that she had something to show me. She took me to her house and I couldn't believe what I saw! The whole attic was full of Indian paper writings that she had kept for all these years after the death of Gopi Krishna. It must be said that the same amount of scripts can be found in the Swiss National Library in Zurich.

This was the beginning of the book, because through the channelling of Gopi Krishna he gave me permission to write a book with the most important, still unpublished scriptures that are important for today's life. Of course, I did not know where to start and so when I contacted Sri Gopi Krishna, he told me the following. I was to look for an insect that could be found in the attic. I kept a lookout and soon saw a bee flying around. While watching this bee, I told Gopi Krishna about it and he told me to follow the bee with my eyes. The bee would instinctively sit down on a pile of paper, which he wanted me to point out as important for today's world. Now the magic began. As I looked at the insect, it began to fly around and slowly sat down on one of the piles. So this is the important pile, I thought, and put it aside. Then the bee began to fly again and sat down on another pile. The insect repeated the task until, as Pandit told me, there were no more important scriptures to be found. I then retrieved the piles, along with his former secretary from the attic, and the bee followed us. As soon as we closed the door to the attic, the bee suddenly stopped flying and fell dead to the ground. Its life's mission was probably finally fulfilled.

The book you are holding in your hands transmits ancient wisdom which, in the eyes of Gopi Krishna, is of great importance today. In addition, they are useful to the modern world and bring clarity to many areas that have not yet been explored. All texts written in italics are taken from the scriptures that the bee marked in the attic.

The first chapter gives you information and possibilities to look at the question of life after death in the Indian tradition of Gopi Krishna and in my view as a medium. Again, Gopi Krishna's ways of looking at it will be in italics.

The second chapter focuses on becoming a medium and explores the question of what exactly a medium does. In the process, you will get an insight into higher states of consciousness. There is also a detailed explanation of understanding mystical experiences.

The third chapter gives you an insight into my life in the form of a biography and tells you about my spiritual journey in connection with the rise of Kundalini energy, followed by the ability to speak with the dead.

The entire fourth chapter focuses on yoga and the Kundalini energy. In doing so, you will gain insight into my personal experiences as a Mantra and Ashtanga yoga teacher. Interestingly, an interview of Gopi Krishna, which I found, along with other interviews, thanks to the bee, focus on my two forms of yoga. The fourth chapter starts with an interview about mantras and goes into yoga and the supernatural, explaining this development in relation to Eastern philosophies to Western philosophy.

The fifth chapter opens a perspective on self-discovery and self-healing. Parts of shamanism are addressed and you get a short insight into shamanism in relation to mediumship and how these two levels can connect in our time. It goes into our modern life and male and female sexuality and also Tantra. The conclusion of this chapter contains meditations and instructions that will make it easy for you to integrate aspects from the book into your daily life. With the last chapter, I would like to make this book a modern guide and give you practical exercises and meditations with the knowledge of the inner healer, which enable ways of self-experience.

At the end of the book you can read a short excerpt from Gopi Krishna's most famous book entitled "Kundalini the Evolutionary Energy in Man". It gives a detailed insight into Pandit Gopi Krishna's personal experience with the awakening of Kundalini energy. It should be said here that Kundalini energy is a life energy in every human being and is located at the base of the spine. This power centre can be activated unintentionally or intentionally as the energy rises from the base of the spine via nerve pathways to the brain stem and can trigger some form of higher consciousness or even enlightenment. The ancient sages say that methods of yoga and forms of meditation or concentration can lead to the rise of this energy.

As you will realise when reading my biography, Kundalini energy can be life changing. The sudden ability to speak to the dead is a side effect of this power. The ability that Gopi Krishna and I have in common because of the Kundalini energy is the ability to write poetry. Pandit Gopi Krishna wrote poetry in languages he was not even familiar with. Again, we have the same gift, because I am able to speak languages that I am not familiar with.

TRANSLINGUAL

On the meaning of the word and the title of this book Translingual. As the word translingual suggests, it is made up of trans and lingual, where trans in Latin means beyond or over and lingual means the tongue side. In simple terms, it is the ability to speak a foreign language without knowing the language. In this biography of mine, I will be happy to explain how this phenomenon happened to me on that life-changing day in August 2017. What is the spiritual gift of tongues? Let's take a look at what one of the oldest books in the world, the Bible, says about the gift of tongues:

The gift of tongues was the supernatural ability to speak in a foreign language that the speaker himself had never learned. We see this gift applied in Acts 2:4-12 when the Jews in Jerusalem had the gospel preached in many languages. Thus, a person with the gift of language interpretation could understand and speak a language even if he did not know the spoken language itself. The lack of prior mastery of a language is the difference between the spiritual gift and the natural gift of understanding and speaking multiple languages. The language interpreter heard the speaker of the language and conveyed the message to those who could not understand the language. The goal here was that all could understand and benefit from the spoken truth. According to the Apostle Paul, and in line with the tongues described in Acts, the gift of tongues and its interpretation were meant to convey God's message directly in the native language of the listener. Of course, if those present could not understand the language that was being spoken, the speaking in tongues was useless - and this made the interpreter or translator of tongues necessary. The goal was to build up the church (1 Corinthians 14:5, 12). Paul told the Corinthians that if two or three tongues speakers were going to speak in a congregation, a spiritually gifted interpreter of tongues must also be present. Indeed, "if there is no interpreter, let the speaker in the congregation be silent and speak to himself and to God" (1 Corinthians 14:28).

Gopi Krishna, after awakening the Kundalini energy, attained the ability to write poems in languages unknown to him. Through yoga and intensive physical exercise followed by meditation, I awakened this power and the resulting abilities some years ago. This book is not only about the ability to speak in foreign languages or poems in foreign languages, but also about the ability to speak with the dead. This is also called channelling, derived from the word channel. A person who is able to channel is called a medium and the philosophy behind it is called mediumship.

PART I - LIFE AFTER DEATH

The meaning

What does it mean to me? The days pass and it puzzles me to understand what life is supposed to tell me. A group of dear people I wish to share yes to grow, but how does it seem to me? Can I exist, can I see myself and how strange it becomes to me. A virtue, a power, a force kindled in me and an emptiness just like that is fulfilling me. I am lost in nowhere. My joy and my laughter, all that I see fading in the group of people here and there. Oh loneliness I love you so, for you make my heart grow and glow.

I. H. Elyonor

CHAPTER 1 - IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH?

Let us first begin with the burning question of life. Is there life after death? To make the answer short. Yes! Of course there is life after death, because how could I have access to persons who have died if they were no longer there? I wouldn't call it life after death, because the souls are still in the atmosphere, but obviously they are no longer beside us but walk beside us in subtle form. So it can be said with certainty that there is an existence, after life. Let me give you some brief information about this.

Why doesn't everyone have access to our deceased friend or relative? That is easy to explain. Our senses do not allow it and many things are taught in our schools, but no knowledge about how to access oneself. Scholars and scientists have been preoccupied with the progress of matter for more than two centuries, forgetting to attend to the intangible or subtle. Let us look back to five or six centuries before Christ. Even then there were philosophers like Socrates in Greece and Lao Tse in China. Today, knowledge comes from the intellect. You may think that is obvious, because all sages have their knowledge through education and through the constant development of the intellect. But if that were the case, how can it be that a genius like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote arias as a child without having learned them through the intellect or a school? In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in ancient Egypt, the focus was on the creation of matter. Mathematics and physics gave rise to great buildings, and I don't even want to talk about the progress of electronics. Where have all the philosophers gone? Could it be that for a whole century only one direction counted, namely to follow progress, and nothing else mattered? Due to the extreme progress and the concentration on the intellect, there was something like a vacuum that tore religion and spirituality out of this world.

But now this hole is slowly filling up again and the environment and the life of humanity are coming more and more to the fore.

This book aims to provide answers to questions about the subconscious and even life after death. In doing so, I refer to my personal experiences that I have made as a medium and which I will now express in this form. This book is the result of my experiences as a medium and by reproducing personal writings of Gopi Krishna, the wise Indian who was born in Kashmir on 30 May 1903 and died in Srinagar on 31 July 1985. The aim of this book is to address the knowledge of ancient Indian scriptures and to show how a medium uses his abilities. It also deals with the question of life after death. I try to shed light on this dark subject. In this way, content from writings that have not yet been published is conveyed and the everyday life of a medium in this day and age is taken up. Strictly speaking, it is about questions like these: Is there life after death? What is a medium? Where do I come from? Where was I before I was conceived? Who am I? What happens to me after death? What is channelling and how can we communicate with the dead?

Let's explore this question again: Is there life after death? The body is a kind of device for our soul, giving it a form (i.e. physically tangible), similar to the effect of a television, which is the vessel for vibrations and waves. The body gives the soul a form, the television gives the vibrations and waves a form by transforming them into images. So if a television or our body breaks down, the waves will not continue to vibrate and form into images or thoughts. But what if we replace the television or give the soul a new vessel? So with the television it is clear. So we see the images, say the daily news, on our television. There is a short circuit and the set is defective and no longer works. The pictures or the daily news are no longer visible to us. So we get a new TV, nowadays you don't even have to go to a shop for that, from another room and switch it on. Immediately the picture is there again and we continue to watch the daily news. So now when our body dies, the apparatus of our soul is broken. But when a new body is created, the soul can use that body to show itself again as physically tangible forms.

Technology has developed incredibly fast. On the other hand, after the discovery of the moon in 1969, where did we come from to explore consciousness and explore unexplainable worlds? The first man on the moon hit the earth like a meteorite. Researchers at the time spent millions on developing new rockets and nuclear weapons while children in Africa starved. Speaking of meteorites: Millions of years ago, meteorites with amino acids hit our planet and were clear evidence that life on Earth is not an isolated phenomenon but has a counterpart in other parts of the world that space has (Source: Essay Gopi Krishna 1973).

But back to research and the collapse of spirituality. In the 70s, there was an emerging counter-current through the hippie era, which was swallowed up like a sect in the sand. The upsurge was short-lived, but the effects are still partly fatal. A walk through San Francisco today, the stronghold of the movement at the time, speaks for itself and is repulsed by the myriad of homeless and drug addicts on the streets. So it is also understandable that the New Trend movement of the time was unsuccessful and that research and technology still rule the earth today and only facts count.

But I think that now is the time to ask ourselves philosophical questions and also to reveal the answers that make sense. There will be a big shift in people's consciousness and this book is meant to help and serve as a source of inspiration. Some sections are simply meant to inspire you. Chapters can also be skipped and parts brought forward. Some chapters of Gopi Krishna are not easy to read or understand. I ask you to be patient with yourself and sometimes simply read over a page, because perhaps on the next page the content can be understood more clearly in different words. In the old works that I put together in the book, there is always repetition and if at first glance a section is very strange it can be perceived quite logically in the next. The book should, all in all, be easy for the reader to understand and the knowledge acquired should be enjoyable. I would like to thank Gopi Krishna for all the information and inspiration that has helped me to produce this book in the form in which you now hold it in your hands.

Not every person who reads this book can probably transfer this information and inspiration into daily life. That is also fine. It is wonderful if you can take some thought impulses or positive ideas into your life and learn more about the human body or even about yourself. The exercises at the end of the book should certainly also help you to integrate what you have read and to let the knowledge flow into your everyday life with small instructions. The following writings of Pandit Gopi Krishna serve as a source of wisdom and inspiration.

CHAPTER 2 - DO WE SURVIVE DEATH?

In this article, an excerpt from the book of the same title, Gopi Krishna argues that nature is forming in man a supersensible capacity to explore this question.

Do we survive death?

« A question that often arises is whether it is even possible to find a convincing answer to the powerful riddle of death. My answer to this question is "yes", because in fact the whole scheme of evolution and every true religious discipline is designed to answer this riddle to the satisfaction of the individual who practices it.

Based on my own experience, however, there is a divergence between the approach to this problem taken by all the luminaries of the past and the one I am following, which I believe can now be followed by any seeker and produce results that can be verified by science.

This divergence in approach lies in the fact that all the leading intellectuals of the earth - who have dealt with this subject - have treated their reason as the final authority on the subject, or their experience as the final limit to which the mind can reach. And with such a conception of human consciousness they let fly their arrows of speculation towards an invisible goal forever beyond the sensual grasp of man. Perhaps none of them suspected that the intelligence they employed in solving this problem was only an intermediate channel of observation with limited power, and that the evolving human brain was imperceptibly a new and more sensitive instrument for dealing with metaphysical problems entirely beyond its present reach.

The mystic and the seer - who relied mainly on introspection to find an answer to this riddle, carried away by the astonishing nature of the vision of transformation they experienced in their inner being, under the impression, that they were in rapturous union with the Supreme Reality - expressed cosmic concepts and ideas about the soul and the afterlife as varied, as contradictory to each other and often as hypothetical as the views expressed by thinkers and scholars in the past.

So while Pantajali, one of the greatest of the spiritual luminaries of ancient India, believes in the plurality of souls, for others there is only one Eternal Pool of Consciousness from which all embodied souls derive their existence. Similarly, there is a difference between the teaching of the Qur'an and the ideas expressed by many of the eminent Sufis who professed the Muslim faith. Some of them, even claimed martyrdom for their revolt against the orthodox views. Among Buddhists, too, there are several schools of thought, some of which believe in the existence of an eternal element or soul subject to the cycle of birth and death, while others reject this as a mere hypothesis. The same difference of opinion can be observed among Christian theologians and mystics.

This diversity of views on a subject which is perhaps the main concern of the faith is a factor which seriously contributes to undermining the whole edifice of religion. The lack of agreement, even between those who claim to have received direct communications from the infallible Supreme Source, clearly points to an error or leakage somewhere that casts serious doubt on the interpretations placed on mystical experiences. It is not for nothing that Omar Khayyam, a Persian mathematician and astrologer, has been led to exclaim: "The revelations of the pious and learned who rose before us and burnt as prophets are all just stories that woke up from sleep, they told their comrades and returned to sleep."

This presently existing confusion is due to the fact that the utility of the intellect does not extend to spheres of enquiry and investigation which have no substance in matter, which are beyond the reach of sensory perception, and which have no conceivable aspect to which it can apply. The growth of reason formed a balancing counterbalance to the growing sense of curiosity in our human ancestors. It could never grow without a stimulus from within, provided at first by a dumb desire to know and explore, a sense that was present in rudimentary form in most higher animals. Without this growing ferment in the mental pool of the subhuman ancestor, abstract thought could never have become the possession of any living creature on earth. Nor could it ever have reached its present height without it.

The desire for knowledge and an insatiable curiosity are inevitably the characteristics of a great intellect. But the ferment of enquiry in the brain, which in the course of eons of time led to the birth and development of the rational faculty peculiar to man, shows no signs of abating. On the contrary, it is now knocking for entrance into realms beyond the capacity of reason to explore. It is obvious, therefore, that some other compensatory sense or faculty is in training to cover the field of enquiry to which reason has no access.

The error of the Faith Pillars was that they too often misinterpreted their amazing experiences in the uncharted territory. Instead of regarding their supposed visions of God, saviours, celestial beings, or merging with the Absolute as the first indeterminate, indistinguishable impressions of a still imperfectly developed new channel of perception, they attributed everything they saw or heard to the special favour of God or the Godhead. Since these altered states of consciousness were vouchsafed as rewards for their striving, they stamped their visions and effusions with the seal of infallibility and finality. With this statement I wish to make it clear that I have no conception or display of my own superiority of knowledge in this field, but on the other hand I must admit my own even greater errors. For I have been beaten mercilessly again and again during the whole period of my transformation, until I understood that the mystical experience - at the present stage of human evolution - does not denote a state of finality attained by any individual blessed with it. They are only the first attempts at the use of a transcendental channel of knowledge, still imperfectly developed even in the most perfectly evolved human beings, to explore the ineffable, massless world to which the soul of man belongs.

The faculty of speech begins to develop in the infant through the instruments of speech - the vocal cords, the tongue and the special centre in the brain which is already part of the infant organism. The whole development of the faculty of speech takes years to mature, long after the other senses and instincts have made their appearance. The hard, stubborn attempts of a child to articulate its first words are indeed remarkable. Sometimes it uses all the strength of its small, round body, clenches its soft fists, rounds its little mouth and uses all its energy to utter a single word, triggered by an impulse about which we are still in the dark.

The ability only begins to take shape months after birth, corresponding to the developmental period in the three years of the human being's life. Similarly, selfconsciousness appears in the infant at about the age of three, again in accordance with the time at which development took place in the race.

Judging by the way man rises from conception to the stature of a mature human being - his ceaseless struggles to learn to speak, to eat, to crawl, to stand upright, to gather knowledge at school, to acquire self-control, love and success in life - it would be infantile to assume that after all this, he can make a sudden leap to the application of a new and amazing ability designed to penetrate to subtler levels of creation previously denied him. It is this ignorance of a yet unknown law of nature that lies at the root of all the confusion and conflict that exists regarding the supernatural and the divine, and which forms the basis of the discord between religion and science. The rational biologist or psychiatrist or psychologist who comes in daily contact with the inescapable realities of human life - both psychic and organic - instinctively recoils from the idea of a sudden total negation of all the concepts and notions he forms on the basis of objective experience. A rational exploration of this developing channel in all men can therefore be of great mutual benefit to both the scientist and the man of faith. Returning now to the development of this super rational channel of perception, it can be definitely asserted that all paranormal phenomena and psychic abilities observed in human beings provide positive evidence of its existence. The individual who is prone to mystical experiences or astral travel and possesses the gift of clairvoyance, telepathy, prophecy or mediumship in the state of trance, sleep or wakefulness, knowingly or unknowingly makes use of this psychic channel for the exercise of his extraordinary abilities.

The fact that the phenomena exhibited are inconclusive, unpredictable and unpredictable - almost always beyond the control of the individual - is a clear testimony to the idea that the channel is imperfectly developed. Such individuals lack the experience and training necessary for better performance, as in a child's first confused attempts at articulation. A thorough investigation and analysis of even the psychic phenomena can only lead to the conclusion that the mechanisms, manifestations and forces involved are entirely beyond the reach of our sensory equipment, mind and intellect. To illustrate what I mean, let us take the example of a telepathic communication received by a medium, or a prophetic dream fulfilled in all its details on a later day. From the standpoint of the intellect, there is no explanation of how an embodied consciousness, bound by space and time, can see into the future. According to our present ideas of matter and the sequence of events, the future cannot be determined. We have to look for another explanation for materialisation. The phenomenon of communications from the deceased is no less surprising.

When we deal with the subject of telepathy or precognition or communication from the dead, we almost always assume a superhuman, unconditioned nature to mind and consciousness. Thus those who believe in telepathy, divination, astrology or communication with the dead tactfully admit the possibility of all-pervasiveness, superhuman intelligence and omniscience in the Cosmic Mind. They admit all these qualities when they accept the possibility of a superhuman sense of perception, for which distances and the existence of millions of other similar points of consciousness have no value at all. To a spiritualist, disembodied souls have no difficulty in locating the whereabouts of those with whom they related on earth and communicating with them among millions of others. This points to an analogous belief in the clairvoyance of souls, which almost amounts to omniscience

The argument that souls are non-spatial and non-temporal entities reinforces the view I have expressed that we cannot form an accurate picture of the spiritual world in terms of the standards that prevail on earth. We cannot then even say that a spirit leaves or enters the body or inhabits a series of bodies in succession, according to the laws of karma, because such terms as entry or exit or migration from one body to another can only be applied to entities that have a place or time. So it is clear that these terms do not serve to explain the phenomenon, which is still completely shrouded in mystery. They are only semantic, that is to say, signifying aids to make us understand what our mind cannot comprehend and our language cannot express. The realisation of a prophecy or prophetic dream involves the presence or even more stellar qualities in our minds and consciousness. The fulfilment of a single prediction can only mean one thing, that the mind has the capacity to know even the future. This in turn would involve the fantastic possibility that what we experience as the future exists in the present in a way that is imperceptible to embodied consciousness. This is enough to change our whole concept about matter and our ideas about the universe. To explain the various categories of psychic phenomena, the present solutions and explanations delivered from the standpoint of reason are all quite inadequate to explain them or to understand the law underlying their occurrence. But one irresistible conclusion that emerges from this study is that all our ideas and concepts about spirit, consciousness, the soul, God, the afterlife, survival, immortality, eternity and the like must be aligned in the light of our experiences in the mystical and paranormal spheres of the mind.

The greatest service that parapsychology could render would be to establish the validity of paranormal phenomena beyond doubt and dispute. It is premature for any scholar to speculate on the nature of the spirit until all its paranormal and mystical manifestations are tabulated and their meaning understood. This investigation would be sufficient not only to explode many of the scientific myths at present prevalent, but also to focus the attention of the masses sharply on the duty they owe to their eternal selves. Even if only a small fraction of the potentialities existing in mind and consciousness - as revealed by psi phenomena - are accepted as fully established, this must lead to momentous conclusions and correct many of the misconceptions currently prevailing. There cannot then be the slightest doubt about the fact that there is absolutely no possibility for an embodied mind to draw even an approximate picture of consciousness as it exists in its very own free state.

We have absolutely no earthly yardsticks with which to compare a medium that transcends time and distance, that knows all things near and far instantaneously and covers all periods of time, past, present, future, as if they did not exist. Seen in this light, the cosmic spirit or the self-existent world of consciousness must be so alien to our conceptions and thoughts that it is impossible to conceive of it in our imagination or to grasp it with our intellect. In the light of this fact, it is easy to conclude that all descriptions of an all-embracing God, Brahman, Jehovah, Allah or the stage of Nirvana (state of extinction) or any explanation or representation of their inner state, the clairvoyants, the telepaths, the mediums, of the mystics or the prophets, must all be interpreted as attempts by the highly diluted human consciousness to express the nature, characteristics and extent of a cosmic colossus which is totally beyond its channels of perception and thought. Acceptance of this fact must naturally lead to a better understanding of mystical and psychic phenomena as the spheres of investigation and knowledge of a new channel of perception slowly develop in the race. The moment we accept the existence of a cosmic spirit or an everlasting universe of consciousness and its amazing nature as revealed by psiphenomena, we have no alternative but to admit that the manifestation of earthly life and consciousness in man all depend on, say, the radiation of a mighty cosmic sun. Then we must also accept that there must be extremely attenuated or extremely concentrated forms of this radiation - such as the extremely weak nature of a ray of light reaching the earth from a distant star and the intensity of the light on the surface of our mighty sun. So, assuming that each human soul is a dilute, tiny drop from the concentrated ocean of life or the distant, tiny ray of light from an unimaginably bright, gigantic sun, the question now is whether this drop of water or this glimmer of light, shining like a firefly, would continue to exist as a separate entity, cut off forever from its oceanic source, or whether it would immediately merge with the mortal coil on its dissolution.

As things stand, neither the experience of the mystics, nor the various explanations offered for the incredible nature of psi phenomena, nor the speculations of the sages have provided a definitive answer to this riddle. In view of the fact that Nature is already establishing a supersensible channel of knowledge for this enquiry, it is obvious that man is destined to find a solution to his problem which will satisfy his innate desire for self-knowledge and his unquenchable thirst for immortality.

We stand defeated before the mystery of death because we have not yet overcome the limitations of embodied life. Is there an afterlife, and if so, what is it, is a question that is present beneath the surface in the mind of almost everyone. Most people cherish the pleasant thought of a personal afterlife beyond the grave, and any thought of a loss of identity, inevitable in merging with a cosmic whole, seems repulsive to them. But freed from earthly bonds, what is the true nature of this identity whose continuation after death is so dear to us? Does not everything revolve around the realm of our self-consciousness, our knowing, seeing, feeling, incarnate self? But this consciousness of ours is but a speck in the unbroken and undivided volume of consciousness that spans the universe. United with the cosmic consciousness from a tiny unity, do we not become a colossal whole? Broken down to its essence, this is but an emanation, that is, radiation, from the eternal cosmic source of life and consciousness. If the "I" of all human beings were not illuminated by the rays of this almighty sun, the original source of all personalities, memories and thoughts, the human ego could not even come into being. »

CHAPTER 3 - LIFE IS IMPERISHABLE

The following article was published by the Central Institute for Kundalini Research in New Delhi and written by Gopi Krishna, on 26 March 1980.

Life is imperishable

« The problem of continued life after physical death is not as easy to solve as some have tried. At the same time, a blanket rejection of the idea of the continuance of consciousness after the destruction of its physical organ, namely the brain, as suggested by some able scholars, also does not indicate a rational approach to the problem in the light of the expanded knowledge of our day. It is the height of imprudence to believe that the universe we perceive with our five senses and intellect represents all the knowledge of the creation surrounding us. This is not even true of the physical energies and forces. We cannot perceive the energy waves emitted by a radio or television station with any of our senses. But they are manifested through any apparatus that can convert them into sounds or bright, moving images and shapes. Without the apparatus, it would not be possible for the inhabitant of a remote area, who has no contact with the modern world, to detect the movement of the waves or even to suspect their existence through his sensory equipment or his mind. For him they would not exist at all, just as they did not exist for the wisest spirits of the past.

We lose ourselves in speculation about the possibility of the survival of the spirit or consciousness after the dissolution of the human brain, for the spirit too is a form of energy belonging to another plane of creation. It is so different from everything we know about matter, and so far removed from our conceptions of being, that it is impossible for us to recognise it apart from the organic instrument through which it manifests itself, or even to have a clear conception of it as we imagine matter or its energies. The indwelling soul, the only mirror that reflects the cosmos and gives it substance, is itself unfathomable and inconceivable. It is made of a substance that has no counterpart in the physical universe. It is needless to point out to an intelligent observer that we cannot, by any means at our disposal, peer into the mind of another human being. We are never aware of the immense world of thought that exists in every human mind. We see the individual, his body, his head, his brain, even when we open the skull, the cortical matter and the neurons to their finest levels, perceptible to our magnifying instruments, but no trace of mind or consciousness. And yet it is there. We know we have a brain, with all its extremely complex and intricate formation, as others store. But can we ever perceive how our thoughts emanate from neurons and what activity and storms occur in the cerebral cortex when we think hard about a subject or focus on a problem. The reason why some modern thinkers and scientists have been carried away by a mechanistic interpretation of existence is that knowledge about the brain is currently very incomplete and that the energy of life is of such an overwhelming nature that we cannot form any picture of it at all.

When we think of ourselves, that is, of our innermost being, our "I", we turn our minds upon ourselves in a vain attempt to solve our own riddle. But we always return confused because we are trying to fathom a depth that has no dimension, no mass, no form and no property by which we distinguish one thing from another on the material plane.

The riddle of life is unanswerable because the drop that embodies our consciousness, with its five senses and intellect, is never able to comprehend the ocean to which it belongs. The wall of the passage isolates it from the other drops and the immeasurable mass of water of the ocean. Only when communication is restored between the drop severed by the human brain and the undifferentiated mass of water in the ocean does the glory and majesty of consciousness become known to the individual as life. Since the mind of man, with its egoistic individuality, sets the final limit in the scale to which life could ascend on our planet, we have no conception of what lies beyond the limit to which our own minds have reached at the present stage of our evolution. In some cases, for example with mystics, the boundary is crossed and a new panorama of consciousness opens up to the vision of the gifted individual. The high-ranking intellectuals of our day, in all parts of the globe, are now close to this frontier, and need only a moderate effort to cross it. The tragedy is that despite the emergence of extraordinary individuals blessed with this vision, the scholars of our day are still in the dark as to the potentiality that exists within our mortal frame. For the so-called rational thinkers, the limit to which life can rise is that which the normal human mind pretends - a fallacy which is the cause of the present explosive state of the world.

The existence of amino acids in meteorites that hit Earth millions of years ago is clear evidence that terrestrial life is not an isolated phenomenon, but must have counterparts in other regions of space. There is a growing realisation among scientists that life in the forms that exist on Earth may have reached an even higher level of civilisation on millions of other planets in the vast expanse of space. In making these assessments, scientists again have in mind the model of human consciousness and the human brain as the final frontier to which biological evolution can go. The fact that there may be other brain types on other planets with far superior forms of consciousness to the human model, or that there may be other forms of life unimaginable to us or completely alien to which we have no equivalent on Earth, does not seem to be considered. We are no longer geocentric in terms of our position in the universe. We should also stop being geocentric in terms of our ideas about life and consciousness. What an irony that it is now the elite among scientists who make the earth the centre of life, just as their counterparts in ancient times made it the centre of the universe. In both cases, the inadequacy of knowledge was and is the cause of error.

The inconceivably varied and graduated scale of life on earth, beginning with a primordial cell and ending with the extremely complicated organism of man, should lead any unprejudiced observer to concede the fact that still more highly developed varieties of life and consciousness are possible and may even now exist in the universe. Since in the last two or three centuries humanity has produced neither a towering spiritual genius of the stature of Buddha, Christ, or Socrates, nor a great scientist or philosopher blessed with an enlightened state of consciousness, intellectuals not blessed with vision continued to exercise their talents and expend their energies on the question of whether the mind has an independent existence or is merely the product of the brain that manifests it. The question has therefore remained unresolved to this day, awaiting the touch of a future spiritual giant to decide it beyond doubt and dispute.

The statement I have made that we encounter the spirit only in the forms in which it is expressed by the organic instrument of the brain is based on the reality we see around us. We are never able to observe the mind of a living being as we observe other objects in the universe. Nor are we able to establish communication with a disembodied spirit, such as that of a deceased friend or relative, except through a living spirit, which in turn depends on a biological organ, namely the brain, for its expression. Our brain and our spirit are inseparable as long as our earthly existence lasts.

Our actual personality, with all its memories, behaviours, ideas and conceptions, inclinations and tastes, is the result of this intimate relationship between brain and spirit. But we must remember that the brain is only the apparatus, like a television set, for translating into moving images and sounds the incredible energy waves of life coming from the transmitting station of the Cosmic Spirit. Without the waves, the instrument would show no animation, think no thoughts and emit no sounds. At the same time, without the instrument, the waves, though active all around, would not be perceptible to any of our five senses, nor would they manifest in any form that could be detected by our minds. When a body is struck down by death, the animating spark of life lives on in its original form and glory. Only the broken apparatus now no longer shows the signs of animation. Although the pure, incorporated intelligence permeates the entire expanse of the universe and even reaches beyond it, surrounding us everywhere and every moment during our earthly life, we are never able to perceive it apart from its embodied expression because of the dullness of our senses. We never perceive the Real in its physical frame, but only assume its presence through external signs or inferences.

This intangible, elusive and incomprehensible nature of life carries within itself irrefutable evidence that in it we are confronted with a substance that belongs to none of the categories recognisable by our minds. Therefore, before passing judgement on it, we must first try to expand the capacity of our own mind. What form consciousness takes in the non-embodied state, after severing its connection with the brain, is not possible for an embodied mind to know. This is the point at which some of the beliefs expressed in the religious scriptures or spiritual traditions of humanity cannot satisfy the doubts that arise in a critical intellect. Can we assume from a rational point of view that our embodied personality survives our physical death with all its qualities and peculiarities, faults and weaknesses or merits and virtues that distinguished it from others during life?

Let us examine this question a little more deeply to see how far such an assumption can withstand the fire of the critical intellect. If we consider the case of an infant who dies at the age of, say, a few months, can we assume that his personality would live on in the form of a baby even after death? What about a centenarian who is bent with age, afflicted with infirmities and completely senile at the time of his departure from this world? Would that same decrepit personality continue forever after the dissolution of the shrivelled body it inhabited at the end? What about the retarded or atrophied people? Will they live on in the afterlife in the same sub-human forms? What about the neurotics, the criminals or the alcoholics? Will their abnormal dispositions continue to colour their personalities in the afterlife? If the answer to these questions is negative, can we or anyone represent which part of our personality will persist after death and which part will dissolve with the dissolution of the body? If the answer is that it is not possible to decide this question with any degree of accuracy, it means that on the human level we are still not able to solve the problem of survival in the same way that we solve the worldly problems of life.

Those who believe in the survival of the soul after physical death not infrequently project an image of their personality in the full splendour and vivacity of its prime as their perpetual state of being in the afterlife. But even if this is accepted as a possibility, it can only apply to people who pass away in full possession of their powers in their prime. It cannot apply to the other categories of people already described. What is to be the lot of those who form the majority who pass away in old age, often in a state of mental debilitation and senility? If it is argued that the soul or the Atman never experiences the ignorance of infancy or the sensibility of old age, but dwells in a state of eternal blossom, the question arises, what happens to it in the course of its embodiment to obscure its glory and overshadow its bloom? Why then does it manifest itself as a crowing infant, a babbling child, a senseless idiot, an imbecile, a hardened criminal, a murderer, a robber, a madman, a pervert, a drug addict, or a staggering wreck without judgment or reason, at the end of life?

What other answer can there be to this problem that the soul manifests itself in accordance with the growing and then declining capacity of the brain, as well as with its formation or deformation, whichever is the case. If this growth, decline or malformation of the brain is thought to be the result of karma, it still means that karmic traits manifest through the organic framework through which life on this planet expresses itself. It means, in other words, that the soul builds its earthly form in accordance with the role assigned to it by its past karmic inheritance on earth.

The present ambivalence about the real nature of consciousness, in the present advanced state of our knowledge, is a sign of the one-sided development of the human spirit. The reason for this is not difficult to find. The overemphasis on purely physical phenomena by empiricists during the 18th and 19th centuries, and the agnostic or sceptical attitude of many gifted scientists and scholars during this fertile period, led to the phenomena of mind and consciousness taking a back seat. Material progress usurped all the attention of scholars and created a vacuum on the spiritual side that was not filled. Only now is the study of consciousness belatedly receiving some attention, but the glaring discrepancy between the physical and spiritual sides of the human personality still exists.

I feel compelled to point this out, for it is this disproportion between the spiritual and the material progress of the race which is the cause of the present crisis of humanity. I wonder if anyone among today's scholars even suspects that humanity is heading for disaster, since its most gifted intellectuals have utterly failed for the last two-plus centuries to judge which of the two components of our personality deserves the greater share of our attention - matter, which serves the needs of our transient flesh, or spirit, the source of our being, the magic substance through which alone we know ourselves and the universe around us. Nature relentlessly adheres to its schedules and programmes. The sun and moon rise and set at exactly the appointed time. The seasons come and go at the time prescribed for them. The entire universe obeys time in its organic and inorganic realms, a healthy human child crows, crawls, stands upright, waddles, lisps, walks and talks at the appointed times in the early years of its life. Childhood, adolescence, youth, flowering, maturity and senescence follow each other as surely and regularly as dawn, sunrise, forenoon, noon, afternoon, sunset, evening and night follow the diurnal movement of the earth.

What serious error in thinking has led the scholars of our day to the erroneous assumption that the development of our consciousness as a species is not bound by time and that it is our efforts alone that have led us to the present height of our intellect? What would happen if we encouraged a growing infant in its attempts to waddle, first unsteadily and then firmly, and at the same time discouraged it in its first efforts to learn to speak? A severe handicap would be the result, which would be difficult to overcome later. This is exactly what has happened with the development of consciousness, especially among the more advanced nations, in our time. The often vehement and vigorous attacks against the religious concepts of soul, immortality, God and the afterlife launched by some of the ablest minds of recent times, and the atmosphere of scepticism prevailing in the academies, by discouraging interest in the spiritual and the paranormal, have contributed, however unwittingly, to cause a serious disproportion in the development of the modern mind. The wholesale dismissal of religious ideas, which date from the remotest antiquity, almost as an instinctive inheritance, without study or investigation, has been one of the most irrational episodes in the cultural history of the race.