Articles for Saadhana

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru.

Last night in answer to U’s enquiry, I was explaining how ‘I’ is a notion and it denotes a source, a presence and that presence is all-pervading. I don’t know whether she understood it; but she has to understand it.

There is one principle which I have explained in Brahmavidya Abhyasa, that book. Whatever exists, that thing existing will have one quality called pervading or permeation. The permeating capacity or the permeating power of a substance cannot be separated from the substance itself. Think of a huge hall. All the doors are closed and also windows; you put on a light there, one bulb. The moment you put on a bulb, the light permeates inside the room and how much is its permeating capacity is a point to be understood.

You pour water somewhere; immediately the water spreads on all the four sides and to the bottom; it will not go up. So it has got a permeating capacity. Think of a cotton cloth, you put it in a tub of water. Automatically the water penetrates and gets into the cloth. You insert a piece of iron or maybe a ball of iron into any burning surface. Automatically the fire enters it to such an extent that the iron ball will not look like an iron ball, it will virtually become red hot iron. That is because of the permeating capacity of heat.

Keep in a vessel some water on the fire. After some time you will find the fire, one of the qualities of which is heat, it enters into the water. Now all this, according to me, is depending upon the permeating capacity of the substance.

Now I wanted to say that panchabhūtās – earth, water, air, fire and ākāśa – these are five graduated products. Earth is most solid, so its capacity to permeate is the minimum; water is the next, it permeates even in earth; then air is there and fire is there; finally ākāśa, the subtlest of all products and ākāśa becomes all-pervading.

Our body is made up of the panchabhūtās; that means in our body earth is there, water is there, air is there, heat, fire is there and finally ākāśa. In such a body there is something called the power of animation, there is a presence which animates the body from head to foot. Wherever you are touched in your body, you come to know of it and you also know that I have got so much of bodily range. Close your eyes, sit. Don’t you know what the range of your body is? How do you know it? So something is present in the body other than the panchabhūtās, because the panchabhūtās are inert and insentient.

So the other thing permeates the whole of the body and makes you feel the presence of the body. This is what we call consciousness, whose expression is the mind, whose function is the mind, whose another function is the intelligence, in which there is also constantly an I-notion called the ego.

Substance-wise it’s all one. Because consciousness is animating the body and therefore it has to be present throughout the body and the body contains ākāśa which is all-pervading. Now imagine a substance which can permeate even in ākāśa. So if ākāśa is all-pervading then the other substance will be all the more so.

Now this is a methodology by virtue of which you can understand that, call it consciousness or mind-substance or intelligence or ego, whatever it may be, all of them are denoting a source, a presence, which is sufficiently all-pervading.

By closing your eyes, meditating and trying to dissolve the manovrittis, you can reach a state of absorption in which you will know the presence permeating your body.

Initially the experience that you have is about the presence permeating the body. Once that experience or realization is had, that this presence is permeating everywhere is the subsequent knowledge that you will have.

In the first, it is a direct experience. In the second, there is also the play of intelligence. The knowledge that you derive directly and the knowledge that you derive from intelligence, I think you cannot say one is lesser and another is superior. If the intelligence is sufficiently illumined, that illumination which the intelligence has is as forceful and effective as a direct experience.

You will find in the courts of law, the judge uses only his intelligence to arrive at his judgments and these judgments are sometimes more factual than even sensory perceptions. I think in the sphere of senses, senses are supreme; in the sphere of the mind, mind is supreme; in the sphere of intelligence, intelligence is supreme and in the sphere of aparoksha anubhava, the transcendental or direct experience, that also is supreme. What we want is an integration of sensory experience and mental experience, mental functions, then intellectual and the direct. It is that compositeness that we want to achieve.

Harih Om Tat Sat. Jai Guru. Jai Guru.