In2-MeC

IBSA (ISKCON Bhaktivedanta Sadhana Asrama), Govardhana, India
9 January 2004

What the Upanisads Teach
Part Eleven

The Different States of the Jivatma

When the tip of a hair is split into a hundred parts, and one of those is split further into a hundred parts--the individual soul (jiva), on the one hand, is the size of one such part, and, on the other, it partakes of infinity.

It is neither a woman nor a man, nor even a hermaphrodite; it is ruled over by whichever body it obtains.

The birth and growth of the body takes place through the offerings of intention, touch, and sight, and by means of food, drink, and impregnation; whereas the embodied self assumes successively in different situations the physical appearances that correspond to its actions.

The embodied self assumes numerous physical appearances, both large and small, in accordance with its qualities. One sees also another cause of their union [i. e. the union of body and self] in accordance with the qualities and actions of the body.

He who is without beginning or end, in the midst of disorder; who is the creator of the universe displaying various forms; who, alone, encompasses the universe--when someone recognizes Him as God, he is freed from bondage. [Svetasvatara Upanisad V. 9-13]

"The embodied self assumes numberous physical appearances, both large and small, in accordance with its qualities. " In adhyaya IV, the same upanisad refers to those qualities in this verse:

ajam ekam lohitasukla krsnam bahvih prajah srjamanam sarupah
ajo hy eko jusamanonusete jahaty enam bhukta bhogyam ajonyah

This one (prakrti) is unborn. She is red, white and black. She gives birth to many creatures similar to herself [i. e. colored by her three hues]. The soul is without birth. One such unborn soul lies with her to enjoy her; another unborn soul, having finished such enjoyment, gives her up.

The Sanskrit word for "unborn" is aja, which also means "goat. " The verse can be read as comparing maya to a she-goat with a red, white and black pelt, and the conditioned soul who comes to enjoy her to a he-goat. Their offspring are colored red, white, and black. These colors represent the three modes of material nature.

Aitareya Upanisad I. 3. 12 speaks of three dwellings of the soul, beginning with nananda, the heaven of pleasure. Mundakopanisad II. 1. 3-9 tells of living entities born as devas (demigods), manusyas (human beings), and pasavo vayamsi (beasts, birds, etc). And so the universe is divided into three worlds--heaven, earth, and hell--by the three modes of nature. These states are experienced by the jivatma under the spell of the modes of material nature.

Prasnopanisad explains that the soul is unified with the work of the body by means of prana, the life force: ara iva ratha nabhau prane sarvam pratisthitam--"as spokes are centered at the hub of a wheel, so all bodily activities [e. g. duties prescribed by the Vedas, yajnas, varnasrama-dharma etc. ] are established in prana. " (Pr. U II. 6) We saw above that Svetasvatara Upanisad declares there is "another cause to their union--He who is without beginning or end. . . He who, alone, encompasses the universe. . . " Prasnopanisad details how the Paramatma brings about the union of body and soul by means of prana.

atmana esa prano jayate yathaisa puruse chayaitasminn etad atatam
manokrtena ayaty asmin sarire

The vital force is born of Paramatma. As a shadow follows a man, so prana follows the soul, entering by a path created by the mind [i. e. by the desires of the soul].

This is Prasnopanisad III. 3. Verses 6 and 7 of the same adhyaya shed light on how the soul and its shadow, prana, follow the path created by the mind. Hrdy hy esa atma--"the soul resides in the heart," and from this heart radiate a hundred and one nadis or channels of prana. The soul, following its desires as they are subtly manifest in the mind and grossly manifest in sensory activities, departs the body by way of these nadis. If he has done good deeds he goes to a good world. Bad deeds bring him to a bad world. If he has done both good and bad deeds, he goes to the world of men. Katha Upanisad II. 3. 16 says that one nadi, the susumna which runs up to the crown of the head, leads the soul to immortality.

Adhyaya IV of Prasnopanisad tells of the states of wakefulness, dream and dreamless sleep, which are the effects of the three modes upon the mind. Brhadaranyaka Upanisad IV. 3. 9 describes these three states also. Mundakopanisad describes a fourth state, turiya, beyond the modes of material nature.

About the gross body, Taittirya Upanisad II. 1 explains that it is produced of anna, food. Food is produced by the oceans (in the form of rain). The oceans arose from the earth; the element earth arose from water; water arose from fire; fire arose from air; air arose from ether; and ether arose from Brahman. Hence the body consists of all these elements.

To be continued, starting with the Transmigration of the Soul.

Sketches of a Devotee's Pre-Krsna Conscious Life in India

Back in the late 1980's I tape-recorded a series of interesting stories told me by an Indian devotee, whom I shall not name to protect his privacy. These stories relate his life as a young man from a South Indian smarta brahmin family, and trace how he gradually turned away from material life to Krsna consciousness. What you will read below took place while he was working in a Kerala branch of the TV Sundaram company. In the previous installment, the narrator had attended a contest of mystic power held by two tantrics in a village bazaar. Now he will go meet one of the tantrics.

I was eager to get to the bottom of what I'd seen and heard, so without wasting more time in the bazaar I headed for the woods outside the village where the pujari said I'd find the master's residence. After a time-consuming hike through thick foliage I finally reached the place in the afternoon.

It was a small shelter of piled rock walls with a crude woodbeam roof built under a banyan tree. Scattered all around it were animal bones and skulls. There were even a couple of dried severed human hands hanging in the branches.

A very attractive young lady sat inside the doorway of the hut. She was not yet twenty and looked fresh and virginal. Her hair was worn long and loose, and she had on a simple ankle-length maroon red dress. There was a vacant look in her eyes that did not change when I spoke to her.

I asked her about the man I was looking for. She slowly mumbled "Please wait, he said you would come," which didn't really tell me what I wanted to know. I rephrased the question and got the same reply, now repeated over and over. I could see she was under some kind of influence.

I gave up and sat down outside the stone shelter. Soon I heard someone moving through the forest. A man stepped into the clearing, and I recognized him as the tantric I'd seen demanding goods in the village. Now he didn't look so wild-eyed and fearsome. In fact he could have been any common fellow off the streets--a rickshaw driver, for instance. Still, one could see in his face a strange sort of lust: not that of a gross sensualist, but a lust for power. One might say he had the same sort of air about him as a successful businessman, a mixture of ruthless ambition and cocky confidence. But his success was not in business. It was in the black arts.

Wordlessly, he led me into his hut. The far side of its dark, disjointed interior was taken up by a stove that was simply an arrangement of bricks housing a wood fire. Upon that squatted an oversized copper kettle with two ear-shaped handles. Steam spewed out from under the lid, filling my nose with a faintly disgusting odor. Lined up against the opposite wall was a flat stone with a highly polished mirror surface, a small bookcase with thick tattered tomes crowding the shelves, and an old harmonium. In a corner I saw more of the now-familiar rice flour figurines, chilling in their combined morbidity and childishness. As I walked in, stooping, my head brushed against bones tied with knots of hair hanging from the gnarled timber rafters above.

He lit a couple of candles with the stove's fire and we sat down. Nervously, I began explaining myself and my new-found interest in tantra. He gazed at me steadily with a cold thin smile until I faltered. Then he asked in a deadly calm voice that matched his smile, "How far do you want to go?"

I said, "Well, to tell you the truth, my real interest is to develop some faith in spiritual things by actually seeing them. "

"Did you see the show I did today?" he asked, maintaining his reptilian smile.

"Oh yes, and it was very impressive. How do you perform such feats?"

"So, you want to learn something from me?"

"Yes, of course!"

He devised a schedule of appointments based on my days off from work. On the average I would see him once every two weeks, but sometimes he insisted that our meetings be separated by as much as forty days, in deference to his own obligations. He ordered me to keep my relationship with him a strict secret.

During our meetings he taught theory, reading and explaining Sanskrit verses to me from a old book. In the course of these lessons, I learned he had twelve chatans under his control. He engaged these demons in grisly tasks for paying customers, such as frightening or inducing insanity in the customers' rivals, or even killing them.

I also learned that my master had taken up vamamarga in vengeance against people who had used the same methods to hurt his family. He destroyed these enemies and then went into business for himself. In India, vamamarga has always been the last resort of the downtrodden in securing justice and getting respect: 'Dog as a devil deified, deified lived as a god. '

Apart from my master's ruthlessness towards his enemies, I found some things in him that were admirable. One was that he was strictly self-controlled, despite the fact that he used women in many of his rituals. He was a rare man who was motivated not by sensual pleasure but by sheer power.

Another good quality of his, fortunately for me, was that once he was your friend, he would not betray you. Many tantric masters accept disciples simply because they need assistants, not because they want to impart knowledge. Since in tantra today's disciple may become tomorrow's rival, a master's students can find themselves in grave danger when he no longer needs them. But my master accepted me as a friend, knowing that I would not seriously pursue tantra later on. I was only experimenting.

For the last ten years he'd been attempting to get mystic powers by a method known as uttara-kaula: the worship of Shakti in the form of a virgin girl with particularly fine lakshanas (physical qualities). His chatans would search for such beauties as he traveled around Kerala doing his magical exhibitions.

From time to time he would place one of these women under hypnotic control and bring her to a burning ground, where bodies are cremated. There he would bathe her in liquor and invoke the power of the goddess with mantras and mudras (symbolic hand gestures). Yet during all this he had to remain completely unperturbed by sexual desires (he'd been celibate for the last thirty years). After the ceremony he let the girl go home untouched, unharmed and unable to remember what had happened.

Having completed theory, one night I assisted him in a particularly gruesome ritual. He took me to a crematorium where he had the cooperation of the man who burned the bodies. This man had pulled from the fire a smoldering half-burned carcass that we used as a kind of altar. My master sat down near the body in meditation. I had a box containing eight different powders; on signal from my master, I would sprinkle one of them on the hot, crackling corpse. The other fellow would place burning cinders on the body from time to time to keep it hot.

The powders produced different colors and flavors of smoke. With the rising of each puff from off the carcass my mind would be opened to a particular realm of thought. For instance, one powder caused thoughts of clear skies to flood my mind--the dawn sky, noon sky, sunset sky and night sky. With another I saw different kinds of clouds. Visions of bodies of water were induced by a third. Sometimes the visions were horrible, as when I saw huge piles of stool. Sometimes the visions were very sensual. In all cases, I had to keep my mind under control and not allow it to be overwhelmed by fascination, lust or revulsion.

I was being used by my master as a 'video monitor' for his own meditations. I was to sustain the images in my head undisturbed while he entered them with his mind. Each image was a door to a particular level of consciousness, and at each level he had to propitiate a particular form of Devi.

This ritual meditation went on until about an hour before sunrise. Finally he stood up and embraced me, saying, "With your help, tonight I was successful. What a mind you have!"

He explained that he had long attempted to complete this ceremony, but because of not having a suitable assistant, he'd never seen it through to the end. Now, he told me, he'd attained the power to render objects--including his own body--invisible, as well as reproduce them in multiple forms.

Such powers are called siddhis, and are obtained by yogis after long, arduous austerity and meditation that might stretch over a succession of many lifetimes. Yoga slowly opens by increments the chakras, the hidden power points of the mind.

But the tantric process, when successful, places the mind of the meditator under such intense pressure that the siddhi-chakras can be abruptly wrenched wide by a mighty burst of willpower. This is precisely why tantric ritualism combines such explosively contradictory elements as the vow of celibacy with the bathing of nude girls in liquor. This is also why tantra is so dangerous, for its forcible distortion of the mind often ends in insanity.

Likewise hazardous is the congress the tantrics have with chatans, mohinis and similar evil spirits. As an old saying goes, 'Mahouts die by elephants, snake charmers die by snakes, and tantrics die by the entities they summon and attempt to control. '

After the session in the burning ground, my master told me not to visit him again. "You have seen enough to have faith in the realm beyond the senses. If you are intelligent, you will take up a proper religious life. This path is only for wild men like me. "

And in fact my faith was greatly reinforced by my master's help. I concluded that if such displays of power as he could effect were possible through the dark practices of left-hand tantra, the miracles attributed to the Krishna murti at Guruvayur must be of an infinitely more sublime and pure nature.

During the period I was learning from my master, I visited other tantrics. There were two in particular who became the main reasons why I took heed of my master's warning to abandon vamamarga. I didn't want to become like them.

The first, who directed me to the second, was a woman who was reputed to be the most adept tantric in all of Kerala. She sometimes stayed in a ruined house in a village outside of Trichur. It was only with great difficulty that I managed to find her there as she was very secretive about her movements. It was rumored that she was wanted by the law, so I dared not make open inquiries about her for fear of being arrested as an accomplice.

When I came to the house, I saw nothing indicating recent habitation except for an old ragged quilt flung in a heap on the veranda. After looking around a bit and finding no one, I picked up a corner of the quilt to see what was beneath it. The cloth was snatched from my touch as a voice hissed from under it, "Don't touch my blanket! If you want to see me, come back after sunset!"

I dropped the quilt as if I had just seen a scorpion in its folds. Without a word in reply to the voice under the blanket, I left the house for the village square and had dinner in a small eatery. As the sun sank below the horizon, I returned to the old house.

As I mounted the veranda, the figure under the blanket stirred and sat up. Her face gave me yet another shock, for it was decrepit beyond belief and covered with infected running sores. Her hideous visage reminded me of a reoccuring nightmare I'd had as a child, in which a hag much like her peered from beneath a staircase of an old building.

But fascination for her reputed abilities overrode my loathing. As she was physically unable to stand (she moved about with the help of people over whom she had power), I sat down next to her. In a rheumy, quavering voice she said, "If sunlight touches my skin, I will die. That's why you can only see me after dark. "

I tried to introduce myself, but she cut me off. "I know you and know why you've come, but I do not deal with beginners. You are looking for drastic displays of power that will give you faith in the mystic realm. Very well; I have thousands of tantrics working under me, and I will recommend one to you who will more than satisfy your curiosity. And I guarantee--after you've met him, you will not want to become a tantric yourself. "

She told me to go back to the village and spend the night there. The next morning I would see a line of people boarding a bus. "You give the driver two rupees. Where he tells you to get down, you get down. From this veranda I will direct you the rest of the way. Now go. "

Everything transpired as she said it would. Around noon I got off the bus at a Muslim village where the main business seemed to be the sale of deep-fried plantain chips. From there I walked, following a footpath out of town and through a green field of tall grain. At the end of the field I saw a house perched atop a rocky knoll. Somehow I knew that was the place I was supposed to go.

On the veranda of the house were four young, pretty women in red dresses, each wearing her hair tied in a long pony tail; they were arrayed on either side of a flamboyantly-dressed man sporting a full beard and shoulder-length hair. He looked for all the world like a gangster, and I began to wonder if I'd stumbled upon a house of ill repute. The five sat in chairs as if they were expecting someone. As I came up the front steps to join them, I saw the veranda was also host to a large population of pet animals--cats, dogs, monkeys, and even a jackal.

"So, you've come!" the man welcomed me heartily. "And you want to see something interesting. Well," he gave me a toothy grin from within his beard, "you must see the performance we have planned for this evening. But until then, make yourself comfortable. " He introduced his female companions and hinted that they would be as friendly as I might like them to be. I modestly declined their assistance in passing the time, for I was by now curious to find out what sort of discipline this man was following.

His specialty was spying on people and locating lost objects by means of mystic sight. And to attain his power, he performed the most obscene rituals imaginable. That night I would be witness to one.

He told me that his line of tantra required no vows or austerities like those maintained by my master. In fact, he knew all about my master and his trust in me; this, he said, was the only reason why I'd been permitted to meet the old lady who had directed me to him.

He said more about her. "Her greed for power knows no limit. She has attained levels that no one else can master, and she still wants more. Her physical disabilities are the result of the terrible methods she has used to get where she is now--but that doesn't matter to her, because her satisfaction is not in the pleasures of the body. To be truthful, she cannot be satisfied. The secrets of the universe are unending, and she has set her mind on fathoming them all. Her goal is to swallow the universe. "

Tantrics consider the siddhi they call 'swallowing (internalizing) the universe' to be the summit of attainment: one has access to anything in the cosmos, on any planet, anywhere, simply by thinking about it. Thus all desires are fulfilled by the mind alone.

Yogis who know this mystic process can mentally move through the regions of the universe as easily as someone using an elevator can move from floor to floor in a building. The yogi's elevator shaft is his body's central psychic channel, which runs through the length of his spinal cord. By meditation he can link this channel to the shishumara-chakra, an astral tube coiling from the Pole Star down to the nether regions, and project his subtle mental body through it for an easy journey to other planets. He may even teleport the elements of his physical body through the channel, reassemble them in the place of his choice, and so seem to appear there out of nowhere.

Shortly before midnight, the tantric gave me a battered tin box to carry and led me to a nearby burning ground, where the body of a pregnant woman had been saved from the fire for his use. I watched in growing horror as he stood on the corpse and recited mantras. He opened the box and took out an instrument for removing the foetus from the womb of the dead woman. Then he brought out a large jar half-full of some liquid chemicals, and finally a razor-sharp knife. What he did next was unspeakable. Aghast and trembling, I fled the scene.

I went to the watchman who had let us into the burning ground. "How can you permit this?" I raged. "That woman's family paid you people to consign her body to the flames, and you're allowing such evil things to be done to her and her baby!"

The watchman cautioned me in a frightened whisper. "Don't say anything more, please! That man knows what you're speaking to me now. Don't make him angry! You must be very careful with him-- he even knows your thoughts. If you don't like what he's doing, why have you come here with him?"

Feeling ashamed of myself, I mumbled, "I only wanted to see the secrets of his power. . . "

The watchman shook his head in pity and said, "Your curiosity will ruin you. You're a young man, you look well-bred and intelligent, why are you getting mixed up in this? Just leave. Don't spoil your life. " But I couldn't leave, as I didn't know where to go. One does not stumble around the Kerala countryside at night, for snakebite is a likely consequence. I settled down near the watchman's campfire and soon dozed off.

Some time later--it could have been one or two hours--the watchman roused me. The tantric had come out of the burning ground carrying the jar under one arm. In the other hand he held the baby's skull. "Why did you leave?" he admonished me, not unkindly. "If you want to do things that other people cannot do, you have to do things that other people cannot do!" He laughed, and his easy manner stupefied me.

"Look at this!" he exulted, thrusting the jar under my nose. I thought he would unscrew the lid, and my gorge rose. But he only wanted to explain that by treating the baby's flesh in the solution he'd made a powerful ointment. He reproved me again for not having stayed and watched how he'd done it.

"Go get the box," he ordered. "We'll go back to my place and tomorrow I'll show you what this preparation can do. " He led me through the fields back to his house. Inside, he went to bed with two of his girls. I slept fitfully on the veranda.

The next morning he set the jar down on a small table between us. Now I could see that the bottom was covered by a pastery substance. With a hand caressing the shoulder of a girl on either side of him, he leaned back in his seat and probed my mind for a moment with a quiet stare. "I think you ought to test the power of this ointment," he said, raising his eyebrows allusively. "There's a problem at your factory that you can solve with it . . . some missing cash?"

He was right. A considerable sum of cash funds had disappeared recently, and suspicion had fallen upon a Mr. Murthi, though no proof could be found against him. The tantric smeared a bit of the ointment on my thumbnail and told me to look carefully at it. As I concentrated, I saw in the nail the image of the office from which the money had been taken. I found I could alter the view with directions given in my mind, just as a TV studio director changes the image on the video screen by telling the cameraman to pan, zoom in for a close-up, and so on. But my mystic thumbnail scope was incredibly more versatile, for it even showed the past.

I saw that it was not Mr. Murthi, but another man who had entered the office surreptitiously to take the briefcase of money and hide it in his car. I followed him after work; he drove to the place of an accomplice and stashed the briefcase with him. The accomplice spent the money on black-market gold so that the cash could not be traced. And I saw how the thief had his share of the gold made into doorknobs that he placed on the doors in his home, naturally without telling his family what they were really made of.

Later I tipped off a friend at work who wrote an anonymous note to the police. They verified that the doorknobs in the man's home were solid gold. He was arrested and convicted on charges of grand larceny.

From my further discussions with him that day, I learned that when people came to the tantric for the recovery of stolen or lost property, for a fee he had one of his girls trace the missing goods with the mystic thumbnail scope. The existence of the ghastly ointment was kept secret, of course. The customers thought it was the power of the girls themselves.

The thumbnail scope had its limitations. Though it could penetrate any closed door or wall, it could not see above or below a specific height or depth, nor look into powerful holy places or temples and could be baffled by expert singers performing certain melodies. Certain kinds of smoke would likewise render it ineffective.

I asked him about his karma. "You have attained this siddhi by very obnoxious methods. What do you think lies in wait for you in future births?"

On this point he was surprisingly philosophical. "Those who would master this knowledge must be ready to face the consequences without flinching. I will surely have to suffer for all the black deeds I have done. But that's part of the game we play.

"We tantrics view all existence as an ebb and flow of Shakti. We connect with that power, and it sweeps us up to untold heights. Later on, the same power may plunge us into despair. But what else is there? Everything is but a manifestation of Shakti. "

This man's question--'But what else is there?'--for which the tantrics have no answer, bothered me. If there was really nothing else beyond the goddess and her power, then he, and the old witch on the veranda, and my master who poured liquor over women's bodies, and the brahmin who broke coconuts on his head, had attained all there is to attain. I couldn't accept that. There had to be something more.

I was now not interested in going any further with vamamarga. But I thought that the theoretical principles and the basic discipline I'd learnt from my master were of great use to me. I had no inkling that once the lid of the Pandora's box of occult mind power had been pried off, it was not so easy to close again.

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