In2-MeC

Kolhapur, Maharastra, India
15 April 2004

I read through the pre ISKCON stories and I wanted to tell you that they are all wonderful. Nice narrated, thrilling and much inspiring. May I suggest you to print or publish them on web separately? At least for me they solved many questions which no longer hang around in my head.

Thanks a lot.

Also, I have one question:

What is the place for Kundalini Shakti in Gaudia Vashnava tradition, practice and philosophy?

Hare Krsna! Thanks for your appreciation of In2-MeC. As to your question about kundalini yoga, Srila Prabhupada has answers for you. In Srimad-Bhagavatam 4. 29. 6, he explains that the kundalini-sakti or "the serpent power" as some call it is comprised of 5 subtle life forces: prana, apana, udana, vyana and samana. The Bhagavatam compares these combined 5 pranas to a 5-headed serpent.

In his purport to Srimad-Bhagavatam 4. 23. 15, Prabhupada states:

The aim of this particular system of asana, known as the sitting posture for liberation, or muktasana, is to attain success in kundalini-cakra and gradually raise the life from the muladhara-cakra to the svadhisthana-cakra, then to the manipura-cakra, the anahata-cakra, the visuddha-cakra, and finally to the ajna-cakra. When the yogi reaches the ajna-cakra, between the two eyebrows, he is able to penetrate the brahma-randhra, or the hole in his skull, and go to any planet he desires, up to the spiritual kingdom of Vaikuntha, or Krsnaloka. The conclusion is that one has to come to the brahma-bhuta stage for going back to Godhead. However, those who are in Krsna consciousness, or who are practicing bhakti-yoga (sravanam kirtanam visnoh smaranam pada-sevanam), can return to Godhead without even practicing the muktasana process.

Jaya Srila Prabhupada!

Thinking about Dimensions

In the early 1880s a book by the name of Flatland was published. The author was Edwin Abbott Abbott (1838-1926), a British Shakespearean scholar. His purpose in writing the book was to open his readers' minds to higher dimensions. To do this he ushered his readers into a lower-dimensional world, Flatland. The idea was to get the readers to first appreciate the ordinary world of three dimensions we live in, and then to acknowledge that beyond ours there could be a world of four dimensions, just as there could be a world like Flatland of only two dimensions.

Length and width are the only spatial dimensions known in Flatland. What for us is a line on a page, for a Flatlander is a wall. We live in houses that are more or less cubes. A house in Flatland is more or less a simple square. A Flatlander's skin is an outline of a body with only one orifice for eating and excreting. If a Flatlander had two orifices, his body would be divided into two parts, and he would come apart.

To a 2-D person, a 3-D person is a god. Think about it. From our vantage point all of Flatland's secrets are laid bare. Flatlanders find privacy from one another when they retreat into the squares of their own rooms. But a square can hide nothing from us. We would even see inside the Flatlanders' bodies.

Suppose Flatland was situated on the surface of soup in a bowl. How would the residents perceive a spoon that enters their world again and again, emptying it bit by bit? It would look like a simple line whose size varies in time; because Flatlanders would see the spoon only in terms of their flat plane world, to them it would be a crazy and unpredictable transformative 2-D entity that appears and disappears out of nothing, uncannily changing shape over time. They would make reports about the spoon that would curiously resemble reports 3-D people make about ghosts and UFOs. Flatlanders who had not seen the spoon would undoubtedly dismiss such reports as mad.

That's the point: after considering what it would be like for us to play with the Flatlanders' minds, we can then consider what it would be like for 4-D personalities to play with our minds. Abbott's book only suggested it; it was the writings of an American, Charles Howard Hinton (1853-1907), that developed rigorous speculations about the relationship between the 3-D world and the 4-D world. Here's a simple example: look at a corner of the room you are sitting in right now. What do you see in terms of dimensions? If in that corner two walls meet at a 90 degree angle, and if the floor meets the walls at a 90 degree angle, what you see are three perpendicular solid plane surfaces coming together at one point. In a 3-D world, that's it. Three solid plane surfaces at 90 degrees from one another can only come together as you observe them do in the corner of your room. But in a 4-D world, you would--sitting where you are now and looking at that corner--observe four solid plane surfaces come to one point at 90 degree angles from one another.

It does no good to picture in your mind two walls and a floor meeting at that same point in a room next to yours: "Oh sure, I get it!" No, you don't. You are not able to see those walls and floor from where you are. You have to get up, go out of your room, and observe the corner of that room separately from your corner. You can fit the adjacent corners of the two rooms together in your mind, but that is only theoretical. In a 4-D world you would directly observe the meeting of four solid planes at 90 degree angles from one another. And that experience is extremely difficult to picture in your mind.

We would be completely open to the sight of a 4-D being. Not only would he see everything inside of us, but at the same time he would see all the sides of the surface of our bodies. When Hinton published his works, such ideas bordered on the fantastic, but nowadays they are fully incorporated into mathematics. Mind-boggling animations have been produced of "hypercubes" and "tesseracts," objects of the fourth dimension. Physicists routinely work with eleven hypothetical dimensions. Theory holds that there could be any number of dimensions.

What some thinkers have implied from this is that the perception of higher dimensions depends upon consciousness. There are portals to greater states of awareness, and one who knows how to open them can then see a totally different world than before. My Godbrother Revatinandana Prabhu remembers asking Srila Prabhupada about how bhoga is transformed into prasadam. Srila Prabhupada replied that actually everything already is prasadam. Meaning: everything already is spiritual. But unless we engage in the process for transforming our consciousness (i. e. the act of offering "bhoga" to Krsna), the portal to the spiritual dimension will not open for us, because we will be stuck in the consciousness of sense gratification.

On this view, then, matter does not "change" into spirit. Matter is spirit, but we are aware of spirit only as matter. The perception of "matter" manifests within lower, mundane consciousness. In higher consciousness, there is no matter. When we offer bhoga to Krsna in our practice of sadhana-bhakti, the Lord, by His mercy, allows a portal to open--at least partially--by which we can have some degree of perception of the offered item in its fuller spiritual reality.

One consequence of this is that we ought not to anticipate the reality of spirit from the standpoint of the "reality" of matter. In science, it is accepted that mathematical logic--which is the means by which a 3-D person can conceive of the fourth dimension and beyond--only partially accounts for higher-dimensional reality. In short, we cannot "figure out" the fourth dimension, and enter into it, by logic alone. We can get an idea of it, that's all. But an idea of a thing is not the same as the experience of it.

To offer an example from science, the established theory of what electricity is--meaning the electrical force that we experience in this 3-D world--is that it is gravity in the fourth dimension. Now, this is speculation of course. But the philosophical lesson is that our present experience of electricity and gravity hardly leads to the experience of them as the same thing in a higher dimension. Similarly, our present experience of matter and spirit is that they are two different things. We cannot arrive at an understanding of what the experience of spirit is like in higher dimensions by studying our present experience of matter and then developing a logic based on that experience.

Of course, we know that the material world exhibits name, form, quality, activity and relationship because these characteristics are inherent in the spiritual world; we know that the material world is a shadow of the substance of spirit. But how far can we carry this logic? "There is pizza here, so there must be pizza in Goloka Vrndavana. " (I've heard devotees talk like this; probably they were joking, but anyway. . . ) Yeah? So there is baseball here too. Does that mean there is baseball in Goloka Vrndavana? And used car dealerships, Internet cafes, and abortion clinics? It's not a matter of quid pro quo, "For this, that. "

kim va yogena sankhyena
nyasa-svadhyayayor api
kim va sreyobhir anyais ca
na yatratma-prado harih

Transcendental practices that do not ultimately help one realize the Supreme Personality of Godhead are useless, be they mystic yoga practices, the analytical study of matter, severe austerity, the acceptance of sannyasa, or the study of Vedic literature. All these may be very important aspects of spiritual advancement, but unless one understands the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Hari, all these processes are useless. (Bhag. 4. 31. 12)

deho 'savo 'ksa manavo bhuta-matram
atmanam anyam ca viduh param yat
sarvam puman veda gunams ca taj-jno
na veda sarva jnam anantam ide

Because they are only matter, the body, the life airs, the external and internal senses, the five gross elements and the subtle sense objects [form, taste, smell, sound and touch] cannot know their own nature, the nature of the other senses or the nature of their controllers. But the living being, because of his spiritual nature, can know his body, the life airs, the senses, the elements and the sense objects, and he can also know the three qualities that form their roots. Nevertheless, although the living being is completely aware of them, he is unable to see the Supreme Being, who is omniscient and unlimited. I therefore offer my respectful obeisances unto Him. (Bhag. 6. 4. 25)

The supreme dimension of reality, in which everything is revealed in its true, original nature, is Sri Krsna's personal state of consciousness. The above verses show that while we may be able to play around with the perspectives of different dimensions, we can never know Krsna's dimension of consciousness. Unless, of course, He kindly reveals that dimension to us. But for that, we must surrender to Him utterly.

And that entails giving up our attachments to lower dimensions of consciousness, whether they be sensual, mental, intellectual, mystical, or even reverential. To surrender to Krsna means to love Krsna with complete abandon (sarva dharmam parityaja) and nothing less. To love Krsna with complete abandon means to want only what Krsna wants and nothing less. If Krsna does not permit pizza "to be" in His personal abode, then pizza is ultimately not, despite our logic of "as above so below. " And so it goes that so much of our present experience of "reality" is founded only upon our "I am the enjoyer" attitude. ("I enjoy pizza so much. . . there must be pizza in the spiritual world!") Separated as we are from Krsna, we are not in truth enjoyers. Thus much of our present experience of "reality" is not real at all.

I've got more to say about this, but this subject matter is rather challenging. So I'll say the rest tomorrow.

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