Spiritual Springs

I mentioned in an earlier post that every person and a place has an essence. One can sense this very deeply if the person/place in question is giving off a very strong, due to lack of a better word, I would say energy or waves.

I have been going occasionally, since childhood to old temples and ruins in India, and I could always sense something different in their environment. How ever during my recent visit to an ancient Hindu temple in Madurai, South India, I felt an overhelming sense of peace and well being among its walls. I also got this uncanny desire to spend hours staring at the ancient sculptures, and it seemed to me that if I stared long enough, I could tune into the past !! One of the local guides informed me of a tradition in South India, where visitors to such temples would sit down inside the temple to spend quiet moments of contemplation. They believe that the location of the temple is aligned to  tune in with certain geomagnetic fields and cosmic currents which have a beneficial effect on the human spirit. My next visit was to the Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India,where three oceons are believed to converge. Here too, inspite of the noise and the crowd, I could feel an underlying sense of peace, and a keen desire to spend more time here. However I do not get any such feeling when I visit some of the modern temples in India.

Perhaps there are certain places on the surface of earth, along water bodies, mountain tops, underground currents, which give off spiritual energy /waves.

Antenna of the unconscious mind

My experiences with the prophetic power of hypnogogia leads me to believe that everything in the lives of ordinary people like us is pre-determined according to the law of karma. As mentioned earlier in a previous post, I often dream of minor everyday things like a word or an image which I then come across in the course of few days in real life. Only last night I dreamt about Niagra Falls, saw a visual image of it, and today while watching TV, I chanced upon a programme on Zone Reality channel, it was titled ‘hunting legends’ or something, in which an American – Mason Whinefield was investingating paranormal phenomenon in western part of New York State, and the site in question was in the proximity of Niagra Falls and according to Mason, the Falls might be one of the reasons for the presence of strong spiritual/psychic current in that area. I had never watched his programme before, nor did I have a pre-knowledge of such a programme being aired on Zone Reality.

So the question which comes to mind is whether even the minutest things in our lives are pre-determined ? And whether it is just a question of being able to tune into the right kind of frequency to be able to  forsee our future ?

Is it also possible that due to my deep interest in the spiritual and occult, my unconscious mind is able to tune into, and inform the conscious mind about things/people/events that are related to this area, that I will chance upon in the future ?

During the course of my study of occult and spiritual subjects, there have been numerous co-incidences, which are too many to be called ‘chance events’ where I would come across the books/websites/references related to my interest with hardly any   effort or search. Perhaps the unconscious mind does have some kind of an antenna which leads us to the things/people that are related to the thoughts and feelings that pre-occupy our hearts and minds……

Multiple consciousness ?

There is another ‘weird’ feeling that I get sometimes, usually when I am sitting quietly in my garden looking at the trees, plants and stones around me, are in a bus riding through unknown streets lined with houses and shops. I can almost ‘ identify’ with the plant, or a stone or a quiet shady corner of the garden as if I could enter into the existence of a lonely stone, or a plant or a balcony overlooking a street, as if I could touch these ‘inanimate’ things with my consciousness, perhaps a kind of multiple consciousness. It is very difficult to describe this feeling/awareness in words.

I just came across a passage by Ouspensky in  ‘In Search of the Miraculous’, which sounds very similar to my experience. Ouspensky describes what happened when he walked around in a state of, what he called,  self-remembering. :

“I used very much to like to wander throught St. Petersburg at night and to ’sense’ the houses and streets. …. I did not think of anything. I simply walked along while trying to remember myself and looked about; the sensations came by themselves.”

:

Energy vortex ?

When I stand out in the sun and close my eyes, I see numerous blackish dots rushing towards a kind of a vortex.  Like energy particles rushing from lower concentration to higher concentration, which is in contradiction to conventional laws of physics. I see this against a bright, deep red background.

Auras ?

Just out of curiosity, I read about auras on the internet and tried to see if I could see mine while sitting in a dimly lit room, in front of a white background with the mirror in front of me. After some practice at defocussing and concentrating on my peripheral vision I was able to make out a very faint whitish outline around my head and shoulders. With practice the outline became clearer. Could this be an optical illusion or a double image? However I am not able to see any colours in this ‘aura’. I can also make out very pale luminiscent ‘auras’ around trees when the sky is not too brightly lit and also in the night time, especially on moonless nights.

everything and everyone has an essence….

Every person and place has an essence, a kind of sum total of its personality, what it emanates….One can often sense it at the first encounter….the first impression, so to speak, before the thinking mind comes into action and clouds one’s perception and intution. This essence cannot be described, only felt like the drops of rain on your face…..

…was blessed and could bless.

 

This often happens to me when I am roaming alone in a new city. The last time it happened was when I was roaming alone in the streets of Amsterdam as a tourist, taking photographs. It began with a feeling of complete well being, child like curiosity and joy as I walked around looking at the quaint shops and houses, which, coming from India, was very new and interesting for me. Slowly I was engulfed in complete stillness and peace, my mind was almost void of any thoughts, I wanted this mood to last forever, the feeling is indescribable, no where close to our everyday feeling of what we call ‘happiness’ or ‘joy’. But as soon as I realized that I had run out of film role, I was thrust back into everyday reality. It was almost like falling into a pit after having flown over mountains and valleys. Such moods come and go. Making the mundaness of everyday reality more and more unbearable and I am reminded of a poem by Yeats:

While on shop and street I gazed/ My body of a sudden blazed/ And twenty minutes more or less/ It seemed so great my happiness/ That I was blessed and could bless…

 

 

 

 

Precognitive dreams

 

I also have occasional precognitive dreams. Nothing dramatic- just small events in my everyday life. For instance, I mostly see words during hypnopompia and I later come across them during my writing or research. For instances, I recently saw the word ‘Dadu’. At that time I did not know what it meant and later during my research on the saint poet Kabir, I came across a reference to the sect of Dadu Panthis who are followers of Kabir. On another occasion, I saw a bright pink saree during hypnogogia and later I came across a photo of one of my relatives wearing the same saree !! The photo was taken recently so the possibility of my having seen the photograph some time in the past and then dreaming about it is ruled out. Recently, I accidentally discovered that I could see a bright golden aura like globes around lighted candles in a dim room. I could not see this earlier. 

Notes:

  ”In unwittingly setting up waking consciousness as the sole arbiter of all his knowledge, Western man limits that knowledge unnecessarily. And in regarding other forms of consciousness as mere copies or aberrations of waking consciousness, or else denying their existence altogether, he bars himself from the supreme insight and the highest felicity open to him. Unless he brings the dream and the deep sleep states also into his reckoning, he will continue to be deceived by the Unreal and to mistake the shadow for the substance. Where a dream is really sensible and significant, this is because the consciousness has completely retreated into the heart-centre, has dispensed with the contribution of the brain, and is once again working in complete accord with the master world-image which it finds within the heart. Such a dream then has at least as much status as a definite experience as ordinary waking life but it is a different kind of experience. And its higher worth and significance will be intuitively felt after awakening.

There are rare dreams which are most important because they originate from an altogether loftier level of mind than the animal part of our being. The man who will not listen to the sublime whisper of his Overself during his waking hours will respond more easily during his dreaming ones, when the veil is thinner, partly because his egoistic will is more relaxed and partly because he is actually nearer the source of consciousness. It is dreams of this superior and spiritual character which bear good fruit after the man awakes.”

- Paul Brunton

 

 

Orgone or Human Aura ?

 

Gradually I also began to see luminescent dots of light darting about in the air. These were different from floaters. Floaters are supposed to be suspended particles in our eye fluid. Many people can see them drifting in front of their vision when they look towards the sky and defocus their eyes. I can see the luminescent darting dots more clearly when the sun is closer to the horizon and the sky is not too brightly lit. I can see them even when it is raining. There movement does not seem to be effected by the weather. However their visibility to the human eye seems to be effected by light conditions. There are various theories on the inter net about these luminescent dots. Some say it is orgone energy – the building blocks of life on earth. Some think that it is a kind of optical illusion that is related to migraine aura. But I can see them even when I am not having a headache.
I later came across the following account from the book ‘ The Human Aura’ by Swami Panchadasi on the Project Gutenberg website : ……‘Another peculiarity of the prana-aura is that it is filled with a multitude of extremely minute sparkling particles, resembling tiny electric sparks, which are in constant motion. These sparks, which are visible to persons of only slightly developed psychic power, impart a vibratory motion to the prana-aura which, under certain conditions is plainly visible to the average person. This vibratory movement is akin to the movement of heated air arising from a hot stove, or from the heated earth on a mid-summer day.’
This is exactly what I have been seeing.

Past life memories?

“

“Both you and I have taken many births, I remember them all, O Arjun, but you do not remember.”
- Shri Krishna to Arjun in the Bhagavat Geeta

 

The phenomenon of visual hypnogogis gradually became less frequent and I begun to experience something else. Just before I fell asleep scenes, sometime with people in them, begun to ‘pop up’ randomly in my mind I use the word ‘pop up’ for a lack of a more appropriate word. The difference between this and hypnogogia, was that while hypnogogia seemed as if I was sensing something outside of me, these scenes seem to come to the surface from somewhere deep within me, like some long lost memories. However they were strange to me because I did not seem to have any conscious memory of having visited those locations or having met those people. It was almost as if somebody else’s memories had been put in my head !! On one occasion I saw a child climbing some dimly lit staircases. He seemed to be wearing modern western clothes. In another occasion I saw a young man riding a motorcycle across a field. He seemed to have western features. On another occasion I was a young boy sitting on a ramshackle bridge which overlooked some kind of a big dug out pit. On another occasion I was a small child with a woman who appeared to be my mother. We were sitting atop a dome shaped building, and some kind of a commotion seemed to be happening below us. When I recollect, from the look of the people around me, it was probably a time period of 18th century. On another occasion I was a young man (westerner) named Illad, there was a radio in the room, this model was in use during the period of the Second World War. Somebody seemed to be calling out my name and was backing against the wall in fear. There are numerous such instances and I have written them down in my diary in detail, sometimes with sketches. In a lot of these scenes I seem to be an outsider looking at the scene and in some, as in the above mentioned case, paradoxical as it may sound, I was both the character and the onlooker. So I was both Illad as well as someone who was looking at this scene from ‘outside’. As if my consciousness was at two places at the same time!! The question is are these past life memories?

 According to Paul Brunton:

“How absurd and superstitious … is the lore of the soothsayer which professes to provide a prophetic interpretation for all dreams! Nevertheless we know, if not from personal experience then from recorded statements which are too authentic to be disputed, that this lore is not without some valid basis in so far as it applies to a single class of dreams only. A dream may be an accurate perception of some event happening at a distance in space or time; that is to say, it may be a genuine clairvoyant vision in the better sense of this much-misused term. How is it then that some dreams can thus take shape as forecasts of future happenings?

Now because the same time-series which rules waking life does not rule dream life, and because bodily sense-experience is mental in essence, it is possible under certain conditions which are more easily provided for most people by dream than by waking, for the mind to perceive in advance of their physical occurrence events in which the body is involved, and to project itself sometimes into the future with fair accuracy. This is the rationale of most prophetic dreaming.

It may happen that we dream things and thoughts, persons and events, which cannot be ascribed to earlier waking perceptions by any stretch of theory. Such dreams leave extremely vivid after-images and their memory is hard to shake off, even after several years have passed. They may indeed exert an unsuspected yet profound influence in shaping some attitude of our wakeful life. The sense of familiarity with new places or persons may, on rare occasions, be due to this cause. These dreams arise out of our karma and are either actual transcripts or vague reminiscences of former happenings, their roots are deep down in earlier incarnations and they revive events which happened then.”