Day 6: 19ᵗʰ April🔗

(Ajna = ‘will’ or ‘order’. The Ajna is known as the Master Chakra)

Located: Between the eyebrows Locked by: Seriousness Unlocked by: Innocence and simplicity Meditation technique from: Christianity Name of technique: Divya Netra

The Ajna chakra is known as the Chakra Raj – the Master chakra. This is such a significant chakra that there is no religion that hasn't worked on activating it. When the Ajna opens, the whole Being enters into a different realm. A whole layer of faculties opens up. That's why all the oriental gods are represented with a third eye in their forehead. The third eye is only a symbol for the awakened Ajna. There is an old saying that if you die in Varanasi (a sacred city of India), you will automatically get mukti (salvation). Varanasi is not just the city as we know it. It is also the region where the vaarana (eyebrows) meets the naasi (nose). That is the exact location of the Ajna chakra. If you die into the Ajna, if you leave your consciousness in the Ajna, you will attain salvation. Of course, the city Varanasi is so sacred that it may be true, as Sri Ramakrishna says. But I think this is a much more developed interpretation.

The Ajna chakra is concerned with Seriousness.

In a Zen monastery, there was a competition among disciples about who could have the best garden. One disciple was a very serious sort. He took the competition also too seriously. His garden was always neat and clean, and well-swept. All the grass was of the same height. All the bushes were neatly trimmed. He was sure that he would get the first prize.

On the day of the competition, the master went around all the gardens.

Then he came back and ranked the gardens. But he gave this disciple's garden the lowest ranking!

Everyone was shocked.

The disciple himself went and questioned the master about it.

Master, what is wrong with my garden that you ranked me the lowest?

The master asked him with a smile, Where are all the dead leaves?

A garden maintained in such an unnatural way is no longer alive!

Seriousness kills spontaneity.

Seriousness destroys creativity.

Science has proved that when you perform a task in a relaxed manner, your thinking and decision-making capacity is automatically enhanced.

All our seriousness is sickness!

When I say all, I mean all!

And all our sicknesses originate in seriousness.

Seriousness begets sickness. Sickness begets seriousness. psychological planning. Chronological planning is planning on a timescale. It is a practical way to organize tasks in a way that can give the best results. This kind of planning with sincere action leads you from ananda to ananda to ananda! Psychological planning is planning in your head. It means postponing happiness, postponing life, waiting till some particular thing happens to start enjoying life. If I get married, life will be more interesting! After I retire, I'll have enough time to cultivate my hobbies! It's the attitude, Now I'll be serious, later I'll be happy! It can only lead from dukkha to dukkha to dukkha.

One more thing: when your consciousness is alert, you can directly solve problems without complicated planning. You will acquire a clarity of vision, a clarity of purpose, efficiency in action. You will no longer be bound by the narrow confines of your mind, your opinions and prejudices.

How to unlock the Ajna chakra? Live with simplicity, with spontaneity, with innocence. Be down-to-earth. Have the courage to make mistakes. After all, what have you got to lose? Only your useless ego! Take on life with joy, love and care. Be natural. Be original. Above all, take it easy. Nothing is so important that you can't room started laughing, without even knowing why. Without their even being aware of it, the common laughter of all the monks produced a huge wave of positive energy in the room. The monks reached a state of tremendous elevation. In the course of the laughter, they experienced a moment of no-mind. The Zen monk declared, This is true spirituality. Laughter is the highest spiritual quality. It can lead you to enlightenment! In fact, laughter is the royal route to enlightenment. Laughing is a great healing power. If you laugh at your sickness, you will become healthy. Because laughter is a beautiful way of connecting with the prapancha shakti, the energy of Existence.

Shall we try some laughing meditation? Someone who can really laugh can start! (prolonged laughter follows)

Before we enter into the Ajna meditation (the laughing meditation was just a practice session!) – any questions?

(from audience) Swamiji, I have read that when the Ajna is activated you develop the sixth sense. What do you feel about sixth sense? Sixth sense? I say nonsense! (tremendous laughter from crowd) First of all, let us learn to handle our five senses properly.

With experience, you get 100%. What I am really giving you is through my energy. My light becomes your light. Like lighting a candle from another candle, you light your candle with my light, with the light of my enlightenment. But once lit, the light is yours. Use it to find your way, use it to grow. Do as you please with it. Take care that it is never blown out, that's all! (applause) Have trust in yourself. Your problems will not be solved – they will be dissolved.

Let us enter into the meditation.

This meditation involves two separate techniques: one for cleansing the Ajna, and the other for energizing it. Our lower chakras need only cleansing and channeling. The higher chakras need energizing also – pumping up the energy to the chakra.

In the two phases, you will be asked to alternately close and open your eyes. When your eyes are closed, I want you to focus on your third eye - on the area of your Ajna chakra. Don't be alarmed, it only shows you that you have done the meditation with deep sincerity. Because that is my reality! It is because you perceive your own body as solid, that you perceive my body as solid. Just at this moment, if you can perceive yourself as empty, you will see that I am empty. The rest - whatever you see right now, is nothing but the master's drama - the master's leela!

(the group practises Divya Netra meditation and takes a short break)

That, said the yogi quietly, is what I am doing NOW.

So all our trials, our efforts, our struggles, even our wars are nothing but the pursuit of ananda (bliss)! If you see, even our meditations are a battle for happiness, between our self and our Self! The truly wise are the ones who have known where to find this Ananda.

How to be blissful? This is the question asked more often than any other – either directly or indirectly – by each of us, every day. The Sanatana Dharma addresses man as Amritasya putra! (O Child of Immortality!) Ananda is our kingdom! It is our own! We are already in it. So the issue of how to enter it does not make sense. The question is not, How to create happiness? Because whenever something is created through external factors, how long will it last? A few hours? A few years?

When a sense of happiness is created through external reasons, with external causes, it is sure to give way to dukkha (misery) when it ceases. So to search for Ananda outside is the surest way to dukkha. Ananda is our nature. So the question can only be, How to rediscover the Ananda that we have forgotten is there in us? That too can be answered in one phrase: Drop your guilt.

Whatever I have spoken these past days, the essence of my message is this: Be Blissful. Be in Ananda. And the key to unlock the Ananda inside you is this: Drop your guilt. Our mind is so attuned to the idea of guilt, that whatever we do, whatever happens in our life, whether good or bad, we find a way to feel guilty about it. All our dukkha arises out of nothing but this feeling of guilt. When you get angry, for instance, you punish yourself far more deeply than you punish the person whom you are angry with! Because you end up feeling guilty about your anger. But does that mean you stop getting angry? NO! We keep on repeating the same actions, and keep feeling guilty about it. The deeper your guilt, the harder you try to punish yourself, and the more the chance of your repeating the same action. Like the crank shaft and the piston in an engine, the deed and the guilt are both equally responsible for making the wheel of Samsara go around. Swamiji, you ask us to drop our guilt. But what if we have

said that the moment any person stood before Vali, half of that person's energy would instantly go to Vali. Like Vali, these emotions – anger, lust, greed – have a great power to draw all your energy to themselves. But to do that, they need your help – they need your guilt.

Just examine yourself. How many people are sitting inside your head, giving you instructions on how to live?! Your parents. Your children. Your spouse. Your friends. Strangers. Society. Law. All the writers of all the moral books you have read, all the speakers of all the discourses you have listened to! Either exploiting your greed, or exploiting your fear. Your greed for reward, or your fear of punishment. Greed for heaven, or fear of Hell. Our whole life is controlled by these two ropes – greed and fear.

Do you know, a survey was recently conducted on the internet on the most deadly disease of our century. Do you know what that disease is? Can someone tell me? It is not AIDS. Not cancer. Not TB. It is Depression! It is depression. And the root cause of depression is guilt.

Sometimes people come and tell me, I feel depressed for no reason! The reason is, initially you feel guilty for a certain reason. If you continuously admit guilt inside, it becomes a quality of

your Being. Then the guilt arises on its own, even without any external reason – because you don’t know any other way of being. And when you feel guilty without being able to find a reason, you classify that feeling as depression.

So how do you drop your guilt? First of all, throw out all the voices of society that are alive inside you, scolding you, praising you, guiding you. A small story: A man approached Buddha seeking sannyas. Buddha told him, First go and kill your father and mother, and then come back to me. The man was astonished. What did Buddha mean? Can anyone tell me what he meant? Was Buddha asking the man to go and physically kill his parents? NO! What he meant was, Go and kill the voices of your parents which are inside you, continuously instructing and disturbing you. Kill them psychologically, not actually. Remove their influence from your Being.

Another story: A journalist died and went to Heaven. At the gates of Heaven, St. Peter informed him: We already have a surplus of journalists here. There isn’t enough work for them, and they won’t want another one coming in. Because in heaven there’s really no news. Everybody eats, sleeps, prays, and sits around being good. All the action

our customs, in our social life, in every step we take, we always look around for approval from others. When thousands of people follow something, it is automatically taken to be the correct thing. Hitler says beautifully in his autobiography: A lie repeated a hundred times becomes the truth. So every time you follow something, first measure it with your inner scale, with your Intelligence. Are you doing it because one thousand other people are doing it? Are you believing in something because it is the socially approved idea? Test every philosophy with which you are presented. Test everything. And when I say everything, I include myself. Use this scale and test whether I am also in the process of creating ten thousand followers! Don't believe blindly. When you sharpen your knife on a piece of wood, you can test its sharpness on the same wood. In the same way, use this scale I give you to test me also. If I can live up to your test, well and good. But if you find that I am not able to live up to your scale - drop me, not your scale. Be very clear. Place your trust in principles, not in personalities. That is why the Sanatana Dharma, the Vedas are apourushya. They don't depend on the words or ideas of any single

(Sahasrara = 'thousand petalled' - from the mystical experience of a thousand-petalled lotus blooming on the crown when this chakra is activated)

Located: On the crown of the head

Locked by: Discontentment, taking life for granted

Unlocked by: Gratitude and bliss

Meditation technique from: Sufism (Islam)

Name of technique: Sahasrara Dhyana return without asking for anything. But Akbar spotted him and called him back.

Why did you not ask for anything?, he asked the fakir.

The fakir replied frankly,

Your Majesty, when I was waiting outside, I heard you praying to god. You had such a long list of requests! I felt as if you were even poorer than me! I thought that if I anyway have to beg, why beg from another beggar? Why not directly approach god, who provides for you and me and all humanity?

There are only two kinds of religion in the world: religions based on prayer, and religions based on gratitude.

The religion of prayer can be followed by the masses.

The religion of gratitude can be followed only by a select few.

That's why the world's major religions are all based on prayer and bargaining.

Only the few meditative religions, like Buddhism or Sufism, are based on gratitude. These religions have very few followers, but the quality of the followers is high.

There is nothing wrong with prayer, but it should be used as a jumping board to enter into meditation.

The Sufi master Junnaid used to pay his gratitude to god

In the Shiva Purana, there is the story of Shiva and the Brahma Kapala. The Brahma Kapala was a skull that Shiva was forced to use as a begging bowl, when he was wandering in the guise of a mendicant. The strange thing about the Brahma Kapala was, whatever alms people put into it would promptly be swallowed by the bowl itself! No matter how hard Shiva tried to fill it, the bowl always remained empty. This Brahma Kapala is inside all of us. It is nothing but our own ego. The ego is such that it swallows everything!

Whether you want to base your life on asking, or on gratitude, is entirely up to you. Gratitude is not some kind of morality which is imposed on you. It is a basic principle for your own happiness!

Once a man went to Ramana Maharishi and said, Bhagwan, I want peace! Ramana replied, From your own statement, just remove the word 'I', remove the word 'want' – and what remains is Peace! The only way to have a live connection with reality, with Existence, is through gratitude. When you are loving, flowing, filled with gratitude, you will always feel the tremendous energy of Existence flow through you. We have not tasted the sweetness of gratitude, the

Have we worked very hard to deserve life? No! So living itself is enough reason to be grateful. When you give your thanks to Existence, remember all the people who have made your life what it is today. Start with your parents - the people who gave you life. Pay your deepest gratitude to them. Forgive them for any way in which they may have hurt you. Ask their forgiveness for all the wrong that you have done them. Forgive completely, feel only gratitude!

Now remember each person who has helped you in life - the doctors in the hospital where you were born, your teachers in school and college, your friends and relatives. Pay your gratitude to them all.

Think of the strangers who have helped you - the farmers who grow your food, the weavers who weave your clothes. Thank them all.

Even your enemies have played a role in your life, they have taught you something. Drop the anger. Drop the hatred. Forgive them and ask forgiveness. Do it with all your sincerity!

Have you thanked Existence for the beauties of nature? Have you thanked the sun for warming you every morning? Have you paid thanks for the water you drink?

More than what I can give you intellectually, this is the true gift that only an enlightened master can give. Technically, what happens is that I awaken the energy of your Being with a touch on your Ajna chakra. It is as simple as that - but it can transform your life.

For Energy Darshan, I want you all to come in fresh white clothes. Take a bath before you come, wash your hair if possible. When you wear white, the energy flow is beautiful. The colour white has the power to make you more tranquil and receptive.

Swamiji, I have already taken diksha from my guru... That is no problem. I place no conditions on you. You can follow whomsoever you like, even after accepting Energy Darshan. This is not the traditional kind of diksha. It is purely the transfer of spiritual energy from me to you, what we call shaktipat. This energy will encourage you on the path of meditation, support you in your inner search. And if you still don't feel comfortable with the idea, you are free not to accept Energy Darshan. Simply relax and keep alive the blissful mood, that will be enough.

Swamiji, you will be giving us your aashirwaad (blessings)?

At the end of half an hour, Swamiji chants softly:

(Group receives Energy Darshan individually from Swamiji. Music and dancing follow.)

F or centuries, science and spirituality have been battling it out on these issues of perennial importance for humanity. Although spiritual leaders have always maintained that the no-mind state is a 'real' phenomenon, and a perfectly realizable goal for all of us, the scientific community has naturally been unwilling to accept this without solid proof. For the first time in our century, science has hopefully found a key to supernormal and paranormal phenomena, with solid medical evidence that explains why the spiritually super-evolved are blessed with 'powers' that the rest of us can only daydream about. In March 2004, hoping to find answers to these vital questions, a team of top neurologists from Oklahoma (USA) performed pioneering and extensive scientific research on Swamiji's science-defying neurological system. The team's preliminary research report, presented in the following pages, has profound relevance not only for the global medical fraternity, but for every one of us who has been silently asking these same questions - who believe and yet don't believe, who know and yet don't know - for all of humanity, fellow adventurers on this pathless path that is Life!

A Mind Matters Column™ The Mind of a Mystic By R. Murali Krishna, M.D. President COO, INTEGRIS Mental Health & James L. Hall, Jr. Center for Mind, Body and Spirit

Paramahamsa Sri Nithyananda Swami is a trim, healthy-looking young man with dark, shoulder-length hair. Handsome and polite, possessing an open manner and a wealth of curiosity, he could be any ordinary American college student.

The difference is that ordinary American college students do not wear saffron robes and turbans, have not experienced spiritual enlightenment and are not regarded as a teacher, healer and mystic by millions of people in all corners of the world.

A mystic? The term is not a bad fit for ‘Swami’, as he is known. Mystics, popular culture tells us, have direct communion with God. Through means not understood or measurable, mystics are thought to have access to ultimate realities or truths. Picture a mystic and you'll probably picture someone full of bliss, someone gifted with lofty thoughts and insights that the rest of us do not possess. The very presence of a mystic is thought to bring peace and healing to others.

That's an apt description of Swami, a 27-year-old from South India. He is approached by thousands of people every year

MRI, PET produces images of the function of the brain through the metabolic activity of cells. An analog of glucose is attached to a radioactive PET tracer. The PET scanner then images the metabolically active brain areas at any given time.

In the case of Swami, the drug was intended to identify highly active areas of the brain in an alert and conscious state, in the early stages of meditation and during deep meditation.

The results of the PET scan tests were stunning. To begin with, the activity in the frontal lobes of Swami’s brain were significantly heightened, even in early meditation stages. The level of activity was several times higher than would be seen in the average human brain under any conditions. The frontal lobes are associated with the functions of intelligence, attention, wisdom and judgment.

When we then asked Swami to go into the deepest meditation state, there were two more remarkable findings.

First, the dominant hemisphere of Swami’s brain was more than 90 percent shut down. It was as if Swami’s brain had packed up and gone on vacation. It was quiet and still, completely at peace ... and Swami had made it so at will.

A second amazing aspect of Swami’s deep meditation was that the lower portion of his mesial frontal areas lighted up in a very significant way. This area roughly corresponds to the reputed location of the mystical ‘Third Eye’.

When we later asked Swami what he was doing when the

brainwaves. The progression from one bandwidth to another, though, is not so easily in their control.

From Swami's QEEG, though, we can see that he has complete control over his brainwaves. When in deep meditation, his brain smoothly shifted from one state to another, like a talented pianist playing the scales. There was no hesitation and no retreating, just continuous, fluid shifts from one type of brainwave to the next. Because the QEEG represents the five brainwave bandwidths as colors, it was as if we were watching Swami float from color to color within a rainbow!

The brain is the body's most complex organ, containing more than 100 billion neurons, each of them in chemical and electrical conversation with upto 10,000 other neurons. Its sheer capacity to process information is astonishing.

Remarkably, that complexity presents little difficulty for Swami in managing his brain activity. Swami's mind - his thoughts, emotions and intellect - control his brain. He can, in a very fluid, easy way, shift his brain function and alter his brainwaves.

More than answering questions, the voyage we took into the mind of a mystic brings intriguing questions for study.

Are there techniques we can learn and teach that will bring balance and peace into people's lives?

Can we invoke a healing response or accelerate healing