EWS #55 Questions from viewers (6)

Dec 07, 2019

Topics:

Narad (0:00:48):

Namaste. And welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhalu. I have an incident to report that was most extraordinary for me. I had a friend who was a doctor and he got Parkinson's. The Mother told him do nothing about it but he couldn't handle that. He went to New York City where I met him and in those days they were drilling a hole in the skull to cure Parkinson's and it didn't help. And this man, who was a good man, he actually was very close to the ashram, went around all of India finding one yogi and another and another to try to cure him. No one could do it. And one day he got to Satya Sai Baba. And Sai Baba looked at him and he said, Why do you come to a light bulb when you have the sun? Oh! My experience of these discos, in which I've never participated but I've seen them on TV and others, seems to me one of the darkest elements today of possession of the mass. I wonder if you could talk about that.

Sraddhalu (0:02:40):
If you look at people dancing on the floor to the music, you cannot distinguish one person from another. There is a kind of homogeneity energetically in consciousness. And it's as if the energy flowing through them is one mass of energy, which has formed a body, which is playing to the beat of the music, boom, boom, boom, and they are just jumping mechanically. They come out of it numbed and homogenised in consciousness. They have lost their individuality and they are being flattened and then they are easy to control and manipulate. And it's sad when young people who are still forming their individuality are pulled into that, then it's as if their individuality is left damaged and they can never fully recover it. It's one of the most harmful things, as is of course drugs and alcohol which have a similar effect or premature sex which also weakens the individuality at that point.

Narad (0:03:43):
Another thing I'd like to ask you is, is there a true role for psychiatry, psychoanalysts to cure these things without the touch of the Divine or spiritual nature?

Sraddhalu (0:03:59):

Relating it to our discussion last time, where we spoke of a sick society causing a lot of these sicknesses in people, the role of the psychiatrist or the therapist is to provide an environment where you do not have the sickness, which means they have to create an environment of love, affection, acceptance, which the patient is not getting in society. And to that extent they can be extremely helpful and especially if it's a form of group therapy where we are all caring for each other that can make a huge difference. In fact the most effective therapies to get free of alcoholism or all kinds of other addictive behaviour including drugs and others has been this model which is called the Alcoholics Anonymous. It's a 12 step program. It starts with this recognition first that I am sick. Second, forming the community which is helping each other. And third, I am summarising, it's a 12 step program, but the third important principle there is the principle of surrender to a higher power than you who can heal you where you cannot and without that, and that's the spiritual component. All the rest is still community. But the spiritual component is the acceptance that there is a greater power and you put yourself in its hands. And although the formation of the AA program was in the Christian context, the formulation itself is quite universal. And anybody from any religious or non-religious background can participate in that. If you catch that principle, you have the way forward. Whether it's done with an individual therapist or ideally with a group framework. The second thing which is extremely helpful is reviewing. A lot of these problems are coming from the false values that society imposed on you and for you to now correct those values. And so revaluing yourself.

I had a session recently in Europe with a group of young people and we were about a dozen young people, age groups everything from 17 through 28, let's say, and young boys and girls equally and they were all struggling with life, having their own problems. And instead of going through a discussion about their problems, I started my presentation. I said first recognize that there are broadly four lines of aspiration of the soul. Recognize that you are here for a purpose and there are four lines of development and I described the four facets, four soul forces as Sri Aurobindo describes them, the aspect of perfection in work or service to others. And I said each one of us has a primary focus in one of these four aspects. And in this you excel. And in others you may feel you do not sufficiently excel. And then we got into some examples. I described the various examples. And then we had a discussion. I said after that, now let's discuss. What is your type? What do you feel after this discussion reviewing your life from that perspective of your temperament? And it's very interesting feedback. And then I commented on each of those. So one of the girls said, I was trained to be a nurse. But all my life I've had this problem of self-confidence. I've never felt I was confident enough. I always felt I was insufficient. And then we compared. I said, look at that person. Who is the more heroic type? Who is the adventurer type? Who can be a leader? And his self-confidence is the self-assertive force of self-confidence. But you have a different kind of self-confidence, which is the self-confidence of your capacity, your competence, your ability to engage with life and I said if today you're walking on the road and there's an accident and someone falls bleeding and she was an emergency nurse, that other fellow is going to run away or he will collapse in fear seeing the blood, whereas you will have the confidence to walk up and know exactly what you have to do and save a life. I said how many other people in this room can save a life in that critical situation? And then she realised that and she said, ‘Oh my God, I never realised I have this’.

Sraddhalu (0:08:31):

And she discovered her self-confidence, except it didn't fit that model, which is what society is projecting to you. It didn't help her to recognize her temperament and nature. And so we went with each one like that. And it was quite amazing. One of the boys who was there was sent by his parents because he never talks. Anybody approaches him, he is so stuck in his insecurity or whatever little bubble, he never speaks and he began to speak and he began to share what he liked. Initially it was I don't know. What do you like? I don't know. What do you want to do? I don't know. But at least he was talking. And then eventually we prodded him with a few things. Do you like this or that? I don't know. So would you like to do this? Yes. Or what? I said, imagine what you would like to do ideally if you had nobody, no society, no parents, no nothing. What would you do? How would you spend your time? I would play football, he says. See, he just all the while he said, I don't know, and then suddenly he said, I'll play football. I said, so you like football? No, I don't know, goes back to that. Then we figured out, I'm skipping a few steps, but we figured out, he said, finally, it's impossible, it'll never happen. Society and parents were pushing him to become something which he didn't want, and he had caved in and broken down as an individual saying,’ I can never do what I want to do. It's impossible. And so now I don't know whatever happens happens’, just led by pulled and pushed. And then I've drifted a little bit. But the point is to recognize that each one has their own individuality and a therapist can assist in that process or the collective together can assist each other but starting from something which is real and relying on the higher strength. And what I can say is in those few minutes what we did as a therapy was more valuable than all the therapists they might have met for weeks or even years because they never got to the truth which was within them. They kept covering distortions with further distortions.

I'll give another example which is an actual case. There have been many such off and on, but this one is relatively recent. So somebody who is very capable, very strong, intelligent, spontaneously leader in the school, but suddenly comes to a crisis and refuses to do anything, refuses to work, refuses to go to school, just wants to lie in bed, stops speaking and similar response, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I sat with the person and first he was not speaking at all, then I said a few things and then there were a few I don't know responses. And once I got what it was, he had bound himself into a bubble of impossibilities. So I found the escape route. I described, well imagine yourself in this environment and I created a space which was free and then bit by bit in about 45 minutes the child was smiling, laughing, conversing, joking. I had him stand up, I showed some exercises, he was doing exercises and the parents were wondering what just happened here in 45 minutes. And it would be the skill of a good therapist that you are able to reach inside a person's psychology, experience what it is that is the problem and then find a route out and lead them out of that or help them to reposition, review. So not everyone can do that, but it's like modern medicine.

If you pass all the exams, you are qualified to give medicines, but you're not a doctor really. So you can pass a qualifying exam, you can mug up the DSR, DSM, DSM four or five list of illnesses and symptoms, which my AI computer can do much more effectively than you human can do by the way. So you could replay the therapist by AI.<laughs> But a true therapist will be somebody who is empathic, who is able to experience and that requires already a basic deeper, I will even use the word spiritual sensitivity if not development to be able to do that well.

Narad(0:13:13):

So in answer to this person's question, can mental illness be cured by yogic force?

[Sraddhalu](0:13:21):

Yes, but that's different. To cure by yogic force, what they expect is you take a sick person to a yogi and the yogi does something and the person is cured. No, it doesn't work like that. Like I said, you can remove a possession, but the person may call him back. We discussed that last time. But in most cases it may not be a mental illness at all. It may just be a dysfunctional personality and you can't just invoke force and fix it. This whole mentality that we will fix somebody is wrong. In fact that's what happened in the example I gave of this person who was brought to me. He had been taken to so many doctors for years, and even put on medication for years. And all of them had tried to fix him. And he had resigned himself to the fact that he was being taken to someone else who was going to fix him. So he was just in this passive mode, okay, fix me, which I didn't do. Instead, I engaged, I got in and made the thread. Another person fixed himself in a few sessions. But this is to show the importance of the therapist if the therapist is skilled and competent truly, which the current educational system does not really prepare you for. If there are good ones out there, it's because they already had it. And the educational qualifications just gave them the certification to allow them to practise what was already there as a skill. But if, and this is for practical use for people who are listening to this. If you feel the need for some such therapy, there is a method which is based on the Raja Yoga principles, Buddhist principles which are very similar. It's called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT, where you are asked to review, reassess things. So instead of thinking, I am a failure, you look at the situation as, oh this was so useful as a learning experience. You learn to think differently and reposition and put in different perspective, which is what a healthy society would have helped you do from the beginning. But as a process for correcting wrong self-image or wrong ideas or even behavioural problems, a lot of behavioural problems are in reaction to this distortion. A lot of that can be corrected through a therapy of this kind. And it's often done in a group setting like the AA program. It's very effective.

[Narad] We have a question from the audience?

Audience (0:15:53):
Yes. In the earlier session, we were talking about how metal music warps the thinking of the... Hard rock and metal music. But presently in psychology, like a lot of the schools of thought are predominantly from the western psychology and all of those schools of thought only touch the surface of the human consciousness, be it behaviorally or be it mentally. And like one school of thought which sort of also pulls you down is the school of existentialism. It sort of puts a very negative aspect to looking at life. It sort of makes you feel hopeless and all of that. So when you are being trained in these schools of thought, how does the curative aspect or bringing of the soul forward comes and I feel a lot of the mental illnesses are sort of a disharmony in the levels of consciousness but all these fools of thought, they don't touch that.

Sraddhalu (0:17:05):
In fact, they are the cause of a lot of this problem in society today existentialism as a philosophy or a very coarse form of atheism that says that life has no purpose, life has no meaning and therefore what's left? Just satisfy your desires wherever it may lead you to, enjoy in the moment. It's a valid perspective of life, but it is extremely harmful for the evolution. So even in India that perspective of life is accepted. We have the philosophy of Charvaka who says that eat, drink and make merry. You don't know what tomorrow will be like and you don't know if there is a hereafter. So it's a valid perspective, but does it help you to grow? And there may be a very small minority in humanity today for whom it's even the right thing because they live on that band of consciousness. But the overwhelming mass of humanity does not live on this. The overwhelming mass is looking for a deeper meaning, deeper sense of purpose, and when that is taken out deliberately by an argumentation, by a programming of philosophy and even science, it is extremely harmful, and it is one of the causes for this problem. The countries which have the greatest physical comfort in the economy and material circumstances are the countries which also have often the highest suicide rates as you know and the reason for that is because after I've done all this what do I live for? I have nothing to look forward to and the spirit sinks.

Audience (0:18:42):
And also most of the training in psychology is pushing towards the training of the ego personality and again ego is the cause of most of the problems. So it does not even talk about shifting your point of consciousness away from ego.

Sraddhalu (0:18:51):
They don't even have an idea that there is something deeper. So the problem starts with the psychology that looks at the human being as a piece of meat that is thinking. So your thought is basically electrical signals and programming of your hardware and you can reprogram it. This was the idea with which many of the militaries tried to program a person to behave and of course the industry itself programs you to be a slave and a worker. But not recognizing that in fact we are a complex being of many layers and at the core of it is the spiritual center, which opposes and inevitably breaks through the programming. But how much time lost, how much damage done? And that's why one has to really go back to question from the foundation itself, what are we doing with our children? And to the extent you can, maybe you cannot prevent this programming that is coming from society, but you can make your child conscious of this deeper centre, this deeper reference and if in the house you create a spiritual culture of sensitivity, not teaching by rote, not drilling and imposing, which only creates a strong revolt and reaction, but an environment where there is a sensitivity and the child is allowed the freedom to grow within that sensitivity, then the child can go very far, navigating through this confusion.

Narad (0:20:27):

So we have a question here that many people try homoeopathy and obviously Ayurveda and alternative treatments. Do they have any positive effect in this situation?

Sraddhalu (0:20:43):

For mental problems? [Narad:] Yes. It all depends on the root cause. And if the mental problem has its roots in the biology or in toxins in the biological system, such a therapeutic intervention can make a difference. The second help which will happen in the therapeutic intervention of medicines is the person who is giving the medicine and at that point it doesn't matter whether it is homoeopathy or allopathy or just religious blessed basma[1] or a fruit that has been blessed by some Presence. You give that with a certain intention and it is a kind of an energetic healing which goes from within to give you the lift and the positive turn. And so yes, certainly a spiritual help coming through the medicine can lift the consciousness for a while and bring in a depressed person an optimism. But if you have not also corrected the biological basis for low energy, the optimism will still be struggling with lower energy. One has to look at the full picture and then intervene. I always recommend intervening on all levels simultaneously. So change your lifestyle, change your food habits, change your sleep rhythms, change your relationship with your life purpose and surround yourself with positive nourishing influences. I mentioned the sleep rhythm is a major cause of a lot of psychiatric problems today. I want to dwell on this, we didn't touch upon it last time. So I recently was with a group of students, class 9 in Bombay, and I asked them, how many hours do you sleep? 6 to 8 was the maximum, only one person had 8, bulk of them were 7 or less, and quite a large number were 6 hours per night. And then I said to them, biologically your body needs 10 to 12 hours of sleep. They're all massively sleep deprived. They're not even conscious of it. And it's all being presented as attention deficit. They're falling asleep in the class. So what do you do? Give them medicine to keep them awake.

Sraddhalu (0:22:56):
They're just sleep deprived, nothing else. So then we went through the symptoms. They said any class, they can close their eyes and go to sleep. So the teacher has to struggle to do something useful and all weekends. I said do you sleep long hours and weekends? Yes, all weekends they oversleep and then they feel guilty and there's a whole cycle of guilt and not having done homework and then it goes back to why we have to do homework at night. What time do you sleep? 12 o'clock, 1 o'clock, 1.30, because we have to finish the homework for the next day. Okay, so we came up to that point and then I asked, how many hours do you watch TV? Minimum was one hour, some of them one and a half hours. So I said, if you eliminated the TV, could you not finish your homework? Yes, but, now here's the interesting thing, that's their only relaxation. The whole day they've been harassed in school, followed by tuition which is harassment, and then homework which is harassment, and then parents who are harassment. Where is the time to be alone by yourself? TV. So it's their only relaxation time. And they don't want to let go of it. But then what happens on the TV? This very crude junk that's being pumped into them. It's such a sad situation. It's a vicious cycle. So maybe I can go a little bit in depth on what I discussed with them. So first I pointed out, especially for that age group, I said your body is growing, your intelligence is growing. That they cannot argue. Do you realise your biology is building more brain cells? And the growth of brain cells is going to go on till about age 21. After that there is a sudden drop. It will still continue to grow brain cells, but at the age of 40 or 50, you're growing maybe a few hundred or a thousand brain cells per day. Whereas right now you're growing a few million brain cells per day. What do you want? And when is the brain cell growth happening? So your brain size when you were a baby was about this much maybe, and as an adult it's about this much or whatever. How many times has it grown? And all those cells are being replaced also, some of them die, they are replaced, especially at that age, up to 21. And that's going to define your intelligence for the rest of your life. Okay, now you understand how serious this is.

Next, when is the brain cell growing? Not when you are sitting in school, not when you are studying, not when you are playing, it's when you are sleeping. And if you deny yourself the sleep, you do not allow your brain to grow, you do not allow your intelligence to grow, which will remain stunted for life. Is it worth it? So this is already now shocking them a bit. Then I showed a rationale. You see, a newborn baby may sleep even up to 20 hours. And then the sleep need tapers off after 21. And you'll notice it is directly proportioned to brain cell growth and brain size. As long as the brain is growing, you need lots of sleep. When the brain slows down in its growth, your need for sleep drops. And when it's fully formed, that's when your sleep need tapers off to about typically 7.5 hours for an adult, which is necessary to rejuvenate, brain cell replacement, and the rest of your biological rejuvenation. Seven and a half hours is the minimum requirement. And as 14-year-old, you're dropping to six hours. What's going to happen? And while we were chatting, of course, it had the shock value that was necessary to keep them attentive. Two of them lay down and were already drifting into sleep, in spite of themselves.

Sraddhalu (0:26:48):
And they said, we are listening, but we can't keep our eyes open. I said, okay fine. Then we went a little more into the next correction. I said It's not enough that you sleep the hours. The quality of sleep is critical if you want to have proper brain cell development or as adults for your overall rejuvenation of the body, so I'm going to generalise the discussion a little bit. At which point of the night or what decides in the night, the quality of regeneration of cells brain and otherwise? And now we come to two very interesting things. First there are certain hormones that are released by the pineal gland and the pituitary gland which tell the body now it's time to sleep and they tell the body now it's time to regenerate and repair your cells. You need to catch that. Second, there is an overall push of energy in the universal rhythm which is synchronised to that. So I will touch upon both of these.

First you recognize that there is a timing that takes place. The pineal gland is the centre of the forehead, what we call third eye. It is the biological representation of the chakra, the Ajna chakra, the will, vision. Interestingly, it has cells which are photosensitive, that means they respond to light, just as your two eyes. It's almost as if either in evolution, there was an attempt to grow a third eye opening through the centre of the forehead. And if you are familiar, we have stories of giants in the past, who had a third eye, one eyed, or they had a third eye, Shiva has a third eye here which he opens. Or it means there was a third eye which became a vestigial organ as it withdrew, we don't know which one, it could be either or both. But this is photosensitive, even now today as an adult, it's sensitive to light. So when light strikes your forehead, the third eye responds as if it is responding with your physical sight to light. Now what happens there when you go to sleep it's the pineal gland which is the creator of certain hormonal signals which tell the body to rejuvenate, which tell the body to go to sleep as well as rejuvenate but they're tied to this light cycle. So if you're sitting through the evening with bright white light, the pineal gland thinks it's daytime, it doesn't send a signal and if your white light goes up to midnight, it's never had a chance to send a signal to go to sleep or to rejuvenate after that you switch off the lights and suddenly expect to go to sleep, you don't get sleep common problem most adults have today. They don't get sleep because either it's white lights from the tube lights in the house or it's mobile phone or tablet or television which is all white light. Actually it's not white, it's bluish light which is the worst because it's the closest to the sun signal that says don't sleep, it's daytime. Then you switch it off suddenly and unlike what would happen in nature where the sun sets and then the darkness slowly creeps in over two hours or one hour and you're ready to sleep here you switched it off and then suddenly you're expected to go to sleep, you can't, your mind starts working and you don't get sleep.

So first thing to do- remove all white lights from your house or use them only in daytime switch completely to yellow lights, whether LED or otherwise, switch completely to the closest to yellow orange not the half white there's an LED which is half white and then there is the full yellow. Go for the full yellow. So in the evening you switch to yellow lights from sunset on. So the moment the sun sets, whatever that time is 7pm let's say, turn off all the white lights and switch to yellow lights. And second thing, start dimming all the lights. Keep them the lowest you need to function. So if you are having dinner, maybe you need some light to be able to see the food but keep it as dim as you can, don't put the full power 50 watt light switch to 20 watts or have two lights, one which you will use in the beginning of the evening and then by the time you've hit 8 or 9 about two hours before sleep all your lights should dim make sure you dim completely. About one hour before sleep time, whatever that time is, stop all white light exposure. That includes mobile phone, television, tablet, anything. If you have to use screen or mobile phone, there are apps or now it's a built-in functionality that the screen becomes orangish. It's called night mode. So please enable that. Then the screen becoming orange reduces this effect, but then reduce brightness. We don't realise that we still have the screen on the brightness which we need for the morning. And daytime, you need the screen to be bright enough to see something, but night, you have to dim it to less than 1/3rd or a quarter to match the ambient light which is already so dim. Often you don't, you will see a person sitting in front of the computer screen even with the yellowing of the night mode, you will see the light on his face is brighter than the light coming from the light bulb. Interesting. And even television, especially television, people don't realise. Dim all that. If you do all this, by the time you hit your official sleep time, your pineal gland is sending all the signals to go to sleep, releasing the melatonin, serotonin, all the cycles start up and you will tend to fall asleep or slide into sleep easily. First correction.

Sraddhalu (0:32:33):

Second correction is food. If you go to sleep with lots of food and the digestion and the sugar high that comes with the food being absorbed you won't get sleep. So ideally you finish dinner at least two hours before sleep. then you will get good sleep and regeneration of biology and brain. So this is two very important things you have to correct for. And of course you don't watch or read things which are exciting. If you watch cinema with a horror movie or a thriller movie, then your nerves are rattled, you don't get proper sleep. So now we come to the second aspect of it, which is the alignment with nature. And so this is an example I gave to them, I said we don't realise how deeply our biology is actually plugged in into cycles of nature. Just because we are moving around, and like trees who are plugged into the ground, we don't realise that we are as much as trees actually aligned to the cycle of the sun or the moon. So give an example, when the sun sets, all of the tree biology slows down and shuts down. And all the tree sap goes down and sinks to the root, largely. When the sun rises, at the first dawn, the sap begins to rise. It peaks at the moment when the sun is just rising on the horizon. And all the finest juices of the tree sap, plant sap, and the fine oils which are released as a perfume, they have all been released just before sunrise. From the moment the sun rises, the fine oils are evaporating rapidly and the sap, whatever little is in the leaves, begins to warm up and evaporate or the leaves block it from being lost and the juices are gone. So if you want medicinal value of the plant, you pluck them just before sunrise when all these fine sap is at the maximum. So there is a timing in the plant which completely the plant is tuned in which has of course medicinal implications.

Look at little clams, you have shells which open and close according to the tide. And how do they know the level of the sea water? They can't measure. They are synchronised to the moon. The position of the moon is their reference for the tide's position. So they open at high tide, they close at low tide and anything in between. So you take these clams, this is an experiment done from the eastern coast of South America. The clams were taken and put in an aquarium on the top of the Andes, on the western coast of South America. They are in an aquarium with a fixed light there is no reference of the moon or any other light cycle, they continue to open and close by old habit for about a week, then they go out of sync, they open at odd times and then suddenly all of them synchronise and open all together and close at the time that the tide would be high if there was an ocean on the top of the Andes. You see what that means? They're tuning into the position of the moon and the moon profoundly influences their biological processes. They have no senses to know the moon. It means their existing biological rhythms are actually influenced by the moon. They have a momentum but after a while the momentum flags and the moon is the synchronising point which builds the new habit, the new momentum. Now if this is true of the shells it is equally true of the human body and everything else in between all life forms including trees. If you plant a seed when the moon is waxing, it's not the position of the moon, it's the relationship of sun and moon, which makes for the light to be brighter or less. The seed is on the ground, it's never receiving sunlight or moonlight. But if you plant when the moon is waxing, the seed grows rapidly and healthy. If you plant when the moon is waning, these energies are going down and the seed does not grow so effective.

Sraddhalu (0:36:46):

Now this is connected intimately to the human biology also. The human menstrual cycle is tied to the moon cycle, it's the exact same duration 28 days. Not by chance. All our hormones are tied to the moon, at the time of the full moon the hormones peak. So I give them this example. I said, you know what is a lunatic, okay, we say someone who's crazy. Why is he called a lunatic? Lun is moon, lunar, right? It's because one of the symptoms of lunacy is that on full moon and sometimes on new moon, you have maximum instability of behaviour. So that's called lunatics, but we are normal people right? So what happens with us on a full moon night or day? Observe statistics of accidents in any country in the world. We just see police records. Full moon night you have maximum peak of accidents. And there are other such problems which peak on both full moon and new moon. Interesting!. So us normal people, we are not lunatics. What happens to us that we have an accident? And what it goes back to show you is something inside your energy of which you are not aware is unstable, unbalanced, agitated which makes you more open to accidents or makes you more open to emotional fluctuations or makes you more easily lose your temper or behave in irrational ways. So what that shows you is we are intimately connected to the moon and of course to the sun. So, having placed this, evidenced it, what happens now for our purpose of night sleep? As the sun is sinking down, light dims of course, but the life force in nature begins to sink down. When the sun reaches the exact opposite of the earth from where you are, the energy is lowest and when the sun begins to come up, the energies begin to rise. And then they hit the peak at the moment of sunrise where the balance of light and dark shifts and the rising energy now comes into the open. But before that it is subconscious or subliminal. The rising movement has already begun. For your biology, for your psychology, the state of maximum rest is when the sun's energy is sinking down, that's when you can sink into sleep. From the point the sun begins to rise already inside you on a subliminal subconscious level the rising movement has begun. And so the timing of sleep is extremely important to synchronise with the sun. Ideally to get good sleep, you have to sleep before midnight. And the Mother also I think is on record saying that the best sleep is the sleep before midnight.

Narad (0:39:40):
Yes.

Sraddhalu (0:39:41):
So, yes, 9 to 12, she says that. So 9 to 12 would be ideal, but since we are already in a very severely unbalanced society, we need to eat late, sleep late, watch TV, call up friends, whatever it is, most people tend to find even 10 o'clock to be early and well you may say 11, the point is as early as you can. In the ashram, it was a rule for a long time that you'd go to sleep by 9 latest and you'd wake up early proportionally which is fine and the reason given interestingly in the old days, this is before the Second World War and the refugees coming in. The reason given was interesting, that the Mother used to come and visit every sadhak in her subtle body and that's the time when she would work on you most intensely because you were the most receptive in sleep. In waking state all your fixed ideas are blocking her action and she had said this in so many words and people had the experience, some of them had the memory of it. So there's recently I met a girl, she is now in her seventies probably, she was there as a girl in the ashram, little girl, eight years old, she used to in her sleep move the body and often the mosquito net would be torn, so they said, inform Mother. So when she informed the Mother that I'm having this. Mother said, do you remember meeting me in your dreams and she says, ‘no Mother, I don't meet you’. The Mother said, ‘no, you do meet me, but you don't remember’. Mother knew the child didn't and then she told her what to do when you go to sleep, to try to maintain that contact and to remember the link. So the idea was you went to sleep early because that was the time the Mother would work on you through the night and then Mother says later, once the large number of refugees came the family's numbers suddenly grew, it was her way of diplomatically saying it, she said that it was not possible to do this anymore and so she stopped. But it was not that. She was not that she was not capable, the number never matters for her, isn't it? In her consciousness, she is holding the whole earth and all of humanity. It was not about numbers. It was about large numbers came in who were not there for the sadhana. And so, neither was from their side the receptivity nor from her side the value in infusing them with an energy that they were degrading and wasting anyway. And so she had to change the way and she said, ‘now the force is kept as a general pressure and if you make a conscious effort to open to it’, the help is given and you have the same benefit, ‘but you have to make the effort’, she said. That's the responsibility given to you.

So I am going to put this in this context: if you sleep early with this intention, that you want to open yourself to the Mother's action and you go to sleep with that intention, that time before midnight is the most valuable and it is a fact of experience, I can say this from my own experience that it makes a huge difference when you sleep before midnight. I have been through many years of sleeping at or around midnight, sometimes even later because it's the only time in the day when nobody is around, there's no thought forms, the whole space is free it's like the whole of Pondicherry is empty, it's like I'm in a desert, all alone. And it's the time you can be most quiet and most open to do any kind of work, but it is disruptive in other ways, it's not helpful at all. So having had the experience of both, I can say it's extremely valuable. The point being, as early before midnight as possible, the better for you. And especially for the regeneration of your body cells. And if you're concerned about your health, if you're concerned about your intelligence, and even for your spiritual growth, it's worth it to sleep as early before midnight as possible. And if you wake up sooner proportionally, it's okay. But Sri Aurobindo's recommendation- minimum seven and a half hours sleep. And if you wake up well stay silent, stay with eyes closed. Now here comes the other biological working. If you wake up, switch on the light, instantly the pineal gland registers and stops the signal for regeneration of the cells. The serotonin-melatonin cycle which is the key for cellular regeneration shuts down instantly and the research was even if there is a brief light, even if it is a small dim light, it's enough to stop it. Now I discovered a lot of people sleep with light coming in either with a nightlight or some house light or light coming in through the window from the street light. And well we have accepted that's normal in a city. But it's not normal for your pineal gland. And if you can, if you find these lights there, first of all cover them. We have little electronic gadgets today, chargers, which give off light. In daytime it's so dim, but at night it's so bright, you look at them and your eyes hurt. That's a sign that it's not good for your biology. Cover those lights or switch them off. And if required, what I found very helpful, cover your eyes and forehead, because that's the signal for the third eye, remember the pineal gland? Cover eyes and forehead. I often do this if I have to take an afternoon nap if I have not had enough night sleep and an afternoon nap requires me to catch up for the night sleep, not just rest, then I cover the eyes and forehead. And it has that effect it makes up for the night sleep. So try this out. These are all guidelines so coming back to the discussion with the children, all this was to get to the point of recognizing the importance of sleep for your brains growth, for your intelligence and of course for us, for the overall body regeneration and the spiritual nourishment also. By the time I completed this two of them had gone completely to sleep.

Narad (0:46:15):
I did want to pick up one thing because as you know, we meet these young children from Mumbai a few times a year and one thing you didn't cover, I'd like you to cover is cell phones. Because even more than watching TV they're on cell phones all the time.

Sraddhalu (0:46:45)
Yes, if you take a cell phone it is programmed to check the signal level of the transmitter so normally the cell phone is a passive receiver. It's listening. And when it finds a signal becoming very weak, it tries to tune into the nearest strong signal. And when it finds a stronger signal, it communicates. If you're very close to a loudspeaker, you'll often hear the sound, or a mic, it picks up the transmission with the sound tat tat..ta da da ta da da taa. Its a very typical sound  of the GSM communication,  That's when it's sending a signal. Are you there? Are you there? I want to talk. And the tower gives a signal. Okay, I'm ready. Switch to this band. This one switches to that specific channel. This only cell phone on that channel. And then it starts communication. It's saying I'm here, this is my position, this is my location, this is my number, register me, and then it stays passive listening, waiting, until it finds again switching towers and then it does the communication.

Now in those days, this is barely five years ago, before you had 4G and internet operating, you could keep a cell phone next to you and the only danger was when it was sending the signal, once in half hour typically. Now you have a cellphone which is all the time on the internet, with your 4G connection. It's not doing tat tat tat tat tat tat tat every half an hour, it is going - zzzzzz - full broadcast. Its broadcasting a signal that has to be ground enough for the nearest tower which is five kilometres away to register and receive you, and it has to be strong enough to do that. That means it's now radiating radio waves of very high frequencies and the higher the frequencies, there are certain bands particularly which resonate with the water molecule and certain structures in your cells. What happens when you resonate? So if you have a tuning fork, let's say you have a glass and you sing a pitch which resonates with the glass frequency. You've seen videos, the glass shakes until it cracks and breaks. What happens to your cells when they resonate with your cell phone signal? DNA breakdown and water molecules shake, they don't break down, but they shake which is what according to physics it's heating, they heat up. Inside the cells water heats up and certain DNA and other cellular structures if they resonate they begin to shake and break down eventually. You're creating genetic disorders or the cell detects that it's damaged, it shuts down and kills itself. So your body replaces it, but you still have illnesses because the rate of shutdown and the rate of replacement are not matching. All kinds of other problems can come from that. So now if you take a phone which is broadcasting continuously, put it next to an egg, which is a chicken which is still forming. 21 days is it for the egg to give birth to the chicken? Keep it close enough at this distance. Your chicken dies inside the egg, it's never born. But this has to be transmitting all the time this was not the case ten years ago, this is the case today all of you who have 4G, you have so many apps sitting inside and Google particularly sitting all the time, maps and others, whatsapp, they have to be updated instantly when someone messages you, right? how do they know they have a message? By constantly asking, is there a message for me? So there's a continuous communication 24 hours and that's equal to killing the egg. And you're keeping them next to your head, in your pocket, next to your heart, in near your reproductive organs, enough to make you infertile or damage the sperm cells to give birth to damaged children.

Sraddhalu (0:50:52):

All this is happening right now. Nobody talks about it. Oh, they will tell you, because occasionally people do talk. They are called conspiracy sites. No, they are not conspiracy. They are very scientific, but the sites often exaggerate. And so they are open to criticism. And unfortunately, because they somehow sometimes make statements which are non-scientific or are not sufficiently validated. Now here's the interesting thing, not sufficiently validated is the greatest excuse that the other side has to say there's no danger. So they will tell you there are no studies which prove that this is enough to kill. No there are enough studies to prove that it kills, but the studies have not been replicated enough times. What does that mean? Who didn't replicate them? They, who should be replicating, didn't replicate. Why? Because it's not convenient to replicate a study that is harmful to the interests of the mobile phone manufacturers, isn't it? So the studies which have been done, and there are many, and they are independent, show that this is destructive and harmful, causing genetic damage. But then you do not bother to replicate because, if you do you do not get the funding and then you're very quickly suppressed because these are powerful entities. They know, you know how the media is controlled. So here's the problem: you are causing harm, but because you don't feel it, you don't feel the heat directly, you don't feel an impact directly, you don't know what's happening at your genetic level, it feels safe. I've seen drivers, they put it between their legs. It's the most dangerous thing. It's going to lead to cancer of your reproductive organs. Keeping next to the head. People put the phone, they fall asleep with the phone next to the head. You're going to get brain damage in some way. Talking for half an hour with the phone next to your head. So they will tell you, the manufacturers will tell you, oh we shift the transmitter as far away from the part which touches your head. But that as far away is not far enough, it is still close to your brain.

And then the phone cellular manufacturers will tell you that we follow the safety guidelines and norms. Yes, true. What is the norm? That the broadcast power should not be more than whatever number at a distance of 50 metres from the cellular tower. Okay, that's the catch. At a distance of 50 metres, the power should be below a certain threshold. Now, already that threshold is enough to kill the eggs, but let's ignore that for the moment. How much of the actual presence that you have is right next to the cellular tower? If you go to the ashram society beach office, the society beach office next to the ashram Knowledge kindergarten and college, on top of the society beach office is, I think is still there, but for many years it was there, I think it's still there, is a whole cell broadcasting array. It's beaming in multiple directions, one of the directions goes right through the third floor of the Knowledge building where all the students are working through the day. And it's less than 50 metres by the way. I've gone to Bombay, travelling through the car, I take these photos. Someday I think I will publish them, but I don't think that's going to happen, so I might as well say it here. There's a building, and on the back of the building are these broadcasters, cell phone broadcasters. And behind the wall are people living there, half a metre away, not 50 metres away. So while you have maintained the norms that the transmitting power is such that 50 metres away it is safe, but you have not bothered to ensure that nobody is there in that 50 metre range from your cell phone tower. If you did then all your towers should be at least 50 metres tall so that people under it are not harmed. Nobody does that. So that's the scam. They will say, ‘yes, we follow the guidelines’, which are safety guidelines. Yes, they do but they don't ensure that the transmission allows you to come closer than the safety guideline and get hit by the full power of the blast, which is enough to give you cancer.

Now here's the other part. The cell tower is transmitting broadly, let's say, in all directions or in a narrow band, depending on how the array is set. And then you'll see in each of those towers there's a little round thing, dish, like a drum. That's a high-power microwave antenna to link from one tower to the next, to avoid cabling between them. So in a city, you can't be putting cables between the towers, so you have towers linking through high-power microwave antenna. Again, in the old days, the antenna tower was so high that there was nothing in between. So you could have a high-power beam, it's relatively narrow, it broadens out relatively narrowly, and so people could be on the ground and not be affected. Now you're in the middle of the city, and to save money, they don't put it at a great height, they put it at the level of the height of buildings, and the beam passes right through a building. Everybody working, living there is going to get cancer, for sure, because it's a high-power beam, narrow beam. Nobody talks about all this. And the problem is, you can get away with the statement that, “We have followed safety norms. It is completely safe, guaranteed by”,  but you have not actually ensured people are not crossing the threshold of the safety norm. That's the game.

Why did we come to this?

Narad (0:56:38):
Because I asked you about these students and they said they watch television an hour a day, but how long did they use the phone?

Sraddhalu (0:56:50):
What's happening when you're watching the phone, of course you're exposing to radiation. This is one side of the problem of cell phones. If you can, disable the mobile transmission data. Just doing that will ensure your phone is not beaming all the time. And then every half an hour it will send out that signal. And that's far less harmful. So please disable mobile data whenever you don't need it. That's one way you will reduce your radiation. Second, put it in aeroplane mode or switch it off when you go to sleep. I don't do it by the way. So, sorry. But I do disable the cellular data and I have Wi-Fi with which it connects. So again, Wi-Fi is a complex story. There are people who get a headache when they are in a Wi-Fi. All of us actually have a sensitivity to Wi-Fi and it all depends on the frequencies. There are many frequencies it uses. There are certain frequencies which are more harmful, certain which are less harmful and if you're close, it's more harmful, if you're far it's less harmful. If you have some of the 5G WiFi, which is different form the 5G Cellular, which is fifth generation and this is 5 GHz. They are two different things, but both are called 5G. So there is a lot of confusion around this, which is convenient for people who want to, as if to discard the criticism of 5G cellular, let's say. So there is a 5 GHz signal, which is obviously a higher frequency and can be more harmful. Why? How do you know that? Because we are told that the 5 gigahertz signal does not go very far. Because it's absorbed by the walls, it's absorbed by plants, it's absorbed by the human body. What does it mean it's absorbed? It means things within you receive the energy and absorb it and become hot or damaged. If it is not absorbed then it's passing right through you not affecting you. If it is absorbed, then it is affecting. Why is it absorbed by plants? Because of the water. It is resonating with the water molecule frequency. So yes, any frequency which approaches that is harmful. So if you can, stay away from it, put it as far away as you can, if possible switch it off at night, all of these are good practices. So if nothing else at least put the phone in silent mode, aeroplane mode, put it away from you, do not watch. This is one aspect of the cell phone problem which is the frequencies and radiation.

The other aspect which is in some ways more serious from a psychological point of view is the social media and the constant intrusive access that the cell phone has into your life and your mind particularly and even your emotions. So you get a beep, bing, you look, oh I got a message, I need to see. Might be important, might not be, might be the most trivial thing, but I need to see, just in case it's important. I am in middle of a conversation phone goes bing, I look. What happened at that moment? I lost the thread, I reconnect. How often does it bing? There is this guy who is a driver which I often use. When his cell phone is on, I hear bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, all the time. I ask him what's this? Ah, it's my WhatsApp. What are you getting? People keep sending me forwards. Out of that for a business, he might need one or two. But that's about it. All the rest is junk coming in. And all the time it's broadcasting. Remember, the radiation is right there. And if he starts looking at it, of course, as a driver, he has long hours, he has to wait between pickups and drops and all that. So it's useful for him to pass his time. But what happens to the rest of us if we are having any social conversation, it cuts you. If you are all alone, the first thing people do is look at the phone. And then you always think to surf the net. After all the surfing you've done in the whole day, I'll ask the simple question, what among all the things you've seen, do you retain at the end of the day that you can say, ah, this is important or even that this I remember? Of all the things, let's say you had a hundred interruptions, messages. What do you remember? Out of those hundred you may remember five. All the rest you've forgotten. And out of that which was important? Probably none, maybe one or two. Is it worth it? And what's it doing to you in the process?

Sraddhalu (1:01:37):

Sri Aurobindo has this very strong statement in his writing on education. He says the fickleness of the modern mind is the result of teaching in snippets of half an hour or 40 minutes and he's criticising the world a hundred years ago when he wrote this and a hundred years ago when the teaching in snippets used to be about 40 minutes class. So for 40 minutes you were immersed in something and then you cut the attention and switch to something else. And he said because of this the fickleness of the modern mind, a hundred years ago was fickle by the way, compared to your grandparents at that time or even today. But from that to today, where your attention span is dropped from the 40 minutes down to about 20 minutes. So you have the TED talks for example, by design they are for 20 minutes, because after 20 minutes people get restless. But more interestingly in those 20 minutes, you need to be provoked every 10 seconds or 5 seconds. Anything beyond 5 seconds you start already wavering in your attention. And so there's a study of a goldfish brain and attention span. If the goldfish bowl is large enough that the fish takes seven seconds to complete a circle then it is finding the next round to be interesting, ‘ah, this is something new’, because it has forgotten what happened seven seconds ago, because of the brain size being so limited. So it keeps going around and ‘ah, interesting, interesting’, and it keeps on and it is happy to go. If you make it smaller than that, smaller than 7 seconds to take a circle, then it gets bored, ‘Oh, I have seen this already’. Our attention span today is less than 7 seconds because of these breaks. We are unable to hold attention more than 7 seconds. Watch for example, a very simple test. You go to a website, you enter and the site is taking long to load. You have this little thing spinning. How long before you switch out and say, oh it's not working? Measure it out. You don't have patience for five seconds. If it takes more than five seconds, you give up and move to something else. Isn’t it?

Narad (1:03:49):
One of these children told me, if I don't answer my friend in five minutes, she'll unfriend me. Woah! See? So they're constantly on the phone. Yes.

Sraddhalu (1:04:08):
Yes, And then what Facebook has done is this ability to friend or unfriend. Yes. It's what was earlier much more subtle, I like them, I don't like them, but I'm always polite, because we are in conversation, is made explicit as a measure. So you friend somebody by tagging them and mark as friend or you unfriend them and it appears on your screen as you have so many friends. And it's a subtle competition between young children where one child would say, I have 150 friends, how many do you? I have only 120. Oh, you are nobody. Nobody likes to, see I am 150. Someone comes and says I am 300. Wow, she's the star of our team. What does it mean? And what do you do then to keep your numbers growing? And that's when you get sucked into this kind of behaviour. You have to live up to some illusion, imitation, pretence. All you're doing is building layers of hypocrisy. Knowing full well that nobody cares. It doesn't matter or it's all an appearance. You still have to keep doing it to maintain that competition of appearances and it's brought it to a level where again it's reducing to numbers. What's your value? You're 300, I'm 150. So the attention span drops as a result and it's all in the most fickle meaningless chatter, banter or forwards of all kinds of silly messages.

Often the most what they call viral are the ones which are most provocative and controversial but least valuable. Entertainment value and superficial entertainment value becomes high whereas deep thinking value drops. So often we see this problem. Of course 20 minutes is the limit for a presentation. All public talks are now dropped to 20. I'm saying this because 15 years ago, I was criticising them for having a 40 minute limit or 30 minute limit. And now we're down to 20, maybe soon it'll drop further. I was in a conversation for a presentation in a scientific conference. I was talking to two other scientists who are in the game. I'm not so much in the game. I was thinking, I can't do something worthwhile unless I have at least an hour because I want to present the whole perspective of the consciousness matter relationship and one of the scientists said 10 minutes is a lot. It's enough to do an entire talk and I had the shock. I said my god, by this standard 10 minutes is an entire talk and I'm thinking of one hour, it’s not going to work. it's getting worse. So first step, engage with the children, bring this awareness into their lives. The way I presented the importance of sleep, going through those factual information, relating it to their problems as they are having it, giving them means, correcting it. It's not just a series of do's and don'ts. Sleep early is good for you. No, you have to go through the science and convince them with the facts, link it to their experience, give them tools to manage this very weird, I will even say perverse world that they have to live in and survive through. And it's not easy..

Narad (1:07:30):

Thank you, so much.
Namaste.

[Sraddhalu] Namaste.

[1] Sacred ash that one wears on the forehead in India.