EWS #58 Questions from viewers (9)
Dec 21, 2019
Topics:
Narad (0:00:48):
Namaste and welcome to our continuing series, Evenings with Sraddhara. We had a question from one of our viewers as to mediums and whether they can truly bring the soul back to those who are grieving for one who has passed. And perhaps we could also take up ghosts and other things too. It's not the largest subject, but it's important.
Sraddhalu (0:01:26):
Yes. I think there's a lot of wrong knowledge about mediumships because of the claims that the mediums make, but also because of the surprising and sometimes quite compelling experiences that people have. What is not known commonly is that a large part of the experience of mediumship has nothing to do with the soul itself. And rather the medium is either very skilled at drawing out insights from you or is reading the mind or is invoking some spirit which has nothing to do with the soul that you are calling, who then reads your mind and feeds back to you. So there is a whole wide range of phenomena involved. So there are for example, magical performances on stage where the stage magician will do as if an act of a medium. We will say there is someone in this room whose name begins with and he will make some description or who has some, recently had some experience and he describes something very specific and he will say, ‘is there anyone like that’, and someone in the audience will say, ‘yes it's me’ and they are shocked. And then the magician will speak about what the message is coming from their dear departed ones and so on or there will be a full-fledged mind reading exercise where they will guess answers to certain things but in a manner that is as if magically done. And many of these can be taught, they are stage magic tricks or there is an element of prior planning by which they found out information about the person and then presented it in a dramatic way as If it was coming at that point and they can be very very impressive. Yes, yes.
And all they've done, background checks of people who are coming into the audience, any ways. So that's the whole class which is not, nothing to do with real mediumship. So I put that aside, but they can be also equally dramatic. That's the point. Houdini was one of those, Harry Houdini, famous magician, escape artist. He would debunk mediums precisely by replicating what they did by using stage magic techniques. And one of the things he would also demonstrate, which many mediums do, they'll have themselves tied with ropes, chains, and then there'll be instruments kept and a screen put in front. And within a second of the screen being put, the trumpet or instrument will be blown or thrown out and things and then the screen is removed and the medium is just there intact, not having moved. So it looks as if when the screen is put that some spirit manifests and does things, when in fact these are skills by which you can escape. So you can be very tightly tied, for example like this with a rope from one wrist to the other side and it looks like you can't escape but the reality is you can go like that and do this, do whatever is required and go right back. It looks as if you can't escape but in fact it's one of the easiest things to escape from and the same with other types of ties. So Houdini used to replicate a lot of these phenomena and say if I can do what they do then they are fake. But it missed the point that there are actually genuine mediums also.
Sraddhalu (0:4:55):
So we will set aside this phenomena, although very interesting, of how you can do, demonstrate magic, including materializations which you could replicate by stage magic techniques rather than a real materialisation. So going into the real category there are two types. There are those which we have mentioned before in the discussions on astrology who are mind readers or sometimes there is a spirit which is reading the mind and feeding back. So there the medium can actually say things, they will look at you intently and they will start saying things and it looks like something very dramatic because it is so precise regarding the past and especially if it concerns someone who has passed on, they can tell you specifics which only you knew. But the fact is at the end of the whole exercise, they have told you only things which you knew. And they couldn't tell you something which you didn't know or which was not already in your subconscious. And that's often the giveaway that it was a mind reading exercise. The most sophisticated mediums are the ones who actually are seized by some spirit which comes into their body, it's a kind of a possession or there's a materialisation of a spirit which can even appear in the room during what are called seances and it can have the form of the person who has departed and who then conveys a message or at least appears and then vanishes and these are often done in darkness or with dim red light and often involving hand holding and such means. So the hand holding is supposedly, one of the reasons given is that to ensure that you know you are holding someone's hand so they are not moving their hands. So if suddenly something floats in the middle of the darkness, you are still holding the medium's hand. Then why would you want to hold hands of a circle?
Behind this is an occult requirement for building up energy or rather drawing energy from the group for the purpose of materialisation. And it's one of the things which is highly not recommended, to do things which involve hand-holding for any kind of such exercises. It tends to build an energy flow, a vital energy flow, which immediately lowers the vibrations to a vital level and for spiritual purposes it can be quite harmful. I remember there was a lady who came once to the kindergarten in the ashram and she wanted to do things with children holding hands and doing things which were vaguely in that direction and my teacher was very sharp about it. My teacher, MP Pandit said no, this is vital and it should not be encouraged and that whole thing was stopped. But you'll find similarly people do things where they hold hands and do chants and prayers together and they will often come out saying, oh it was very intense, it was incredible, it was intense. But intense is not spiritual, intense is vital generally. So that's one thing which is used by the medium as a way of drawing energy from the group for the purpose of the materialisation of phenomena. What is done though is, in the category of materializations, the medium's own subtle physical substance is drawn out. In the occult tradition, Theosophical tradition, they use the word Ectoplasm. So the word is plasm, not physical but Ecto representing a finer grade, which is drawn out and it is from the medium's own substance which is taken out that the materialisation, the materialised form is made.
So generally for any purpose of materialisation, the beings who do that, they need that substance from the earth world. So just as in the mental world by thought you can materialise or concretize mental substance or in the vital world similarly by force of vital will you can concretize or give form to vital substance. In the physical world you need also some physical substance to be a base for any materialisation or phenomena related to materializations. So they take the medium substance, which is the reason why generally the medium goes into some kind of a deep trance and is unable at that point to function normally. So you'll recall the experience that Mother narrates of one scientist who had gone to such a medium. And this is going back now more than 120 years. It was a time in Europe when a lot of such experimentation was done and it's interesting that today it's almost faded out. There are people but not so many who do such things and they tend to remain quiet. But at that time it's as if everywhere you had people doing it and it represents a certain phase I think in the exploration of that age. So the scientist goes to a exercise of mediumship and there's a materialisation, a form which wanders around, they're all holding hands and he suddenly breaks the chain and reaches out and grabs the clothing of that materialised being and pulls it and the materialised being moves away and the clothing is torn and the being shouts and the medium shouts, screams, the being dematerialises, and the medium is in a state of shock, the lights are put on. He is still holding a piece of the materialised being, the being is gone. But the Mother explains that it is because the medium substance was used that the medium had the shock when the materialisation was interrupted. But he kept that piece and he showed it to the Mother and she said it was very similar to the plastic which was much later created. In those days there was no plastic. But it had the same kind of shiny and smooth character as plastic. So this is a very interesting phenomenon. When you think about what is possible, and someday it might even be done by means of a technology, that we should be able to materialise objects in the same way as today you 3D print an object. It's a kind of a coarser form of materialisation, but you're basically shaping substance which is liquid and then giving to it a physical shape. But here you take it from the conception in the mental world filled with life energy of the vital world and then materialise into the physical world. And that would be a way of manufacture or even of creating things. But it belongs to a distant future in terms of technology. But it should be doable at some point, because it can be done by occult means. So it should be doable by technology. So it's an interesting area but the point which is made by Sri Aurobindo in one of his letters, I think it is to Pavitrada, he says, that it has nothing to do with spirituality because he gives this example, he says that the very fact that they can do this only in red light shows you that it is a vital manifestation and these beings cannot stand in white light. Interesting observation. So they need something very dim or dark in which they can do these, otherwise the beings run away.
Narad (0:12:18):
I’d like to ask about two things. One is these Haitian people who have this tremendous occult force and the other is the Philippines for a long time had these healers who could without surgery remove an abscess or something.
Sraddhalu (0:12:31):
Yes, so they are different things but they all go down to a very low level of magic and low level of vital materialisation or vital intervention. So in Haiti you have quite a range of black magic which is very strong, very organised and it even seems as if in that space the access to those lower worlds is more easy, precisely because there's a large number of people calling on those forces and giving them embodiment and access to the physical world. Just as there are spaces which are spiritually stronger, because the spiritual consciousness has been called closer. And then these lower beings run away because for them it's they will get dissolved, they can't stand it. Equally, there are spaces where the lower beings have been called and then the spiritual consciousness withdraws because it's so contrary. But generally what happens is with those lower beings also comes their characteristic which is chaos, division, conflict, confusion because that's their nature. And so things which are done with that often have ripple effects which only add to greater confusion. So they have even a whole thing around people being put into a state of cataleptic trance so that they are declared dead and you've heard about this, they are called zombies. What's the correct term for it? It's a kind of a zombie hood. What is that?
[Audience] Voodoo?
[Sraddhalu] Yes, Voodoo is the category of magic but there's a whole exercise of people to whom they will give something to eat and the person becomes paralyzed and then subsequently they are buried because it looks like the heartbeat has stopped, breathing has stopped. Then the magician goes and digs him out and force-feeds him some material which reverses that effect and then they are taken as slaves and taken into their plantations, sugarcane plantations and such. But they are kept in a drugged state so that they are never normal thereafter. And it happened that there are a lot of incidents where people were seen who had died and the family would say, ‘oh, but I saw someone who was just like that and he was in that zombie state’, so the popular story was they had died and they were brought back to life, that's how they were called zombies. And then there was the researcher who went there, actually met with some of these people doing their thing and discovered what poison they were using. It was extracted from the skin of a toad and they then took that poison, replicated it, it's called tetrodotoxin, which is very interesting as a poison. And there's another fish which has a similar poison, which are eaten by the Japanese and it has similar effect. So when that toxin is put in the body you ingest it and if you eat that fish and if the fish has not been properly cleaned then yes, it's a kind of low fish and the person becomes completely paralyzed, so paralyzed he cannot breathe, the heartbeat stops and you die of suffocation eventually but if the fish has been properly cleaned then there's just enough that it gives you a high you get the numbness of the toxin but you don't get completely paralyzed, so that's why it's a highly prized food among some Japanese. So here with the toad, they had a similar effect and the result was the person would then be buried, he would be taken out subsequently and he would be force-fed a paste made of potatoes and other things which had the effect of reversing the toxin effect. But by then either there was brain degeneration because of lack of oxygen or some other drugs which were induced by which the person could never be normal and then they were kept as slaves. So a lot of things like that happening in Haiti.
Narad (0:16:10):
So this was a slavery thing?
Sraddhalu (0:16:14):
It was yes. So many of these you know once you go at a level which is technological you can measure what effect it has, you realise it was not so much a cult but a very crude level of misuse of certain materials. Maybe while we are at it, I can give another example of a tree which is from South America, which exudes a poison which is so fine, in the smell of the tree, that if you go under the tree, you fall asleep, or you are in a state which is equivalent to hypnosis, and you don't wake up because it's so strong. So you are advised to stay away from those trees and from that tree, from that flower, they extract a particular liquid and that liquid soaks through the skin. So the people who misuse this, it's equivalent to what is called a date rape drug, so they apply it on the skin. Hypno drug, yeah. I don't know that, I don't remember the name of it. Something with R O L, but I forgot now. What is that? [Audience] Rohypnol? Rohypnol is one of the daterape drugs, but there is an equivalent which is coming from the plant. So you are walking in the road, let's say, someone walks up near you and places his finger on your neck, because that's when you have the close flow of blood, with the liquid, with gloves, he places it on you, and you as if lose all sense of self-control or self-will and you find yourself obeying whatever the person says. You are in a daze of hypnosis. But it's done by chemicals and then they can actually tell you, give us all your money, give us all your jewellery, take us to your house and you just obey as if you are unable to exercise your will. Now this is done by a molecule, a chemical which affects your ability of conscious self-will. It's quite amazing. It's not really an occult intervention and yet it's on the borderline of something which would be done normally by occult means and here it's done by chemical means. So there's a lot of that kind of low-level magic which is in that space unfortunately. It never leads to good.
[Narad] And the Filipino healers?
[Sraddhalu] The Filipino healers also, it's interesting that they use something which is dramatic because you will see the person put his hand, I've seen videos of this.
[Narad] Video?
[Sraddhalu] Yes, it's photographs and videos so they put their hand, they rub there, they say the thumb goes across the stomach and suddenly a line of blood forms their fingers seem to go into the blood, but if you look carefully, the tissue is dented. So their finger going, you never see the edge of the cut. You only see a pool of blood and their finger goes into the blood and curls inside. So the actual tissue has never been actually cut. There is only the illusion of a cut because of the denting. You will not see them do that on hard tissue, where there is a bone for example. You will not see them put their hand into the bone structure. You'll never see tissue opened out, you'll only see pool of blood and then something drawn out and that's the interesting part. They'll pull out things, sometimes what looks like tumour, sometimes it looks like worms or just some tissue and then they will wipe off the blood and then everything is intact. There's no scar, so it looks as if they split the body, took out some tumour and then closed the body, except that they never opened the body. This is the trick here. They materialised blood, materialised tissue, materialised worms in that part and they create a dent by pushing down on the stomach. That's the easiest part which is soft and just generally it's all done there. And its a real materialisation because there's far more blood than you could have hidden in the palm of your hand or anything and the tissue which is brought out, sometimes they even bring out worms or snake-like creatures and some of these have been tested in the lab and they found they don't have reproductive organs. They are not snakes or creatures of the physical domain; they don't survive by biological means. They are materialised probably from a low-level vital world where you do not need the biological organs to reproduce. So it's brought down and then they are wriggling, they are pulled out as if from the stomach, put into this little bowl which is now full of blood and then eventually thrown away. But there is a being which is doing it. Often the person who is doing it is just under control of some being who does the actual process. They may be in trance.
Sraddhalu (0:20:53):
There was one exceptional person in Brazil who used to do complete surgeries of the eye and other parts and he would do it with a knife. There's a very famous article that appeared and those days we didn't have television and it was called, he was called Arigo, Surgeon of the rusty knife. You may still find articles about this and he claimed that it was a being of some, who had died in the Second World War who wanted to help peopl,e who was working through him. He would go into trance, he would not know what he is doing, his hands would move rapidly, he would pick up a rusty knife, pop out the eyeballs, scrape something, plug it back in and the person would have his sight restored. Dramatic, dramatic cures of this kind. So there is obviously some kind of an occult intervention. All of these though, involve something which is given back, something which has to be given back to the being, because materialisation of this kind requires a very strong, low-grade substance and vitality. And often it requires something which is normally in the ectoplasm of the medium and the medium can't keep giving that because eventually they will die out. So often there is some animal sacrifice associated with them and it gets into pretty murky space. But the beings feed on that and use that material for this magical materialisation.
[Narad] So when they say that the devil will give you something, you always have to pay back.
[Sraddhalu] You know it's done, of course in the context of the church, the devil, you have to pay back. But the principle is part of physical life, of Nature. In Nature, there's always an exchange for everything that is coming in, there's also something given back. There's always a flow. That's the nature of the physical world and also of the lower vital grade of substance. So any being of the lower vital is living by those values of exchange. They are not like the spiritual beings who represent infinity which can pour out infinitely and still be infinite. That is what the Self and the aspects and powers of the self represent. But anything on the lower level which is with finiteness has to have something in return. In the higher vital worlds, there are beings which have large vitality and so they may seem to give a lot but they take in some other way, in the sense of power, in the sense of control. Sri Aurobindo was asked, what do the beings of the higher vital do and he says they create large movements. So when you see a sudden thing appearing out of nowhere and it has become very popular and large numbers of people are crowding to follow and then you go deeper into it and you see that it gives you some attractive flickering lights but there is an initiation, there is an allegiance, there is a concentration on their guru or in the hierarchy of their control and there is a whole hierarchy structure. Then you can recognize there is a vital being behind that.
Narad (0:24:05):
There was a lot of talk some years back of Scientology and then people reacted against it very much. A lot of these movie stars said this was a horrible thing.
Sraddhalu (0:24:13):
Yes, but the founder himself apparently claimed that his movement had been hijacked by certain agencies that wanted to control because he had become very popular. I was told and this is by somebody in the ashram who met with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Mahesh Yogi told him that his movement had been taken over by a certain intelligence agency that wanted to control it and they had threatened him. That's why he was rising into prominence in a very big way when what he was teaching had a deeper spiritual yogic content and then suddenly he withdraws and leaves the whole movement to just coast along and there are other people who took over and so he complained about that to somebody in the ashram. And it's a so often when such movements become very strong, they threaten certain existing power structures, it gets into their interests also. But that's a different story. Here what we're looking at is the occult phenomena itself are often deceptive. They may have an occult content, but do they really help? So the person in whom you've done this psychic surgery as they call it, you've pulled out apparently a tumour, has it actually come out? So here's the interesting thing. If you can materialise, you can also dematerialize. And so if you're dematerializing, you don't need to cut the stomach, right? You could dematerialize the tumor from where it is inside you. So why not do that? So here we find some phenomena and this is why it goes into a very large mix. Some phenomena where the person has done the surgery apparently and the patient goes away saying, ‘oh, I feel better’, but he's just feeling better because there's been this influx of life force and if you do an x-ray you find the tumour is not gone. But there are cases where they find the tumour is actually gone and so there was never a physical cut, but just as you could materialise you could also dematerialize. And if the being behind is benevolent it can also intervene to extract, remove something and of course that may lead to other complications because you can't just remove a piece from inside the body unless it's done carefully without some other consequence, tissue filling in, swelling up, etc or the plasma filling in and swelling up. But it can be done. Again potentially these are all possible.
There is one case which I know of which was narrated to me this was somebody who had a yogic background, he would do a kind of a psychic surgery but you would never saw blood, you could feel his hand entering so his hand would be above your stomach and he would move like that slowly as if cutting through and you could feel him doing things inside the stomach and then there would be a cure or something removed or some intervention. But yes, these are equally possible. Unfortunately because it's such a murky area and the person doing it is never in direct control, it's always in control of these beings, you don't know who is genuine and who's not. And unless there has been validation subsequently with a medical x-ray or some other means to verify that actually the tumour was gone, you don't know what actually happened.
Narad (0:27:35):
But just for a moment, if we can dwell on healers who are genuinely in touch with the higher forces, they can heal?
Sraddhalu (0:27:46):
People can heal by not such means which are more dramatic physically, but by channelling a higher grade of energy or even a lower grade of energy. Often the person who is sick has a biological problem but there is also the inability for the body to regenerate because it doesn't have enough vitality. If you could infuse sufficient vitality, the body's own repair mechanism could kick-start and this is the principle behind what is generally called pranic healing and then there are specialised systems called Reiki or others and many others now. You know, each one has to create his own particular branding and then have its own USP to differentiate from other movements. But all of them involve tapping into some universal life force and directing it onto the patient either through the healer or directly. Mostly they do it through the healer. And often they tap into the being who is presiding behind the movement. So if you take something like pranic healing there's a founder and he's like the master of the whole system and then there is in the Reiki system similarly there is a being which presides. I don't know if they have a formal head but one of the signs of this is a person who's let's say practised Reiki, he's asked to visualise or repeat a term, a name, a keyword, a symbol which links to the force behind the movement and then they said, okay, now you are an expert, we will take you to a higher level, you are master or you are grand master, you pay a little money and you go up the levels and now you will get initiated. Once you get initiated your power becomes dramatically increased. What is initiation? But a mechanism to hook you energetically to the source which is behind. So almost all of these movements have some such element of initiation which links you to the source and then you tap into that force and that energy which is now working through you. For the higher vital beings the satisfaction of having so many people under your control, under your command is itself what they take back. So they may be benevolent, so they're doing good but in return you have become their instrument and their agency.
All of these can serve useful purposes, but most of these have also limits of how far it can go. And then there are all kinds of complexities which are not discussed publicly. For example, if you are trying to heal somebody, let's say by channelling an energy, vital energy, and the whole thing is operating on the vital level. You may call it spiritual but it's not. It's not spiritual. It's always vital. You can bring into it, if the person is spiritually developed, you can also bring a spiritual energy but that in itself may be insufficient, you need also vital energy. So, if the person is spiritually developed, you may have dramatic results also but not consistently and there what would happen generally is if you're trying to direct vital energy through you generally if the other person has a stronger vitality you've opened a passage, his vitality can backwash, push into you, his sickness can get into you and are you strong enough to handle it? So generally what you would have done if at all you had to teach this, you would first either prepare the person vitally or select people who are strong vitally in whom the backwash wouldn't happen so easily. Or teach them to recognize when the case is beyond their competence and they can say no that guy is a stronger knot than mine and so I need to let go someone else does it or whatever but generally people with strong vitalities would be effective if they make a conscious prayer they could of course call upon a higher help also but still the principal connection is on the level of the vital. A spiritual person could do the same. Let's say when the Mother healed somebody, she would bring the spiritual energy as distinct from vital energy, as distinct from mental energy. She could also draw upon the universal vital force to do and even if necessary bring it to a very material level depending on the intervention required. But the prime driver of the exercise will be the higher grade of consciousness which is spiritual and therefore it can use all the lower levels without itself being stuck in them or limited by their character so if you are exercising a vital force, your consciousness being not fundamentally free from the vital or the mental you tend to become now a part of this, let's say, machine or flow of the vital energy it you are as if given to only that or it seizes you and directs all of your priorities. Other things of a higher range either fade away or you tend to get inflated in your sense of self-importance and so on which are all typical of the exaggerated life energy and even if you're doing good you have actually bound yourself in a flow which is not spiritually helpful. So for at least for people who come from a spiritual background, I will say these things are helpful, they can be effective but follow your level of comfort, if in meeting somebody who wants to do let's say pranic type of intervention, whatever the particular system, if you don't feel comfortable with their energies avoid it. It's only if you feel the person to have a greater purity than you equal or greater purity on clarity of consciousness then it is alright to submit. Otherwise if the healer comes with a coarser grade of vitality than yours and they pump that into you you will find their coarseness now entering you. Just as if the patient is more coarse than the healer, it can backwash. Well, the patient will get infected by the healer's own limitations of whatever kind, including certain thought patterns and emotion patterns and habits of the healer can imprint into the patient. So let's say you got healed by someone who is very kind, very nice, but he has a coarse vitality and strong, therefore more effective in his healing. You find after a week, suddenly you have sudden outburst of anger or patterns of emotions which are not yours. You wouldn't even recognize that you had actually caught it as an infection from the person who healed you. So understanding this, be conscious. If you need to be healed in this way, be judicious of who you accept the healing from and of course in cases where a patient is really sick you don't care what is coming through as long as something comes through which boosts the vitality. But still you can always complement on other levels. Someone fills in the vital intervention, the doctor fills in the physical intervention and you can fill in with the spiritual call for the help equally, which makes for the most effective healing.
Sraddhalu (0:35:18):
So we have digressed a little bit from mediumship but I think it all comes in a similar grade of phenomena. Coming back to the medium example, the cases of people who claim to call your recently deceased relatives or even relatives who have passed away long ago, first of all you cannot call people who have passed away long ago because they may not be available, because well they have either withdrawn into the psychic zone for rest or they have already taken birth. So if you have a medium who now lets say invokes Napoleon, which is one of the common famous names to invoke, then it's obviously false. Because Napoleon is not available, he's probably taken birth and gone through many lives meanwhile. But what is possible is the imprint of the Napoleon memory in the universal consciousness can be used as a reference to recreate his personality. And so either the medium in whom the spirit, through whom the spirit acts or a materialised spirit can now behave perfectly like Napoleon. Even answer questions historically or give answers which are typical of his character, but now related to the modern context and you are surprised because the personality is so distinct, but it is just drawn from the universal imprint and something like that can be done for your relatives also. In the Theosophical literature, they have very interesting descriptions of these. What they do is, what they describe there is when often there is a materialisation and let's say in the room of the seance, there are 10 people and each person wants to contact someone who's passed on and for each they get a different materialisation and each one says, ‘oh yes, I recognize the face, I recognize the voice’, they say it's too much trouble for the spirit to have 10 different materializations. What they actually do is they have only one materialisation and they take the image from your mind and put it on the front. It's like a mask. So they keep switching masks and the body is generally less formed or even you can put on a mask for the body so the same one is reused for the 10 different personalities and they pick the answers from your memory. The materialised being will call you by the name with which your grandmother called you when you were a child and you are suddenly shocked. There is of course a lot of intense emotion involved and so on. But you are not really accessing the real grandmother who may have passed on. Very rarely you may actually get beings who have passed on and generally it is not done in such mediumistic states and there will be no materializations. It can happen with people who may have a natural opening and it can happen that someone just has it or has developed an occult capacity and that will generally happen within a very short time after the birth, after the death, within a few weeks or at most a few months, during the time the person is still closely enough accessible to the material plane. And if the person had a really important thing which they feel is left uncommunicated and they may have a persistent need to convey a message and they may do that through somebody who they find helpful as a receptor and the person just gets this insight may not always be able to do it consciously but something is conveyed.
Narad (0:38:58):
Is it not also possible that the vital of a person remains on earth for a while?
Sraddhalu (0:39:05):
Yes, yes and again for a short while, it cannot be for too long. Generally the soul itself may have withdrawn but some part of the vital personality can remain hanging around. And what is meant by part of vital personality, you see just as your physical biology after physical death basically decomposes, but the bones they don't decompose, they last longer because they're harder, whereas the soft tissue decomposes faster, hair will last a long time, even centuries, because well, that's how the tissue is. So in the vital body there are parts of the vital nature which are as if more rigid because they are a hard part of your personality, of your character. Those take longer to decompose whereas other parts may decompose very easily. So if you have a very strong attachments, very strong desire, very strong knot of emotions that pattern remains. So in the case of somebody, let's say who is attached strongly to his patch of wealth, which is hidden somewhere and he was always afraid someone will steal it, that fear pattern and the need to protect and recount his money is so obsessive that it has acquired a mechanical character in the personality. So that part may remain and hang on while the vital body itself has dissolved. So what will happen is associated with that wealth, you will find this bundle of energy which is repeatedly trying to protect it and shoo away people who come near it. And it's a energy bundle so how does it show you away, by throwing energy at you of anger, hatred, etc., and if it is of a sufficiently low grade which is where it becomes has this rigid character, it can even act through animals. So you go into the forest area and you find a snake where there is the treasure but the snake is only a physical snake that was seized by this vital force because it matches its of its grade and so the snake comes as if to defend, but the snake doesn't know what it's doing. It just feels an impulse to defend the space. So it can catch instruments like this physical instruments or it may be purely psychological haunting where you go into that space and you feel unwelcome, you feel repelled or you if you stay on as if something really keeps bothering you it appears in your dreams until you leave then it's happy and it goes back to doing its thing. So bundle of energy like that can generally hang around.
What can separately happen again because the soul has gone, there is no person really left. A vital being may use that as a vehicle to do something and that is often the basis for many of the so called hauntings where people see something or sense ghosts, many of them are. So this is just to describe, to complete the topic about communicating with the dead. Yes, it's possible. Ideally it would be done by somebody who is already sufficiently sensitive on that level. It does not need paraphernalia of mediumship. None of the beings who have passed on an have the capacity to materialise and communicate. All of those go in to the other category of spiritism and not so the real, his grand mother who has passed on. So I have a friend who had this experience that, I don't know if I mentioned it here before, but his grandmother had passed on, he went for the last rites, he did everything, comes back to their house, goes to sleep. At 2 am in the morning he wakes up and he finds his grandmother standing next to his bed. So first he is in a state of shock and it's a well semi-transparent but her form and she's smiling and she raises her hand as if to bless him and say, thank you and I bless you and that's it and then she vanishes but then she gives him a message. She says that remember you are of such and such a lineage and she mentions the Gotra, I mentioned this before, she mentions the Gotra which she didn't know and he checks with his family. So yes she did appear but in that immediate aftermath where the gross physical body has been shed and the person is still in the subtle physical body which is much closer to the physical world, is in the physical world and so a temporary materialisation of this kind is possible, again at night more easily because your sight is also more sensitive, daytime you're overwhelmed with the physical light and you cannot see at best you might sense. So briefly it can happen after that within a few days the person would be withdrawn sufficiently that they cannot access, except through some other person through a suggestion of thought and so on.
So, yes, it can happen that occasionally these communications do take place, but mostly what happens from the soul's perspective, as you are preparing to leave, your consciousness already begins to turn away. You are looking at the next, not even next world, next life and the turn of your growth and the possibilities and only momentarily a part of your consciousness looks behind as if to say goodbye and thank you. Or momentary while still in the vital body a longing I wish I could have finished this or done that but it's very superficial the bulk of the consciousness is already turned away and in that transition once the passage is made and sufficiently withdrawn, once you are in that poise, you look at the things of the material world and they seem so petty, so small, so exaggerated and trivial compared to your consciousness. That you say, well, that's it, I have done my part, oh, it's unfortunate they are unhappy, but they will find their way. I am happy to see that they are not unhappy. That kind of a response will be there, but there is never a compelling need. I wish I can reach out, convey this message and generally you finished all that before you withdraw.
Narad (0:45:21):
We have about 10 minutes left, and I'd like to ask you to speak to us about those who grieve and hold the soul back.
Sraddhalu (0:45:28):
So when in that poise somebody is grieving, then from the perspective of the soul still in the vital body vital and mental body there's still the element of the personality enough to be able to resonate with that life but still the person feels I wish they didn't because I am so happy, I am so free. The emergence from the physical body and the separation from the physical life and entering into a higher status involves such a liberating movement, such an expansion of consciousness and so much of the true sense of the personality of the soul begins to fill the subtle body that it is always a joyous state. And so for them, I wish these people didnt suffer so much, I am quite fine, I wish I could tell that. But if they pull you back it's a tug which is only on the superficial part and only in the initial phase but as this receding consciousness continues even that ceases to bother you. You see as if from a great distance, as if from a height of a building you look at the people on the ground, well you see them, you know what they're doing but it doesn't resonate anymore. It doesn't affect you in the same way. The pull itself has no meaning but in the initial phase, in the withdrawal, if there's a strong pull, it can interfere with the freedom of the transition instead. If we recognize that we are grieving for ourselves not for them then we can choose to be less selfish and create a conducive environment of peace, prayer and things of a higher aspiration which will help to rise and make the transition smoothly. This should be the norm for all those of us who have a spiritual aspiration.
[Turns to Narad] Do you want to complete the discussion with the ghost?
[Narad] Yes.
Sraddhalu (0:47:37):
The ghost itself can be of three kinds, generally, you can make three categories of this whole experience. There is the most common, where the person has gone, the soul has gone, there is no vital body, but there is an imprint in the space. Let's say an accident took place on the road, car crashed, somebody died, whatever. There is a life force bundle of the pattern of suffering of what happened, because there's a shock and strong emotional reaction. Just as there's a physical impact of that space, blood spatters, so in the vital plane there's a vital imprint of that anguish and that tends to form like a groove. And as a result, you will find more accidents happening or more frequently accidents happening subsequent to that one accident. It's as if a groove forming in the habit. So if it happened to that person while he was in a state of disturbance, the energy of that disturbed condition and the energy of the accident because of the intensity of the and the violence of that leaves an imprint which tends to pull people into a similar state, if they are unconscious and most people are. So there is a tendency, a proclivity for accidents to recur and that's what people mark as accident zone. But in India what they would do whenever something like that happened, they would do a special ceremony to dissolve these formations. So the correct word here would be formation because there is no person, it's not ghost as in the way they picture it in cinema, but there's a formation of energy which tends to repeat and you can dissolve it by a similar means by bringing spiritual light, white light and or other technical means like pujas and invocations, havans to dissolve those knots and then it ceases to happen. A variant of this and we often hear of stories like this, somewhere where a murder took place, in that room, at that time, sometimes people hear the sound of shouting or some noises come from there or even sometimes physical representations and that's again because there's this mechanical imprint of energy like a cinema. There's nobody, the actors are not there when you have a cinema projected, isn't it? And yet you see the form. So the picture is repeating because of the habitual current of that life force which is bound there. And again it can be dissolved and it goes away.
The second type of ghost is where actually a person has left the body and is available or accessible partially partially as the example I mentioned of my friend, who saw his grandmother or as they might be occasionally a communication which comes of something of importance or you just feel the person is suddenly present and then we don't use the word ghost, we will say the presence of the person because ghost has a negative connotation and you feel the love and the warmth and the help from the person and that's it.
But the third category which is much closer to the cinema examples of ghosts who are haunting, bothering etc. These are generally beings of the vital world who have either own a place or feel that they own it and don't like you interfering in their space. And often it may happen in spaces where people are not normally there, so dilapidated building, nobody's been there for years, they find it okay, here's a convenient spot to do our thing and after a while they're so attached to the place, when human beings come they feel disturbed and they want to shoo them away. And if it's a vital being, it has an entity, it has a reality, identity of its own and if it's of the lower vital, it may even have the ability to interfere and create phenomena to drive you out. But again it has nothing to do with the human soul who always moves on in his evolution and very little of the human vital body has the capacity to last for long. If anything the vital being may seize on that vital formation and use it as a shell to do things. So that's really the third category of ghosts which are closer to the cinema. But again, they don't normally like to stay where human beings are and especially they don't like to be where there is a spiritual atmosphere. So they just go away, they leave.
Sraddhalu (0:52:14):
Champaklalji was often sent by the Mother to clear places from haunting. So there was a house near the beach which the ashram wanted to take on rent. Nobody would take it so it came very cheap because it was haunted. So Mother said we will take it and then she sent Champaklal and she gave him instructions. She said to take her bath water. Think about it. The Mother, she has just had her bath and the water from that he takes in a bottle. Why? Because it is full of her consciousness, her presence. He takes it there and he is asked to repeat, I think it was the Gayathri mantra or I don't know what, but he repeated the mantra and she told him to sprinkle the water on all the corners of the house. So he goes around sprinkling, repeating Mother's name or the Gayathri mantra, to me they would be equivalent in result and he does that to all the rooms and as he is coming out, he sees two beings leaving, a man and a woman, a couple. He saw them and said, okay, work done. But if you need to do something like that, the best way is of course you take a lamp, take a candle or a diya, light the lamp, invoke Sri Aurobindo's Gayathri, whatever for you represents the call of the Divine Presence. Go to each room, invoke the Presence and if you need to, well, go through every corner. Why corner? At an occult level, the corner is the part where things accumulate. It's not where things flow, dust accumulates there, air doesn't flow. It's the part which represents on the vital level, the sticky portions, things which hang on. So you clear that, go to every room, and once you have cleaned out the whole space, you dedicate it, invoking the presence and that's it. It's generally enough to push out any such thing.
There is one important point on the question of mediumship, that there was somebody here in the ashram who claimed to channel the Mother and he would write and sometimes in her handwriting or it seemed like her handwriting, of course that's easy to replicate if someone did too or he would use the pendulum and he would claim that the pendulum would answer the questions from the Mother of course. And you can do it yourself if you wanted to take a pendulum and ask the question and then you decide what the reference will be, going circle is yes, going straight will be no, whatever you decide, and you can ask questions and get interesting answers. But that's a category of mediumship where you're not really calling a spirit but you're picking from your own subconscious certain streams of either knowledge or influence and the slight movements of the body based on the expectations you have, then they are unconscious, almost subconscious and those slight movements are enough to trigger the movement of the pendulum and you're seeing the pendulum move and you're surprised, oh it's not spinning or now it's going straight, but try this as an experiment, see I want you to spin and you wait and it spins and you say I want you to go straight and then it changes after a while and goes straight, so what's the value of the communication coming through, it's your own subconscious will, expectation, knowledge or sometimes insight which is reflected in this. And a lot of the other kinds of channelling which happen with Ouija board are of that category.
Narad (0:55:52):
But it's a very dangerous thing. It is dangerous. And I knew this person and I know that he brought one person so deep into the occult world that he died and someone went to Nolini and told him this story and Nolini very quietly said, for us the psychic being is our pendulum.
Sraddhalu (0:56:16):
Exactly and so this was Mother's general guidance and she took pains to state it in so many words. She said that she will never communicate through mediums, never communicate through automatic writing, never communicate even through such means and she said they will try to imitate her voice. She said that, but it will not be her for the simple reason that anybody can imitate. First of all the human being can imitate. As I said the magician can do it or a vital being can imitate because they can pick out what you expect to hear from her, feed it back to you. And then there's this whole domain which is purely your subconscious subliminal communications. None of those are coming from her. And because they can be intercepted. It's like, if I had to send a message to you by letter, knowing that the letter could be intercepted by an intelligence agency and my message replaced by a contrary message. Would I rely on that mechanism? Obviously not. So knowing that any being can intervene in such communications, the Divine will never communicate by such means. And so Mother said, the only way she will communicate, is directly through the psychic being, because that is one thing nothing can imitate, no mental being, no vital being, no human being. And it's the most direct line you have to the Mother's direct consciousness and presence. I want to end with one incident which took place because you spoke of the danger involved. And it's important to highlight this. Never engage with such means, whether of any kind of channelling, calling any spirits, even if you think it's your grandmother because you will be ending up calling something and you will not know whether it's your grandmother or not. It can tell you whatever you want to hear and it can just be a spirit of the vital world that just says, ‘oh, here's a someone who's calling, let's play’.
So I'll share this incident with you and it's not the first time I've heard such things from others as you mentioned here but it was the first time it happened with me. I was visiting some friends in another city and the lady of the house, she said you know I have a niece who is doing this, she's very sick, can you help her in some way. I said, well what's the problem. So as it turned out, she had always, she was always tired, she was always depleted, she was losing weight, she didn't have proper sleep and medically everything seemed to be alright, but she was losing weight and then as we are chatting we find out that she has been practising with the Ouija board channelling to access her relative who's passed on, I think it was her father and she's been doing it. I said how many years is that? Last three years. How long has she has been sick? Last three years. Perfect correspondence. And it's obvious what it was. She was doing this channelling and sometimes twice a day. She was having a conversation with her father. That's what she thought. But the being which had latched onto her was sucking her energy. What is she doing when you're reaching out, you open yourself to give yourself with love and to receive what comes. And you've just opened the channel for energy to be sucked out. And the being was feeding on her it was so obvious. I said all right, I explained to my friend this is how it is and then she said yes but can you tell her. I said I'm happy to say but will she come? Yes yes, she is my niece so she will, I'm going to call her. So she sets up the appointment and I was about to say, you know she'll be prevented from coming by that being, but then I held myself back knowing that that's what would happen I held myself back saying why should I give force to that idea. So I kept quiet and then she was given time the next day at four o'clock and it's four o'clock we're waiting. She doesn't come for 30 minutes. We didn't have mobile phones then so 4.30, 5 o'clock and then it turned out she's not coming at all. And so my friend said, all right, it looks like she's not coming. Then I explained to her, I said, look, the being will not allow her to meet someone who will break this link. So that's how I expected that to happen.
And then interestingly, next morning, she turns up, just like that, unannounced. And she said you know yesterday as I was about to leave, a whole series of events happened to stop me from leaving. First, she said, I was about to leave and I said, why should I go, because the urge came. Okay, so she says let me just ignore it. Which is, but it's my aunt who's calling me, so I have to go. So she gets up to go and at that point the telephone rings and she's held back, she is delayed. Okay, why should I go now, it's so late already. Then, she finally decides I have to go out of respect for the aunt. She goes to her car and she finds the keys are lost. She can't find her car keys. She struggles to find, eventually she got the keys and just as she's about to leave, a guest comes and prevents her from leaving. So a series of events which prevented her physically from going, and the next day when she actually came, it was on an impulse. She had not thought about going. Something happened, she said, okay, I'm nearby, let's go, and she popped in. So the being didn't have a chance to intervene. So I explained to her the whole thing, I explained what happens, how this works, and how her sickness is the direct result of the Ouija board and it was clear she was so invested in that that the link was very strong. That's how it could prevent her. So I said you'll have to cut that link. I gave her a whole series of instructions. One was psychologically to cut the link, to refuse to have anything to do with it but for that she needed to be convinced that this is what it is and there's nothing more to it and to cut off that psychological link. And second, to destroy the physical point of contact with the board itself. So I said you take the board somewhere, if you can break it, ideally you can burn it so there's no physical element, if you can't burn it, break it and put it far away not in your own trash bin but elsewhere so that goes away from your personal space and your house and she actually did that and after that the whole thing stopped. The urge itself vanished otherwise she would get the urge to want to contact two or three times a day because the being would suck on her energy each time and the whole thing stopped, her health came back and she was completely normal after within a few months.
Sraddhalu (1:03:09):
It's just to say that you know it may seem like a child's play and I am using this phrase because there is lot of cinema out there where they have children doing it to encourage other children to take to such means. There is even a book that has come out recently, a children's book on how to summon, I don't know what word they use there but beings from the vital world and they are given incantations, rituals, talk to children as if it's a game. It's not child's play, it's a very serious matter and as far as those of us who are concerned who have a spiritual inclination, do not ever expose yourself to these things and if you find children interested, warn them. You cannot help it that they are interested because they are exposed to this through cinema, tell them why it's dangerous, explain this whole mechanism behind it and warn them never to indulge in this. I will now turn the whole context in the other way. Our goal is to make of ourselves instruments for the Divine. To open to anything intermediate, however well-meaning is cutting short the spiritual potential of your evolution. And if you get attached to some being and it attaches itself to you, it doesn't want to let go and it will do everything to protect you that is its possession and it will do everything to cut short even your spiritual potential because that means for it to lose its prized possession. So the best thing is never open yourself to anything intermediate or of a vital occult kind. Your only opening should be to the Divine consciousness uniquely, that is exclusively and entirely. No part of you should be open to something else. Yes, a part of me wants to do this, but the rest of me will do my spiritual. No, it doesn't work. You'll be torn because they'll pull in different directions. At some point, they will conflict. All of you entirely should give to the Divine Consciousness, to the highest you can conceive. And that should be our single important reference. All these things are useful to understand, they are interesting even to know about, but to not indulge even in thought or in feeling with such things.
[Narad] (Makes Namaste to audience)
[Sraddhalu] (Makes Namaste gesture to audience)