The Mysteries Of Mind: [20.01] Development Of Mental Powers And Their Use (1)

• When as a result of the painful feeling of duality, one aspires to perceive conscious reality and to experience freedom, a new chapter in the search for truth opens. This is called Samayika.
• The more we gain self-experience, the more does the feeling of equality develop.
• The more the distance between meditation and self experi­ence, the more the flow of thoughts and ideas. The lesser the distance, the lesser the thoughts and ideas. When there is no distance, the thinking process comes to an end.
• We continuously modify existence. When we become absorbed in this process, we become transformed according to our ideal.
• • Ignorance + power = journey towards evil.
  • Knowledge + power = journey towards bliss.
    
• Four bases of transformation:

1. 1. Imagination
   2. Will
   3. Concentration
   4. Absorption

• Two aspects of mind:
• 1. Restlessness + One-pointedness
  2. Karma body, the biggest spring - the remaining springs.

The purpose ofsadhana is to perceive, know and feel the soul. It needs tremendous energy, nay an explosion of energy to remove all the hurdles blocking the path of self-realization.

There are two powerful means of self-realization: mental powers and vital force. In other words the practitioner has to de­velop his mental powers and to collect energy. The mind and breath have to be yoked to each other, otherwise to perceive and realize the self will become impossible. The mind is very powerful and has a great potential. This potential can be activated by training. There are two minds, the trained and the untrained. There can be no development of the mind without training because the untrained mind sleeps. Unless this sleep is broken, mental powers cannot be released and utilized. Once the mind has been trained, it can cause miraculous events to happen. The releasing of mental powers through training is however not a spiritual matter. It does not amount to spiritual awakening. Even those who have no faith in self-knowl­edge, self-perception and purity of conduct, can arouse their men­tal powers. It is all due to training and any one can be trained to do so. Anybody can make his body rise above the ground. There are eightsiddhis or magical achievements. One of them is Anima. It has the power to make the body so light that it can float in the air. This is also one of the methods of yoga but there is nothing spiri­tual about it. All the siddhis are of an order inferior to the spiritual order of thing. These are achieved through the exercise of the muscles of the body and through the release of mental powers.

Rupakosa was a dancing girl in the court of Magadha. She had been trained in the art of dancing and music by Acarya Kapiladeva. She became so much accomplished in dancing that she could dance on the points of needle thrust into a heap of grains. Not a single grain in the heap would be disturbed when she danced on the needle points. There are dancers who would dance on a heap of grains with such ease as if they were dancing on a platform. This is not a miracle. When a dancer becomes accomplished in reducing the gravitational force pulling the body, the body loses all its weight. A space traveller also enters into a state of weight­lessness when he crosses the gravitational field surrounding the earth and begins to float in space. In such a state the body can be carried anywhere. A disciple of Bhagavana Mahavira had the fol­lowing dialogue with him:

"On what support do things stand?"

"Objects do not stand on any support. They exist as they are by themselves."

How can this be? We stand on the earth. Plants and trees are also supported by the earth. There are two ways of thinking; the practical and the transcendental (Niscaya). From the transcenden­tal point of view physical objects stand on their own legs. Accord­ing to this view the gravitational force is a relative force. As soon as it ceases to operate, physical objects do not need the support of other objects. The pot is supposed to hold water. This is correct from the practical point of view. But as soon as the gravitational force ceases to operate, the water in the pot will not need any sup­port. The pot and the water will remain where they are without a fly support. In other words they will remain in their own indepen­dent existence. To say that the pot holds the water is an empirical statement. In the absence of gravitational force every thing exists in itself.