Acharya Mahaprajna
The Daily Rising Kashmir
What keeps life going may not always be grasped by machines and medicine
Preksha Dhyan qualifies to be regarded as a philosophy of life because it tries to understand the mind, not theoretically lone but practically too. Full comprehension is not possible on the basis of theoretical study alone. It is possible only through practice. Just like breath, mind is made the object of meditation. It is called Vichar Preksha. We concentrate on the mind and then start perceiving the incoming thoughts. We should neither stop the flow of thoughts, nor provoke it. All we do is fixing the attention on the brain and meditate on it. All thoughts, good as well as bad, are perceived.
Sharir Preksha requires perceiving the body and the vibrations therein. Under Preksha Dhyan one more practice, called Saptadhatu Preksha has been developed. It means perception of seven constituents of the body. We should first meditate on the chyle, then on blood, coursing of the blood, the bones, the marrow, the semen, the flesh and the fat. It is an effort at understanding the seven constituents of the body.
Another practice consists in meditating on the vital energy. It is the strongest practice but also very difficult. Medical science uses the terms body, mind, and sense, but refrains from discussing the subject of the vital essence of life, Prana. It does use terms like vital energy and vital force, but there is no serious work done yet on the course of this vital energy. Of course acupressure and acupuncture therapies have given it a lot of attention. In Yoga, we are told about it in the form of Nadis (tubular organs for the passage of pran or energy carrying cosmic, vital, seminal and other energies, as well as sensation, intelligence and consciousness in the causal, subtle and physical bodies) like ida, pingala, sushumna etc. It has been said that there are seventy-two thousand Nadis in the body. If they would have had physical organs, physicians could have identified them, for today's medical scientists know more about the human body than anyone else in the past. But the pran system transcends body. There are thousands of routes through which pran, the cosmic energy, flows through the body.
Let us think of health. Today, there are innumerable instruments and big diagnostic machines the likes of which never existed before. They can reveal even the minute parts of the body. But when both machines and physicians fail to locate ailment in an individual, we advise the practice of pran, because it is a case of unbalanced pran. Treating this imbalance is beyond the competence of any machine or physician to perceive.
With balanced pran many problems become automatically solved. Once a Preksha Dhyan training camp was being held in Tulsi Adhyatma Needam, Jethabhai Jhaveri walked in. He had a collar around his neck. On being asked what the matter was, he said he was suffering from spondylitis. He resorted to the practice of Pran. Next morning he again practised it in the early morning sun, and the third day he discarded the collar.
There are many responses to the question: “When does God laugh?” One of them is, “God laughs when the patient is dying and the doctor says that he will not let him die.” Can any doctor give life to someone? If medicines could keep the people alive, the population of the world would have been many times more than it is today. Doctors would keep everyone alive. What keeps us alive is our Pranshakti or bio-energy. As long as bio-energy is there, cells will retain the power of regeneration. Once the regenerative power ends, our resistance or immunity decreases and gradually a stage is reached when neither the doctor nor any medicine is able to save life.
Pranshakti (bio-energy) is the basis of life. In Sanskrit life and Pran are synonyms. Acquiring this understanding is the main aim of Preksha Dhyan.
Once Einstein invited a friend to dinner. The latter arrived at dinnertime but found that Einstein was totally absorbed in his research. In fact, he had forgotten all about the dinner. The guest sized up the situation, helped himself with the food and quietly returned home. When Einstein finished his experiment he found empty used plates on the dining table. He said to himself that possibly he forgot that he had already eaten his dinner and so went back to the laboratory.
How did such a great scientist behave so abnormally? When we are engaged in the subtle investigation of bio energy, our energy withdraws within itself and nothing external is remembered.