CHAPTER 11
The Riddle of Reincarnation
Right now, most people are not even able to handle what is happening in this life, so why do they want to dig into their previous lives? They don’t know how to handle the thoughts, emotions and relationships of this life. How will they handle the thoughts, emotions and relationships of many lives?
Taking on a New Body
Immediately after conception, the physical body slowly starts developing within a woman’s womb. But it is only like a nest. In Nature, there are some birds who build the nests but some other birds come and lay their eggs in them and make a life there. This is like that. Two people came together and started creating a body. Someone else who is ripe for that and is looking for a body comes and occupies it. Before that, the foetus was not a being, not because of the smallness of the body but because it was not occupied. It was just a bundle of cells. After this, the other life occupies the womb and this bundle of cells becomes a being. Maybe not yet a full person, but in many ways a person.
Generally, the physical body in the womb is ready to be occupied after forty days. Most of the time, I would say 99.9 per cent of the time, life enters the womb and takes on a physical body between forty to forty-eight days after conception. Sometimes, in rare cases, it may take a little longer. Certain beings who have become conscious beyond a certain point wait for the body to grow a little more in the womb. But they will not let any other life enter that womb either. When such things happen, it is very easy to know. I will not go into the details, because then people will start looking at every pregnant woman and check to see if she has an aware child or an unaware child!
During pregnancy, there are many signs which clearly indicate whether life has entered the womb or not. A mother can easily feel this if we train her a little bit. If life has not entered the womb after forty-eight days of conception, then something a little extraordinary is going to happen with that child, for sure. There is no question about it. You must have heard that someone saw Gautama’s mother and said, ‘You are going to deliver a phenomenal being.’ Such things can be foretold simply because someone may notice that life has not entered the womb after forty-eight days of conception but a little later than that. That is the sign of a phenomenal being arriving. It is because of certain qualities that it guards the womb but does not enter it. It will wait for the body to develop a little more and only then enter.
This sort of situation can leave a mother in a certain state of distress or a fundamental level of discomfort. This is not a physical lack of comfort but a sort of existential anxiety. Between forty-five to sixty-five days into the pregnancy, if you notice tears welling up for no particular reason beyond normal maternal emotions or see flashes of bright-blue colour off and on or dreams of snakes in a very benign way, this means a sage or a sorcerer or a great conqueror is on the way. When such signs are noticed, various processes to transform the yet-to-be-born are done. A sage or sorcerer or conqueror means a certain level of competence or capability. The difference is only of intent. Towards what purpose one will use their competence makes all the difference. This is why many efforts are made to establish an all-inclusive intent the moment pregnancy has occurred, as it is definitely our responsibility as to what sort of life we bring into the world and what level of consciousness we release when that life departs this world.
Only after this, somewhere between eighty-four to ninety days, the engagement with the body for this life truly begins. Till then the life is just foraging, it checks if this womb is the right place for it. This is not a conscious choice. It is an unconscious choice. Tendency-wise, it is checking out the womb to see if it matches it. Traditionally, we call these tendencies vasanas. Depending upon your vasana, you look for an appropriate body. During this time, depending on how conscious the being is, there is a little bit of choice as to what kind of body he or she chooses.
When I say choice, it is not like you go into a shop and buy this shirt or that. There is a karmic choice. There is a natural tendency for the person to go in a certain direction, towards a certain womb, towards a certain body. Even when you are within the physical body, you have a natural tendency to seek out certain people, because that is how your karmas are. Similarly, when you don’t have a physical body, you do the same. It is much more unconscious, but still the karmic substance that you carry with you seeks out a certain type of body.
It is just like this: if we let in a whole group of people into a hall for the first time, everyone settles down in their own place. The choice is not entirely random. It is based on your karma to a large extent. You may have the karma of back pain, then you will settle down near the wall. You may have the karma of always hiding and looking. You want to be there in the situation, but you don’t want to be visible. So you will find a big person and sit behind him. Your karma may be that you always want to be in the front row, so you just come and sit there. It may be unconscious, but that is how you do it. It is your karma that makes you settle down in a place. Similarly, there are millions of wombs and millions of beings looking for a body. They will settle down according to their attributes and tendencies.
Once it has found that body, it is the vibrancy of the prana of that being which enhances the quality of the physical body. From this point onwards, it is not just the mother who is making the baby. This is why, there are millions of instances where probably the mother is weak, undernourished, on the street and yet she delivers a very healthy baby. But there may be someone else who is in a family where everything is taken care of and everyone is very well-fed, but the mother may give birth to a very fragile child. This is the pranic substance, the pranic vibrancy of the being acting upon that particular body. Accordingly, the new life takes a new physical body.
The chakras also start developing gradually in the womb. Somewhere around the twelfth week, only one chakra is formed, which is the Muladhara Chakra . Within the first twenty-eight to thirty weeks, depending upon the developmental quality of the foetus, the first five chakras up to Vishuddhi Chakra are fully established. The other two—Agna Chakra and Sahasrara Chakra—do not establish to the same extent in every human being. I would say, in nearly 30–35 per cent of newborn infants, the Agna Chakra may not be developed. If you observe the way their eyeballs move, you will know whether an infant’s Agna Chakra is established or not. This is why the moment a child is born, the first thing they do in this culture after washing the baby is to put a little bit of vibhuti between the eyebrows. In Tamil Nadu, they make a large coin-sized spot by applying the resin of a particular tree in between the eyebrows. As it dries, this resin draws the skin around it and creates a strong sensation towards the spot in the middle of the eyebrows. This is just in case the Agna Chakra is not yet developed, we want the child to start focusing in that direction.
Traditionally, by just looking at the eyeball movement, people could say if the infant would become a sage. A sage need not necessarily mean someone who will go and sit in the jungle or a cave. A sage or a seer is someone who sees things that others do not see. It could also be a visionary business person or a visionary leader—someone who sees things more clearly than others. This does not mean that those whose Agna Chakra is not developed at birth cannot develop it in their lifetime—they can if they work on it. But they will need to do a little more work than others.
The Sahasrara Chakra generally is not developed for most at the time of birth. That slowly evolves thereafter. As mentioned before, on the top of the head, there is a spot known as brahmarandhra. Randhra is a Sanskrit word; it means a passage, like a small hole or a tunnel. This is the space in the body through which life descends into the foetus. When a child is born, there is a tender spot where the bone does not form until the child grows to a certain age. This is because the life process has the awareness to keep its options open about whether this body is capable of sustaining it or not. So it keeps that trapdoor open for a certain period, so that just in case it finds the body unsuitable for its existence, it can leave. It does not want to leave from any other passage in the body; it wants to leave the way it came, just as a good guest always arrives through the front door and goes out of the front door. Even when you leave one day, if you leave consciously through whichever part of the body, it is fine. But if you can leave through the brahmarandhra, it is the best way to leave.
The Arithmetic of Reincarnation
One of the first questions people have about reincarnation is that if the world population is increasing, are more animals becoming human? Is this the reason that animal populations in the world have come down in the recent past? Is the population of the world—animal and human put together—a fixed number? These questions come from the ignorance of believing and thinking of Existence numerically. When you talk about life energy, it is not in terms of numbers. You cannot think in terms of, ‘Okay, only one person died, but how are ten people born today?’ It is not in terms of numbers like that. Numbers are only for bodies. Life does not happen in numbers. When you talk about the unbounded, there is no such arithmetic.
When you are talking of life, you are probably thinking there is a being. But what if there is no being? That is why Gautama went on saying you are anatma . This was total sacrilege for the Hindus. He said this because if it is atma, there could be any number of them. But if it is anatma, how many can there be? How many non-beings can you create? How many ‘emptinesses’ can you create? The question now sounds absurd. You always think in terms of numbers because it comes from the dimension of your experience, which is very limited.
In reality, if you go on producing bodies, they will get occupied anyway. Life will happen. So where will the karma come from for them? Where is the karmic substance for them? There is plenty of this substance in the Existence. In reality, if you want, this person who is sitting here right now as one person can take on a million bodies with the same karmic content that he or she has now. It is possible. There are many situations where yogis have taken up two bodies. With the same karmic substance, they took on two bodies. So the question about numbers is not a relevant question. It is a logical, mathematical, arithmetic question. But life does not happen like that.
Life is just one. Numbers are only in your mind. There is no such thing in Existence. Let us say, there is a pond full of water and you dip your bucket and take out water in it. Can you say that I have taken this particular water? It is just some water. Once again if you dip the bucket into the pond, you will get some more water. But there is no such thing as this water or that water. It is similar, with life. The fundamental life force is not in terms of numbers. Just one is enough. One can populate the whole population. What we are referring to as the being is beyond the physical. Once there is no physical, there is no boundary. For that which has no boundary, there is no one or two or ten or million. So that is not the way to think at all.
Science has been successful in cloning plant life for several decades now. It has, in recent years, been able to clone animals like sheep and dogs. Of late, multiple streams of research are afoot to clone the human being as well and the widespread belief is that it is just a matter of time before they succeed. How does cloning relate to the theory of karma? Where will the software for the cloned life come from?
You must understand that by cloning, all that you are doing is just producing a human body. If it is hospitable enough, if all the ingredients are there, life will occupy it. It does not matter how you produced it. But when there are so many women who are perfectly able to bear children, I don’t see why billions of dollars are being wasted to do it in a laboratory. When there is a pleasurable way of creating children, you don’t have to make it so obscene and ugly with all those test tubes and other things from which the baby comes out. Above all, a woman does not just give body to the child; she moulds the child when it is in her womb. Depending on how she is during the pregnancy, a whole lot of things develop for the child when it is still in the womb. Elaborate care used to be taken in this country about this, once a woman conceived. Every step of what she should do, what she should not do, how she should do it, whose face she should see, whose face she should not see—all this was regulated because everything has an influence upon the unborn child. This is because she is not only giving it a body but also moulding the consciousness of the person who is to be born. You must understand that you are manufacturing the next generation of people. How the world will be tomorrow is determined right now in your body. It is a tremendous responsibility. It needs to be handled that way.
Now, just because with technology we know how to do a few fanciful things with the outside world, we don’t have to do everything we can do. This is very juvenile. This is the source of destruction on this planet. As a race, we humans have not matured mentally. We must be able to take a decision as to what to do and what not to do, based on what is needed, not on what we can do.
Now, is it possible that a woman can prepare herself for the possibility of a being with a higher consciousness coming to her as a child? Definitely. But if a woman has such aspirations, it is best that she works upon herself well before the pregnancy happens, because during the pregnancy, usually, their situations becomes such that they are unable to attend to these subtleties So, at that time, her being able to maintain a certain level of consciousness could be rare, but not impossible. There are certain other things that can be done, but she may not be able to do them by herself.
If she seeks assistance from the right kind of source, it could be done for her. But in general, what she can do by herself is to become generally meditative. If she brings that quality into her before such a situation arises in her body, then the results will be good. To be meditative, to be very loving, could ensure a pleasant being. This is not necessarily so because there are various other aspects. But by and large, this will ensure a pleasant being.
Now, if you are thinking of producing an ideal being, yes, there are ways to do this. You can do things so that the best possible being will inhabit the small crucible of life that has begun to happen in your womb. For this, you have to go beyond the karmic substance or the karmic software that you carry within you and attract something that is of a different nature from who you are. This would take a completely different kind of work. Generally, the mother will not be able to do it by herself and will need help from someone else who can set up the situation for her.
At one time, we thought we would roll out a whole set of processes that such people could undergo at the Dhyanalinga. Even otherwise, from the day of conception, if she remains in that kind of atmosphere every day, definitely she would attract a certain type of being. But that would make the Dhyanalinga purpose-specific. Otherwise, being in a consecrated atmosphere like that would attract a certain type of being.
If we do something more, we could also bring down those kinds of beings who are unwilling to come down and be reborn but are not fit enough to dissolve completely. These are beings who have transcended certain limitations in the disembodied state, where they are aware enough not to be driven by tendencies, yet are not free enough to burst the bubble and go. They have not attained to their Ultimate Liberation but they have reached a certain point of freedom. Such beings can be brought down. There have also been situations where beings who don’t belong to this realm have been brought down into human wombs. There are many conditions for this, if all those things are fulfilled, we can definitely ensure that certain kinds of beings get attracted.
Past-life Recollection in Children
There have been many recorded instances of children having clearly recollected their past lives. The descriptions and details provided by these children have even been verified by researchers in the past few decades. But the phenomenon is even more widespread than what these studies suggest. I would say at least 70–80 per cent of the children below three to six months of age remember their past life because the memory screens between lifetimes are not set up yet. Life is yet to decide how much to take on; it is still fluid. In that stage, it is the survival instinct which draws the child towards the mother. Otherwise, the child does not care a hoot who is who. If you observe them, you will see they will go with whoever is nice to them. It looks like he or she loves the mother. No, they do not care a hoot for anyone because their personality has not been established yet. Only the survival instinct is keeping them oriented towards the mother’s breast. They know that they have to go there.
During this time, the memories of many lifetimes are playing within them in so many ways. Slowly, it consolidates. Breastfeeding is an important part of this. With breastfeeding, Nature is trying to establish the child’s memory cycle that this is where your life is. If a scientific study is conducted, it is possible that they find a correlation between breastfeeding and past-life recollections in these infants. The screens may not be set up as rigidly for a child who is not breastfed, as it is set up for a breastfed child. The screens may be a little more porous, and that could translate into unexplained levels of confusion in all matters of life.
In this culture, among royalty, particularly, they believed that when a child was born to a king, if he had to become a good king, he must be breastfed by three women. When the queen got pregnant, they would identify two other women who were in the same stage of pregnancy as her. When the prince was born, they would also ask those ladies to come and live in the palace. They would rotate the breastfeeding of the prince between the three of them. One reason was to ensure that he got the best nourishment, another was to confuse him of his origins. A king should not have any attachment, even towards his mother or father, because, otherwise, he will not make a good king. So they always said a king’s son must be breastfed by three women.
People often ask me if a person will be born the same gender as in their previous life. It is not necessary. I have a very immediate experience of this in many different ways with quite a few people. There are people around me who are of a different gender now than what they were in an earlier life. What gender or form you take is determined by the type of longing that you create. This is determined by your tendencies. If someone’s karmic tendency is extremely feminine, they will tend to become masculine in the body. If someone’s tendency is extremely masculine, they will tend to become feminine in the body, because the meeting of the dualities has to happen. If the karmic tendencies are highly masculine, too masculine, and if it happens to find a masculine body, this will be a skewed person.
Exploring Past Lives
In the spiritual communities, these past-life connections are a big-time hallucination. I am sure even at the Yoga Center many people go about talking like this, ‘I was with Sadhguru in his past life and the life before that and before that,’ and so on. I keep saying that those who are here after their past life with me are failed candidates so that they do not carry that as a badge. You were there then and you missed the opportunity and wasted my life and effort, now you are again here to trouble me! This is not a good state to be in.
So will this knowledge of past lives not help me resolve the difficulties in my present relationships? Now, the only way you relate to anything from the past is through thoughts, emotions, experiences and relationships. Whether it is in another body or this body, it does not matter—this is the way you remember. Let us say, you and I are constantly bickering about something right now. We can look back and see how in my past life you were bothering me, so now I am trying to bother you. Let us say, we found this out. What will we do? Probably, we will extend the bickering to another life! Really! Suppose it sheds light on all the horrible things you did to me in my last life, will I become free from it, or will I become more resolved about bothering you in this life?
People say life is also complicated. What is it that is complicated? Life by itself is not complicated. Only if you want to push the world in a certain direction, it could be a little complicated. But if you are not trying to push the world in any way, if you are just fine with whatever you are eating and drinking, where is it complicated? It is only your memory which complicates everything. Just see, there are people who are so stressed, distressed and freaked out and everything. But let us say, they get Alzheimer’s disease. Now, you will see suddenly they become so simple and sweet. Life is just happening by itself.
Now, if three lifetimes or ten lifetimes of memory descend upon you, most probably, the firmament of your mind will not be able to hold, it will crack up and collapse. Even with me, the level of memory that came to me almost threw me off completely. It is that hard to handle. It is not within the capacity of the mind to absorb that kind of experiential memory. If I did not have the necessary mental fortitude, it would have broken me. So unless you have prepared for it in a certain way, you handling it is out of the question. This why we say sadhana, sadhana and sadhana. Sadhana is not to download memories but to be able to hold the memory of this life at least in such a way that you can pick what you want and the rest of the time it does not touch you. Data is useful only when you are able to pick what you want. If it is all the time blowing in your face, how is it useful?
Right now, most people are not even able to handle what is happening in this life and the memories of this life, so why do they want to dig into their previous lives? Let us say, you realized that your neighbour’s dog was your husband in your previous life, then I don’t know whether you will go and kiss him or throw stones at him! Both ways, it is dangerous because he does not remember. Moreover, by throwing stones at him, you will get into trouble with your neighbour. If you kiss him, you will get into trouble with the dog. So, both ways, it is not safe for you. If the past opens up, so many emotions of love, hate, resentment and affection may happen.
When you are in a condition where you suffer even what happened ten years ago, if you remember everything that happened in the past ten lifetimes, it will drive you nuts! Why only the past ten lifetimes, if you remember everything just from this lifetime—your thoughts, emotions, experiences, what someone said when you were ten, what your friend did, what your teacher did—if all this plays in your head right now, you cannot live a normal life. If all the love, hate, resentment, affection from those lives pour into your present life, you will go insane.
Moreover, of these four things I just mentioned—love, hate, resentment, affection—you are counting two things—love and affection—as positive. Actually, all of them are negative, because all of them are happening compulsively. If I have a deep sense of resentment towards you—‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you’—you understand this is not good. But if I unnecessarily have affection towards you—‘I love you, I love you, I love you’—this also is not good. Suppose we are just two people walking on the street. You don’t know me, I don’t know you, but I have enormous affection for you, will you like it? If I have a lot of resentment for you, you don’t care. ‘Okay, man, you burn with your resentment. What is my problem?’ But if I have too much affection for you, you will not like it.
So it is not the question of affection or resentment. This love or hate is compulsive and that is the problem. This compulsive sense of love, affection, resentment, hatred are all equally bothersome and equally entangling in nature. You should learn to respond consciously, to bring yourself to a level where your response is unbridled and seamless. You should be such that in any direction you can respond. You have no such thing as, ‘to this I can respond, to that I cannot respond.’ You can respond to anything. Until it becomes like that, the past is a problem and the future is a problem. Both should not open up. If they open up, it will only become troublesome. What you find in the past may look like some kind of explanation for what is happening right now. But it will only entangle you deeper in terms of moving towards mukti or your Liberation.
Let us understand this. This mukti that we are talking of is not an invention of the Hindus. Mukti is the aspiration of this creature. This creature wants to become the Creation. This is mukti. Instead of being a creature of the Creation, it wants to become Creation itself. It wants to merge. This is not a Hindu idea or an Indian idea. This is the way life is. We want life to progress with a very minimal number of impediments; in that context, both compulsive love and compulsive hate are problems.
There is another way to look at it. Instead of calling it past lives and present life, look at it as different compartments of memory. That is all they are. Only because it is in your memory, it is coming out. It is not hanging out there in the sky. It is all there in the system. Suppose these compartments are breached and suddenly your Evolutionary Memory opened up—it would create havoc in your life. No need to go that far. Suppose you woke up in the morning and, let us say, the memory of the last three lifetimes opened up in you and it all become one. Right now, what happened ten years ago is in one compartment, what happened yesterday is in another compartment. So you have a short-term memory, long-term memory and all this stuff. In normal life, what happened a lifetime ago is screened. Suppose the screen broke, what happened a lifetime ago feels like it happened yesterday. Now, let us say, in your last life you were something else. Let us say, you were a woman then and now you are a man. Then when you wake up in the morning, you go to the wrong bathroom, to start with! Trouble, isn’t it? Many things like this will open up and it will lead to huge levels of confusion and struggle within the human being because it is too much to handle.
What is the purpose of all this pursuit of past lives? The question is whether you want to find the cause of it, or you want to find a solution. All my lamentations are because you are looking for solutions in past lives when we are teaching you a simple process called Inner Engineering. The solution is in this. If you pay enough attention to it, it handles all of it. Let this one thing sink into you—just seeing that I am 100 per cent, absolutely, absolutely responsible—it will handle your past, present and future. Once your ability to respond is seamless, you will know how to respond to any situation, whatever may be the cause. In fact, both the past and the future will open up in your experience. Now, if you are in such a seamless state of response, even if the past opens up, even if ten lifetimes open up, it is no problem. Even if the future opens up, it is no problem. But if you are in a selective state of response or a discriminatory state of response, then if the past opens up, it will cause one kind of problem, and if the future opens up, another kind of problem.
I know a lot of absolutely bizarre things are going on in the world about exploring one’s past lives. They are just ridiculous psychological exercises. If you really want to see something of the past, you must be able to raise yourself into very heightened levels of awareness where it will cut through the memory lines. Whatever you call ‘past life’ is just unconscious layers of the mind in terms of memory. If you bring yourself to heightened levels of awareness, these unconscious layers of the mind, which are ruling you from within, could be broken down, could be dissolved.
We were doing something like this in Samyama. Let us say, you are sitting and meditating, after some time you are fully conscious but suddenly you find your body is beginning to slither around like a snake. You know it is happening, you want to stop it, but the body is just slithering like a snake. When you come out of meditation, you are perfectly normal. You sit for meditation, once again the body crawls. Then maybe it hops around like a bird, maybe it goes around like a dog, or a tiger or something—it may take many forms. These days we have put a nail on its head largely; only once in a way someone breaks through and goes into such firewall breach. These things happen because we open up the Evolutionary Memory. It was all working out in the form of the body. Some of the people became conscious of this memory and we had to do things to take it off from them. Suppose someone became conscious that they were a chimpanzee somewhere or a fox or a hyena; if this memory comes unknowingly, you will wake up in the morning and start making all kinds of noises! Can you deal with that?
Why this is happening is because, in the unconscious layers of the mind, there are so many dimensions which you are unable to access, but which are influencing everything that you do. So if you go through a process where, with heightened levels of awareness, you bring unconscious layers of the mind into conscious states—not in terms of memory but in terms of energy and experience—you can work these things out and leave yourself completely free in a big way within yourself. In that context, it is relevant, but remembering something memory-wise is not of any consequence. It will only complicate and mess up your life.
You will have the capability to handle it only if your ability to respond is non-discriminatory and seamless. If your response is selective, then you will only multiply the karma. Suppose you realize that ten lifetimes ago I was very dear to you, then you will respond to me in one way. Suppose you realize that lifetimes ago I was your enemy, you will start responding differently to me. You cannot just take it away, because your ability to respond is limited. Once your ability to respond is limited, your memory is a bother and the more you open up, the more troublesome it gets. Now, if you have no such things and you will respond as is necessary right now, then even if you remember that ten lifetimes ago you knew me, it will not matter, because you will be the same way anyway. Otherwise, you will only multiply your karma if the past opens up for you.
Baby Hitler
Sometimes people also ask me, ‘Hitler was such a horrible man, he was responsible for the horrors of World War II and the death of millions of people, what would he be reborn as? Would he be reborn as an animal? What would Gandhi be reborn as? Would he be someone rich, famous and popular?’ They want to use this reference to know how reincarnation works.
First of all, whoever said everyone has to reincarnate? Moreover, you may think you know a lot about their lives, but how the world knows them is not necessarily how they were within themselves. How they were within themselves existentially is what counts. Life does not care whether you were adored as a saint or despised as a tyrant. So what happens after is also not dependent on that.
In your society, a tyrant may be evil and a saint may be great, but existentially it could be the reverse. I am not saying it is so, but it is possible. It could be the reverse because we don’t know how tortured they were within themselves. It is very much possible that a man who tortured everyone else lived well within himself, and a man who tried to do good to everyone tortured himself. But it shows how different life could be existentially from what you or the society perceives. Reincarnation does not depend upon that.
Now, is it possible that someone who is a human could be reborn as an animal? People have certain urges and desires. It is desire that becomes the karma. It is the volition, attitude towards life. Fundamentally, you can say it is desire. Right now, let us say, you have certain desires which are not fulfilled. Let us say, your desire was to collect a billion dollars. But you neither have the brains to earn it nor the courage or capability to rob a bank to get it. You are not made like that. So if you get ten dollars, you will save five. You will starve yourself, you will go through all kinds of difficulties to save, save and save. With this process of collecting, let us say, by the time you die, you have saved only a few million.
Now, there is a big urge within you to collect more, but you die before that with the same lust of wanting to collect. Your karma does not know what you want to collect, whether it is money or stones. What rubbish it wants to collect, it does not matter. It only knows it has to collect. It does not have the discriminatory power. It is almost like your genes. It is a subtler gene, not a physical gene. It only knows that you like to collect. So the next time, this gene may decide, ‘Oh! All my Master wants is to collect. Which will be the right form for me to collect? Maybe I will become an ant or maybe I will become a bee.’ You may become that, we don’t know. You collect the honey, someone else eats it.
If a particular quality is very dominant in you, your karma will seek whatever kind of body and physical situation is best for you to fulfil that quality. Suppose your whole thing is to eat—you want to eat, eat and eat. Suppose you die without eating, unfulfilled, thinking of food even on your deathbed. The next time, you may come back as someone’s pet pig and be really well-fed. People think it is a punishment to come back as a pig. This is not a punishment for you. Nature is not thinking in terms of punishment or reward. Depending on your tendencies, whatever is unfulfilled within you, you get the kind of body that is best suited to fulfil those tendencies. It need not necessarily be an animal form; it may choose that kind of human form in that kind of situation and in that kind of surroundings where it can be fulfilled. But it could be any which way.
This is like a game of snakes and ladders. You go step by step, sometimes jumping, sometimes leaping, sometimes falling back. You climb one ladder, but as long as the snakes are there, it can swallow you and bring you back to square one. You climb up for a few days and again go back down. It just goes on. When you are on an active spiritual path, we give you a device with which you can strip off all the snakes. If you just take the responsibility, there will be no more snakes on your board. Then you cannot build any more karma; it is over.
The moment you focus your whole attention on yourself, you will see you are the source of everything that is happening here. The moment this awareness comes into you, you cannot build any more karma; it is finished. Now, you have to handle only what is stored up. It is very simple. Otherwise, you will go on emptying from one side and filling from the other side. There is no end to it. So to maintain focus on your goal and create that longing which is beyond all these limitations is the best way to ensure that Nature does not know what to do with you.
When Nature does not know what to do with you, it is good for you because you can work your things out very effortlessly. When Nature knows what to do with you, you will get put in this chamber or that chamber—the male chamber or the female chamber or the pig chamber or the cockroach chamber or some other chamber. A body is just a chamber. So if you maintain that longing which is not for this or that, Nature will not know what to do with you. It cannot push you this way or that way. It cannot make a decision on you. It gives you an advantage. That is the significance of equanimity.
Couples for Lifetimes
A husband and wife spend most of their lives together. They probably share more things between them than in any other relationship. For most people, the relationship between the husband and the wife is one of the deepest human relationships. So if anything lasts beyond death and is carried over to the next phase of life, then people expect this one relationship to be the best qualified to do so. This is also, to some extent, the basis of the adage that marriages are made in heaven. But in reality, is this true? Do husband and wife come together in the next lifetime too?
These days, in the West, people are constantly on the lookout for who their soulmate is. They keep searching even after getting married several times! But in India, people want to know if they were married to their spouse in their previous life also. But what they are really asking is, ‘How did I ever marry you?!’ If such a question comes to you, then you must look at yourself as to what is happening with you. After many years of marriage if you are still wondering, ‘How did I ever marry you?’ you really need to look not at previous lives, but the life that you are now living. I think this was promoted hugely by the Indian cinema of the 1970s and 1980s with all those songs about ‘janam janam ka sathi ’ (companion of many lifetimes) and all that. This is not so much a problem of today’s generation. In today’s movies, they are all thinking of relationships, their expiry date, and all that. If your pursuit for truth is guided by commercial cinema, then these things happen to you.
This belief or hope may have come about because somewhere, someone said that husband and wife come together for seven lifetimes. If I say this is true, probably most people will not want to get married at all! But it is not right to deny this possibility entirely. Couples coming together again is possible if they were married in a certain way. If the person who was conducting the marriage married them in such a powerful way that they tied those two lives together in a union to lead to an ultimate union, then it is possible. But this is extremely rare.
Today, people want to know this because they want some special reason to hold on to. If the only way you can hold on to someone is by believing that you have been stuck together for many lifetimes, it is a horrible way to live. Don’t create such horrors in your life. I am with you now because I want to be with you—this is a beautiful way to be with someone. Moreover, if you have been together for three lifetimes, maybe it is time to part! People keep putting me through these works all the time. They ask, ‘Sadhguru, was I with you in the last lifetime?’ Whatever makes you think that if I had seen you in the last lifetime, I would ever come in front of you once again?
What happened yesterday is of no consequence, but now you are trying to create a consequence for what might have happened. This memory is crippling you. It is not allowing you to use your mind as an instrument of penetration, as an instrument to open up dimensions of life. If that is the only way you can relate to your husband or wife, what a pathetic way to relate to people! You should find value in the human being who is sitting in front of you for what he or she is now, not for what they were somewhere.
One accomplishment of modern society is that we don’t value you for who your father was; we value you for who you are. What you have made out of yourself now is important, not who your father was. This is the big shift we have made from a feudalistic way of living to modern-day societies. If you came to India fifty to a hundred years ago, no one would look at your face and ask who you were. They would only ask who your father was. That has significantly changed. A little chaotic we are, but it is still quite a significant step.
Now, asking what were you in your previous life is worse than asking who your father is. What you are right now, what you have made out of your life right now is the most significant thing. So don’t waste your time and life digging into the past. Unless needed for spiritual reasons or to perform a task that would not be possible without the involvement of certain people with past associations, this dimension should not be opened up at all. Most people are unable to handle the memories, thoughts and emotions of one lifetime. So opening many will not bring well-being.
The Only Enduring Relationship
In spiritual lore, it is often said that if you have a Guru in your life, then if you are born again, you will become the disciple of the same Guru. So, in general, if other relationships do not continue across lifetimes, how is this an exception to the rule?
First of all, you need to understand what a relationship is and why there are human relationships. Now, you may have formed various types of relationships in your life for different purposes. Some are for your emotional needs, some for physical needs, some for financial needs, some for social needs, some for psychological needs, some for comfort, etc. In so many ways, you have formed relationships. Whatever kind of relationship you form, whether it is emotional, psychological, social, financial or physical, fundamentally, it is concerned with the body. When the relationship is based in the body, when the body drops, the relationship just evaporates. That is the end of it.
Only if a relationship transcends the physical limitations, then there is a possibility of this relationship extending beyond the limitations of the physical body. Such a relationship can extend beyond lifetimes or extend across lifetimes. Only when you in some way transcend the physical limitations, it can extend across lifetimes. When I say physical, I am referring to the mental structure also as physical and the emotional structure also as physical. There have been husbands, wives and lovers who have come together again for lifetimes because their love was so strong that it transcended the foundation of a need-based relationship. There could be a few examples of other relationships going beyond the physical limitations, but all these are very rare. Generally, it is only the Master–disciple relationship which gets carried for lifetimes. All the other relationships come together for the convenience of the physical; once it is over, it just breaks apart.
Even if the disciple has no idea of the Master’s being, the Master’s business is only with the disciple’s being. This relationship is always energy-based. It is not emotion-based, it is not mind-based, nor is it body-based. An energy-based relationship does not even realize whether the bodies have changed or not over lifetimes. It continues until the energy reaches dissolution. For the energy, there is no rebirth. It is only the body which is reborn. The energy just continues as one flow and accordingly carries the relationship.
There are many people here with us at Isha who were connected with us in the past. But not all of them are connected in the Master–disciple manner. Some are connected in some karmic way from close to 400 years ago too. It is not only those who supported us but even those who persecuted us, who tormented us, they are also somehow mostly in Coimbatore today. All of them are not our meditators, but they are with us. It is like that. That is the way life functions.
Now, why do all these people land up in one place? Do you know why the breeze is blowing in a particular direction and not the other way? The whole momentum of the wind in the world is just this: it moves from high-pressure and high-density spots to low-pressure and low-density spots. During the day, when the land gets heated up, the density becomes low. Wherever the density is low, the wind rushes in there. Then it cools or sometimes even rains and then that becomes high-density and the wind moves backwards. In Nature, wherever there is emptiness, everything rushes there.
This is so with karma also. When someone’s karmic bag is empty, all those other bags of karma which have been one way or the other connected to that for so many lifetimes tend to move towards that direction, knowingly or unknowingly—mostly unknowingly—because for all of them there is a possibility now. When one bag empties, every bag that is connected has the opportunity to become empty. But unless there is some spiritual significance to these things, we do not pay attention to the past connections.
Most of them coming towards me is due to their past karma of another lifetime, not by conscious choice. Many times, their present mindset and arrangements of life that they have made are in confrontation with their helpless longing to be here. Many, after they fulfil their karmic role, are bewildered as to why they are here. Those who have earned something of the beyond here in this life will continue, those who are here because of their old stock of food may, unfortunately, have to go. My commitment is only to fulfil the spiritual obligation but I cannot always fulfil the emotional and social aspects of these enduring relationships.
Life beyond a Thousand Moons
People who die after the age of eighty-four years or, in other words, those who have witnessed more than 1008 full moons will die a death that is very different from other kinds of deaths. Even if such a person has lived a stupid life, even if they never looked up to the sky when they were alive, such a person will not be reborn. Once we were visiting one of our neighbours in the United States. We had gone unannounced, so when we entered the gate, the neighbour came out with a shotgun to see who had come. He was a very elderly man, and it was a little strange to see him come out with a shotgun. So I asked him, ‘Why do you bring a shotgun to check who has come? Do you have a lot of enemies?’ He just shrugged and said, ‘No, all the buggers are dead.’ So if you just live long enough, you can even score over your enemies! This is like that.
When one crosses 1008 full moons of time, which amounts to nearly eighty-two years of age, something wonderful starts happening within a person. Somewhere between eighty-two to eighty-six years of age, suddenly, a certain loosening happens within people who live that long. You will notice that many of them suddenly become very sweet. Their grumpiness is gone, they are not complaining, they are quite fine because the karmic grip on their life will loosen up. This process reaches a substantial level of maturity when one crosses eighty-four years of age. Organically, eighty-four years of age is related to the basic integrity of the elemental and pranic organization of the physical structure. Crossing these milestones, healthfully and consciously, always leads to an unusual sense of wisdom and balance in an individual, which is essentially the consequence of obliterating the illusion of life and death.
The physicality of our birth is a conspiracy hatched between the moon and the Earth. Our very birth is rooted in the menstrual cycles of our mother, and that cycle is linked to the lunar cycles. The sun then provides the basic energy and ambient atmosphere that is needed to hatch life. The cycles of the feminine and the cycles of the moon have come to such a concurrence in the human system that we cannot aspire for further physical evolution. So this has naturally resulted in evolution in terms of consciousness or attempts to evolve in ways other than physical.
Of the many things that we do as life upon this planet, there are three most vital aspects—one is that of self-transformation that one transcends all identities, the second is to ensure the quality of the yet-to-be-born and the third is to evolve or find an absolute release for the life that has departed. In fulfilling all these three most vital aspects, the cycles of the moon have a significant role. If we utilize the full moon and new moon situations with some understanding, we need not be swimming against the current.
Even during our life cycle, the moon’s cycles play a significant role in many aspects of our physical and psychological status, but the impact of the moon cycles is really huge in conception. A couple who are conscious will make efforts to conceive twelve to sixteen days ahead of the full moon so that the being that enters the womb can do so on the next full moon day. There are many more aspects to factor in. If one is willing to approach facilitating the life process as a sacred duty, not just a consequence of one’s passions for each other and longing and the fulfilment of pleasure, we can go into a lot more details about timing and the nature of conception.
It also has a similar impact on the process of death. When the body has seen 1008 full moons, the energy body comes to a certain level of instability. When I say instability, I am talking in a positive way. It is not able to retain that structure very clearly. The bubble’s walls are thinning because it has gone through its full cycle. So when the person dies, he or she cannot seek another womb because they do not have the necessary karmic fire in them. So they hang around. Now, it is very easy to liberate them. Even if it takes a body, it will definitely be a much larger bubble than the way it was. But it is possible it will just hang around for a while and burst. This is true for a whole lot of them. But some may hang around and take a body as a much bigger bubble, more significant life. If people hang on till they are eighty-four years old, regardless of how they lived their lives, it is possible—I am not saying it is guaranteed—it is possible that they attain Mahasamadhi. The possibility is much higher now, simply because the fools endured long enough!
Many times, people lose the natural advantage of crossing 1008 full moons because, by then, they become completely unconscious in terms of memory or access to the Karmic Memory bank. If you are beyond eighty-four, but you have lost connection with the substance that makes you, you will become like a ghost or the living dead, because it is the karmic mass that is making you this kind of a person. The Prarabdha Karma, 1 or the one bowl of memory that was taken out for this life, is over, but you don’t know how to dip into the bucket, or the Sanchita Karma, and take another bowl for you to keep going. If you knew how to take another bowl and another bowl of karma or if you could open up the entire bucket and use it, then you can live for 200 years, there is no problem. Now, when you have exhausted everything, you will attain to mukti, and you will go. But if you are unable to take out the next bowl and you still keep the body going, then you will become ghostlike. This is why the pursuit of immortality and longevity through unnatural means is fraught with too many dangers.
Birth: Always a Beginning
If Enlightened people are reborn, are they born Enlightened? Does Enlightenment also get carried on to the next birth? And specifically, in my case, people ask if I had two Enlightened lives behind me, why did the experience on Chamundi Hills have to wait until I was twenty-five years of age?
We already saw that for most people, their moment of Enlightenment and their moment of leaving the body is the same. When their energies reach a certain pitch, they leave the body. That moment of leaving the body is also Enlightenment for them. So unless they have a certain mastery over the mechanics of the body, and they manage to retain their body because they have some specific work to do, the question of coming back does not arise. If your objective is just Liberation, then Enlightenment and leaving the body will always be together. If you have other objectives of wanting to do something else with what freedom you have found within yourself, then there is something more to be done.
It is just like this: let us say, you release a prisoner from the prison; he is liberated. He goes away. He never again wants to get back to the prison. But there are some who are ambitious enough or stupid enough to want to not only become free from the prison but also run the prison. He is a prisoner, but now he wants to become a prison officer. Only when you have this kind of a problem, you retain your body. Otherwise, the normal prisoner’s aspiration is to somehow get out. He will not seek employment in the prison. It takes an idiot like me to do that!
So will a person who is Enlightened be born Enlightened? If you take a mango sapling, it has all the qualities of a mango tree—it is capable of producing mangoes. But it does not spring out mangoes the moment it sprouts out of the ground. It takes its time. Nature allows this time for the mango sapling to grow to a certain sturdiness, strength, maturity, balance and capability to hold its ground. Only then it flowers and fruits. The moment two leaves sprout, if the mangoes appear, the tree could die. So it will wait for it to come up to a certain height and sturdiness, only then the mangoes will come out.
Similarly, an Enlightened being has certain qualities which are enshrined in him or her, which cannot be taken away. But when he is born, he is born like anyone. The qualities are still there, inherent in him. It will wait for a certain time and space where it can find expression. This is the intelligence of Nature. It knows exactly when it should flower to find maximum fruit. If it flowers too early, it will not find its full fruit. So it will wait. Depending on what type of work he intends to take up, accordingly, he will develop.
We have seen this in India for a long time: many bala yogis 2 become Enlightened by the age of six or seven. Most of them never cross the age of twenty-five or thirty. Before that, they will go because they cannot sustain the body at that intensity of existence. So if Nature gives sufficient space that the mind, body and emotions develop and mature in a certain way before the dimension becomes alive in that person, they can hold it much better.
This is true of me also. Although there was an experience of living an Enlightened life for two lifetimes, I still had to wait until the age of twenty-five before the reminder hit me. This is because the very reason why this body was taken this time was fundamentally for the consecration of the Dhyanalinga. For this, it is not just Enlightenment—you need a perfect body in many ways. When I say perfect, I am not referring to athletic perfection, but a perfect body in terms of management of your energies and what you can do with it. This is not possible in a child. When I look back at those twenty-five years, the way activity happened in my life, the kind of activity that happened, it all occurred in perfect progression for my purpose. Everything happened in such a way that everything that was necessary for the development of this body and this mind and stabilizing my emotions naturally happened as a process of living.
For example, at the age of twelve, though I was someone who was wild, playing, climbing trees, trekking and doing things like this, the best Yoga teacher that was available in southern India came to me and somehow inspired me to learn Yogic practices. 3 And without a single word or thought, I just took it on. Some twelve years later, big things happened to me. So this process of when it should happen is Nature’s intelligence. You never question Nature’s intelligence, because your intelligence is too small to question the intelligence of Nature. Whatever happens naturally is always right, there is no question about it. It is just that your short-term goals and objectives may not be in tune with what is happening, so you struggle with it. But in the real sense, it cannot be wrong. It always moves in the right direction because Nature does not decide things with thoughts and emotion. It just decides things as per your tendencies. This is not a thought. With thought, you can always make a mistake, but with tendencies, there can be no mistake.
See, today you may think something is the right thing to do. But tomorrow if you just start thinking in the opposite direction, at the end of that day, you can clearly come to a conclusion that this is not the best thing to do. This is the nature of thought. With thought, you can always make a mistake as it functions with very limited data. And most of the thoughts are just a mistake. But Nature operates out of tendencies. A mango tree does not think how to produce a mango. Its tendency is like that. It just moves in that direction and just does what it has to do and everything happens at the right moment.
In my youth, I was not a person who was drawn towards spirituality. But at that time in my life, simply, accidentally, here and there, I just began to meet people on the spiritual path. At that time, just like that, things fell into place because the tendencies were slowly coming to the surface and the necessary support to manifest that also came. So for an Enlightened being who is reborn, it depends on what type of work that person has as an objective for his life. Accordingly, at the right time, things will happen. Enlightenment is about going beyond individuality and becoming available to Universality.
The Rebirth of Lamas
One group of people who give a lot of importance to the reincarnation of Masters is the Tibetans. You must understand that Tibetan lamas are basically tantriks in the upper Himalayan regions who converted to Buddhism. Theirs is a Tantric culture. Nepal is a country full of Tantra. 4 It has five temples to do Tantric rituals and processes. The Buddhist monks from India went out to Tibet like aggressive missionaries at that time and converted large populations. The underlying Tantric culture remained, but they became Buddhists. They replaced their idols, but the basic Tantric culture remained. So Tibetan culture became a mixture of Buddhism and the Tantric way of life. Actually, the two are diametrically opposite. Tantra is full of rituals, but Gautama and rituals just cannot go together. Gautama’s main work was to destroy all rituals and make life meditative. Today, Tibetan Buddhists are ritualistic Buddhists. They practise rituals that are more elaborate than Hindu rituals.
Some people in that culture were definitely capable of consciously determining their reincarnation and such things, and some Masters chose to come back over and over again. Apparently, in some cases, there are records where the same person came back for up to thirty lifetimes. Generally, before such a person died, he would say, ‘In my next life, I will be born here with these signs. You please come and recognize me.’ So they would go in search of him wherever in the world he may be and get the child back into the monastery. But not all Masters do this. Many of them simply dissolve and disappear. But over time, this prediction of reincarnation and identifying the reincarnation all became a compulsive culture.
Let us say, it happened in a particular monastery that a Master died, and on the eleventh day after his death, he happened to communicate in some way about his reincarnation. Now, slowly, over time, they made it a tradition that whenever a Master or a senior monk died, he would also reincarnate in a particular way. If nothing like that happened, you either had to admit that the Master was not an evolved being or you just had to create a miracle and carry on the legend. Usually, people chose to create a miracle because they could not let the reputation of the monastery run into the ground. So it became a tradition. It is unfortunate that the world is sold on these miracles.
The tragedy of a living spiritual process turning into a dead tradition is not isolated to any one geography or group. This has been the unfortunate reality in too many cultures. The effort to keep it as a live process and not a lifeless tradition is the challenge that all spiritual processes need to strive for. Tibetan Buddhism has produced many wonderful Masters and the value of that is immense. Padmasambhava who in many ways is the key to that tradition walked around with a trident and two wives. People refer to him as Tibetan Shiva, definitely not a Buddhist monk of a tradition.
My Past Lifetimes
There are any number of my lifetimes which are there in my memory but I don’t pay attention to any of that. I have a piece of life in Zambia, for example, but I pay attention only to that which has been spiritually significant in some way. The rest of it is of no consequence. There are many things around me today which are a legacy of my past. But I have carried only those things which are of spiritual significance. Who my mother was, who my father was, who my brothers were, who my sisters were, who my children were in all those past lives, I can pursue them very easily—but I will not. I have not even paid any attention to them. Only those who were with me in spirit—not in flesh or blood—I nurture them. Those who were with me in flesh and blood, I leave them to the Earth, because it is to the Earth that they belong. In that sense, I consider only my last four lifetimes significant.
Bilva
In the early 1600s, there lived a young man in a small village (the present-day city of Raigarh) in the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh. His name was Bilva. He was a tribesman who lived a wild and intense life. There is a certain tradition in India where some people called the budubuduku s just walk through the streets, usually very early in the morning, when it is still dark. They wake you up with their drumbeats. Intuitively, if they see something, they will tell you. They may say, for example, that death will occur in such and such house in two weeks’ time, or someone will fall ill somewhere, and so on. Generally, people paid attention to these spontaneous utterances because they were known to come true. If nothing came to them that day, they would simply sing songs in praise of Shiva. After this, they would go and sit in a temple for some time, where people would go and make some offerings to them.
This was a tradition within the Shaiva culture, where this particular tribe of people is also involved in snake charming. Snakes and Shiva are deeply connected. Bilva belonged to a tribe like that. Bilva was deeply in love with what he was doing. These were people who lived totally, loving life for what it is. They were not the kind to accumulate anything. They had no sense of money, property or possessions. They simply lived and Shiva was the most important aspect of their lives.
Bilva loved snakes. Mind you, snakes are generally poisonous creatures. If you are the kind who loves poisonous creatures, you have to be a different kind of person. To kiss a snake, you must be very courageous. He was a person for whom love meant everything; the rest was secondary. Being alive itself was secondary. That is the kind of person he was. He was someone who could not fit into the social structure and was looked upon as a rebel. For one of the many rebellious acts he did—not respecting the prevalent caste distinction—he was put to death at a very young age by a cobra’s bite, while he was tied to a tree.
At that time, you could not really call him a spiritual person; he was a devotee of Shiva. But during those last few moments of his life, he watched his breath. There was nothing else he could do and breath watching just happened. The cobra’s venom entered his body and his breathing became very laboured. Death was just a few minutes away. During this time, he watched his breath. It was more of a consequence than a conscious awareness. Bitten by a cobra and left to die, he was lying face down, almost dead. Yet he managed to be aware of those last few minutes of life. This was more out of Grace rather than any sadhana. From those few minutes of breath watching, a new spiritual process began which changed that person’s future in so many ways.
Shivayogi
In his next two lifetimes, he was a very intense seeker of the Ultimate Nature. Shiva was his way. Both the times he was known as Shivayogi. In the first life of sadhana, he died at the age of thirty-seven. He had no disease, just hunger and the intensity of his sadhana did him in. He did not die Enlightened, but he died in full dignity. He died not screaming, yelling or crying, but just trying to do sadhana, to be meditative and die. The second time over, he fared better. He lived up to fifty-five years of age. He went through heartbreaking sadhana, but still final Realization had not happened. At this point, he was bestowed the Ultimate Grace.
Usually, I don’t talk about my Guru. He was called Sri Palani Swami and was a being beyond proportions. That was not his real name, but he was so called because he had attained to a certain samadhi state near the town of Palani in Tamil Nadu. He remained in this state for about two-and-a-half years. After that, he wandered all over the country, enlightening many people. He came to Shivayogi, in the second lifetime, and bestowed his Grace upon him, a forlorn sadhaka.
When this Shivayogi saw him, he recognized that this was the Guru. Until then, he would not accept any human being as his Guru. For him, Shiva was the only Guru. He wanted Shiva to come and initiate him, but when he saw Sri Palani Swami, he recognized that this being was at the very peak of consciousness and he offered himself. But somewhere there was still a little resistance because he could not offer himself to another man. He would only offer himself totally to Shiva. So the Guru, out of compassion, took the form of Shiva himself. Shivayogi surrendered. Sri Palani Swami did not even touch him with his hand or foot; he just took his staff and tapped on Shivayogi’s Agna Chakra, or forehead. At that moment, Shivayogi attained to his Ultimate Nature.
This contact with the Guru lasted only a few hours. After that, they never met again, but they were constantly in touch. Sri Palani Swami attained Mahasamadhi in the Velliangiri Mountains. Somehow, he identified Shivayogi as a person suitable for establishing the Dhyanalinga and entrusted this work to him. Not in speech, not in words, but wordlessly he communicated the immense technology needed to consecrate the Dhyanalinga. So Shivayogi began working towards establishing the Dhyanalinga. He was not able to fulfil his Guru’s vision in that lifetime because of limited resources and lack of support. So the rest of his time in that lifetime he spent mostly with his eyes closed.
Sadhguru Sri Brahma
To continue the work of creating the Dhyanalinga, Shivayogi came back as Sadhguru Sri Brahma. He started the work towards this in Tamil Nadu. He travelled extensively in the state and established several small institutions but his work on the Dhyanalinga was centred around Coimbatore. Here he faced a lot of social resistance from people. As the Dhyanalinga is the highest manifestation of the Divine, it includes all aspects and manifestations of life. So consecrating it involved men and women in very intense processes. If a man and woman sit together, people can only think of one thing. So a lot of resistance came up and he was literally hounded out of the place. He became very angry that he could not fulfil his Guru’s will and left Coimbatore in great fury, as if on fire.
Those were the worst times in Sadhguru Sri Brahma’s life. But in many ways, the best came out at that time. After lifetimes of sadhana and then fired by a phenomenal Grace of the Guru, he was quite sure that what he set out to do would happen.
But he burned with fury when it was robbed away from him by very ordinary and mediocre people, whom he had underestimated. He realized that the power of ignorance is never to be underestimated. It is very powerful and the world is ruled by it most of the time. You think your knowledge, your fire, your Enlightenment will do things, but the Enlightened are always an individual, the ignorant are in masses. There is a huge power to that.
He did not do the cold calculations necessary to work in the world, not because he was incapable of it. He did not do it simply because he thought his fire and his knowing would carry. But that is not how the world always works. The material aspect of the world, the human beings of different kinds, need to be handled as it is fit. Otherwise, it will not work. And this is a wonderful lesson for everyone—a lesson I have not forgotten even for a moment in my life—even if you carry the Divine Light within you, there will still be darkness behind you. So unless you have created a lot of small lights behind you, you need to constantly turn back and check what is happening.
Sadhguru Sri Brahma was alone. There were people here and there that he had lit up, but he did not like anyone following him, so he was alone. Because he was alone, behind him there was darkness, and it followed him and did not allow him to fulfil the purpose of his life. This is a good lesson for anyone: even such a magnificent human being as Sadhguru Sri Brahma, who could do things which are not considered human or humanly possible, could not fulfil what he came for. And it does not matter how many things you do, if you cannot fulfil the purpose that you have stood up for, that is considered failure. Sadhguru Sri Brahma failed and he did not like it; he did not like it one bit. So knowing the only emotion that he knew—he got angry. He was always angry—not about anything or anyone, but anger was his vehicle for intense existence.
In that anger, he started to walk in no particular direction. Seeing his fierceness, no one was able to go near him, except for one disciple by the name of Vibhuti who followed him. Sadhguru Sri Brahma walked without stopping to eat, sleep or even sit for three or four days. During this time, the disciple would follow him, try to gauge in which direction the Master was going, cook food and run to reach his Master and place the food in front of him, step aside and wait in the hope that he would eat.
Where would he walk? He eventually began walking in the direction where the scent of Grace for him was. So he walked towards the town of Kadapa, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Initially, when he set out, he did not even think where he was going. He was just walking blindly to cool his head a bit. But invariably he went in that direction because there is this temple in Kadapa 5 where Sri Palani Swami himself had spent a lot of time. Probably, it was re-consecrated by him. So Sadhguru Sri Brahma went in that direction.
When he finally reached the temple in Kadapa, his anger had still not subsided. Even after four or five months, he was still angry. No one could go near Sadhguru Sri Brahma and his disciple. It is not that they did anything or harmed anyone, but they were so fierce—fiercer than wild animals—even if they were only sitting, no one wanted to go near them. Within a few days, all the priests in the temple left, as they could not stay there because of the intensity of that being. Sadhguru Sri Brahma knew that he did not have much time. He knew that because of certain karmic limitations, he would have to leave his body within the next two years.
When his head got a little cooler and when he was able to put down the shame and resentment of failure a little bit, he settled down to make some very cold calculations. From being a fiery, exuberant, don’t-care-a-devil kind of yogi, he came down to being a cold calculation, a highly pragmatic, controlled fire. He sat with his disciple and plotted how to make the Dhyanalinga happen in the next life. Many things were decided there—who should be involved in the consecration process, where they should be born, in which womb, how and at what time. He plotted every aspect that would be needed and determined solutions for many issues that could impede. Sadhguru Sri Brahma even decided what kind of a person he should be born as, how his physical body and state of mind should be. Everything was created right there. The fundamental blueprint for the Dhyanalinga was made in that Kadapa temple.
Sadhguru Sri Brahma then came back to Coimbatore for the last time. He was heading up the Velliangiri Mountains, which also contained his Guru’s samadhi. There were many people gathered at the foothills that day. To them, he declared, ‘This one will be back.’ He ascended the mountain for the last time. Now, Sadhguru Sri Brahma was supercharged with failure and, having been unable to fulfil his Guru’s will, he executed an extremely rare feat—of exiting through the seven chakras all at once. He was one of the very few Masters who had mastery over all the seven chakras and was referred to as Chakreshwara.
He was only forty-two years old at the time. He did this phenomenally rare thing as a preparation for the consecration of the Dhyanalinga. Though he knew his failure was that of mismanagement of social situations, he was ascertaining for himself that it was not a lapse of his own ability. Exiting the body through all the seven chakras meant this person had complete mastery over all the 114 chakras. It is because of that mastery that now we can have people blowing up everywhere with intense experiences like explosions. He chose the peaks of Velliangiri Mountains for this incredible feat, as his Guru’s samadhi was in these mountains—it was the lap of his Master. Thus, he assured himself that the next time around there would be no failure or mishit.
Even today, the place where he attained samadhi and shed his body exists. It is very vibrant; it pulsates with energy. People who go there can feel it and experience it. The quality of this place at the top of the Seventh Hill—just at the edge of the mountain where chilly, wild winds blow constantly—says everything about this man. That is where he felt most comfortable. It is a very powerful spot. If you are a meditator, if you are a little sensitive, when you go there, you will go crazy. It is like that because he left with a certain purpose. He has a certain purpose to fulfil, so he left in a particular way. It is not just about Liberation and dissolution. He used his energies and even his death for the future establishment or manifestation of how he wanted to be.
Before Sadhguru Sri Brahma shed the body, he made one more futile attempt to achieve the work he had started. A certain yogi in central India had left his body at the age of twenty-six. He was a bala yogi who had attained Self-Realization at the age of eleven. This yogi spent about three-and-a-half years in samadhi. When he came out, he was eager to share his experience, but he only found five or six disciples to impart it to. Even they were not sincere enough. So he got angry and he left his body.
Sadhguru Sri Brahma immediately took hold of this bala yogi’s body and tried to fulfil his purpose through it. He did this because he had no patience to be born again and go through the process of life all over again. For a few months, Sadhguru Sri Brahma was in two different physical bodies at the same time. In this attempt to create the Dhyanalinga, he gathered a few disciples around him and tried working with them with tremendous intensity, because the time span available was very limited. When people did not meet his expectations, he chose to shelve the effort and depart with a declaration, ‘This one will be back.’
Will I Come Back
People ask me: ‘Many spiritual Masters in the Buddhist tradition have come back again and again for the sake of their followers. You yourself took two more births after Enlightenment to fulfil your Guru’s dream. So will you be coming back again, just for one last time, in case we do not make it this time?’
Let me confirm this to you once again: I am not coming back for sure, because my expiry date is long over. Some people who are a little more perceptive clearly see that I don’t even exist. This actually happened: every year we take a large group of Isha meditators to the Himalayas, and Tapovan is one of the places they visit. That year, for some reason, I stayed back at Gomukh. I did not accompany them to Tapovan. In Tapovan there is a lady called Bengali Maa. She has been living there for many years. She asked our meditators, ‘Who are you people? Where are you coming from?’ They said, ‘We are Isha meditators and we have come with our Guru.’ She said, ‘Can I see his picture?’ So they pulled out a picture of mine and showed it to her. She looked at it and said, ‘Oh, he is wonderful but he is gone, long time ago.’ They said, ‘No, no, he has come with us, he is walking with us.’ She said, ‘No way! He is gone.’
So these people came back to Gomukh. They thought that during the time they went up, I was gone. They were a little terrified when they saw me, and then they told me what happened. I thought I had covered myself pretty well, but if she was able to see it, obviously, it was not well enough. I am real or I have made myself more real than most people are. But from the account books of humanity, I am gone a long time ago. This gives me much freedom, though. But stretching it one more time is not a proper thing to do. Even this time it happened only because I got tangled up with the project of the consecration of the Dhyanalinga. Otherwise, this one would not be.
As it is, all the basic infrastructure that is needed for life to continue has been dismantled, but I am still on. This is not good. Existentially, it is not considered good. Once the basic infrastructure that is necessary to keep this life going is gone, that person has no business here; they should be gone. In our longing for Liberation, we dismantled all the infrastructure. Then, since we landed up with an impossible project, we tried to continue on and on. Now that is also done, and no one knows why the hell we are continuing any more. Just to see some more full moons maybe! Not really, because I remember too many of them and the damn moon is not changing.
Once you have deciphered the fundamentals of how it happens, tomorrow, even if a totally new Creation happens, it would still not be interesting enough to go there. It is like this: let us say, there is a super hotel which has a million rooms. If you go there as a customer, they give you a key card which opens only your room. You are just entering one room, so you are very excited when you enter it. Now, if the hotel manager tells you there is another room with a better view and asks if you would like to take it, you say, ‘Yes, yes. I am excited.’ But there is a cleaning person there—she has one simple key which opens every room. But she is not excited about the new room with the view because she has seen plenty of rooms. She has seen all the superficial small decor changes from room to room and all that.
I am sure even she has not opened all the million rooms, but because she has seen so many and she even cleans them every day, she is not excited about entering one more new room. This is so with Self-Realization also. Once you have this key, you can open any number of rooms. Have you opened everything? No. If you have the time and the inclination, it is possible to open every room, but one room is not so different from the other. Similarly, if you enter a new Universe, everything may look different but it is not so different. The fundamentals are all the same. So when you have seen enough, you start dismantling the fundamental infrastructure that is necessary to sustain life.
There is a certain span a life can run. Even now, without the support that I take from a few people around me, I would not be able to keep my body intact. I am doing fine, but without a little bit of support around me, it would not be possible to maintain the integrity of my body at all, because it is well past its expiry date. Besides, technology-wise, me coming back is crude technology. We are establishing a slightly better way of doing things. Moreover, it is very wrong to think that if this person is not there, what will happen? This happened when Kamaraj 6 was the chief minister of Tamil Nadu. You should know that most of the infrastructure that you see in the state were all done during his time. We are still enjoying what he did.
Once Kamaraj was touring the state when he was the chief minister. He was somewhere near Madurai. It was some village and they had just transferred a police sub-inspector from there. That officer had been there for a few years and he had bonded well with the people and done many things for them. So he was a very popular sub-inspector and the people were very agitated by his transfer. In India, it is very rare that people love a policeman. But this policeman had earned the people’s love and they all protested. So when the chief minister came visiting, they said, ‘We don’t want this sub-inspector to be transferred.’ Kamaraj replied, ‘It is wonderful that there is such a wonderful sub-inspector here. But I want you to know, we are capable of producing many more wonderful sub-inspectors. You will see the next one will be even better.’ Even a political leader had such wisdom. Fortunately, we had wonderful people in the country, but unfortunately, they never had enough power in their hands to do anything. So don’t get into this mode, ‘Please come back, Sadhguru! Come back, Sadhguru!’ No. It is not necessary. The next generation we produce should be far better than us.
Whenever I leave—whenever that is—for eighty years after that, my presence will be stronger, much stronger than the way it is right now. This is to ensure that all of you are dead before I go! Yes. This is because once you start people on a certain process, there is a certain responsibility that you finish it. So I want to ensure that everyone who was in some way touched by me is cleaned up from the planet before I leave completely. Since they taught you all those tricks in Inner Engineering with which you may live 160 years, I am keeping it for eighty years after the body is gone—just in case you survive to become 160! That is why these eighty years. Eighty years is almost like another lifetime, but there will be no physical presence. For physical presence, we will establish enough systems but the presence will be much, much stronger than the way it is right now because the burden of carrying a physical body will not be there.
So am I going to be a disembodied being? Obviously, if my body is buried or burned, I will be disembodied, if you want to call it that. But the body is on many different layers. What you pick up from the planet you have to put back. The rest of the body—to put it in modern terminology—is more like a software. The software still stays on a minimal platform. Right now, it is on a solid, physical platform. If this platform goes away, it will stay in a very minimal platform. It will not take another physical platform. This will be far more efficient than being in a physical platform because of various things.
So why not stay forever? There is no such thing as forever, long or short. If it is needed, one can hang on and do that kind of thing. But it is not needed because we have set up a more sophisticated arrangement for that purpose. We will come out with many more spiritual processes which can be transmitted to the masses without much preparation. It is still a pure method, not some fake stuff. Right now, I thought it is not relevant to do that because I am still around; I can do the mass processes more intricately. I adjust a very intricate process to a particular mass that is there and make things happen. It is still very much possible for us to do it that way, but mass processes will slowly roll out of this after some time because that will be long-term insurance. Above all, there is the Dhyanalinga. So there is really no need to hang on forever.
Why do you care? You will be dead and gone, anyway.