The success of this enterprise has meant that India is still the world’s greatest storehouse of spiritual knowledge, particularly as regards occult physiology. As a high level initiate recently said to me, ‘If you visit India today, you cannot help feeling how the air still just crackles with astrality.’
Great Western teachers such as Pythagoras, Apollonius of Tyana and St Germain have travelled to India in search of this astrality. The Gospels contain quotes from older, Indian sources and more ideas that originated there.
Sir John Woodruffe, the Sanskrit scholar who first translated the tantric texts in the nineteenth century, has written how even the venerable Sufi tradition leant on Hindu wisdom for teachings on the chakras, for example.
In the 1960s onwards, Indian religion was felt by many people in the West to offer a working spiritual knowledge, including practical spiritual disciplines and guides through the spirit worlds, which they could not find in church. A bookshop in the West is still likely to stock more books on mysticism derived from the Eastern than from the Western tradition.
FOLLOWING RAMA’S REFUSAL TO TAKE THE crown, no great single personality dominates this period. If Rama was an all-action hero who fought monsters, went on long, dangerous adventures and founded cities, his successors, sometimes called the Seven Wise Ones, or the Rishis, had a stillness, an inactivity about them. They built no stone buildings. They lived in buildings of mud or simple shelters twisted into shape from roots and tendrils. Nothing of the Rishis has lasted except what they knew.
There is a simple saying in the Cabala: ‘Everything you have seen, every flower, every bird, every rock will pass away and turn to dust, but that you have seen them will not pass away.’ This is a saying that would have seemed sympathetic to the Rishis. Seated with legs folded so that the soles of their feet turned upwards, they had no desire to feel gravity, the downward, reductive pull of the material world, but headed instead for the spirit worlds. They were able to see spiritual beings at work on the earth, how they help seeds to germinate in spring, flowers to blossom in summer, trees to bear fruit in autumn — and how seeds are preserved through winter by these same spiritual beings. The Rishis experienced the ebb and flow of spiritual influence like a giant breath. Ancient Indian civilization was like the lowest realm of Heaven.
Earlier we talked about the way materialists misappropriate words and phrases such as ‘the meaning of life’, using them in a secondary and slightly dishonest sense. The same is true of ‘spiritual’, often used by people to puff themselves as good-hearted or moral in a warm, fuzzy, perhaps pseudo-mystical way. What it really means is the ability to see, hear and communicate with the spirits like the Indian adepts.
They were also able to communicate in occult ways. Other people were felt by them to be sympathetic or not by their breathing. By breathing in someone else’s air, they could sense that person’s inner life.
Adepts were able to pour their knowledge into the souls of others in an unceasing flow of pictures. Much later this knowledge would be put into words and passed from generation to generation orally until it was finally written down as the Vedas.
Their gaze could drive away serpents and calm lions and tigers. Nothing could deflect the adepts from their contemplation. They wandered freely, building only the flimsiest shelters, eating fruit and drinking the milk of their flocks. They would eat only vegetable matter, never any meat. To do so, they believed, was to absorb the animal’s death agony.
They immersed themselves in vegetable consciousness, in the physical processes — waking, sleeping, breathing, digesting — which we have seen are the gift of the vegetable kingdom to the human body. By learning to control the ens vegetalis, or etheric body, they could control, too, breathing, the rate of digestion, even heart rate and the flow of blood, leading to the amazing feats for which Indian adepts are famous — the ability to stop the heart altogether just by thinking about it, for example.
The adepts understood, too, how sinking deep into contemplation of the solar plexus chakra enabled them to perceive clairvoyantly. And they knew how to wrap others in a protective beam of love emanating from the heart chakra.
In addition to the sixteen petals of the heart chakra, the adepts saw 101 subtle and luminous arteries issuing from the same area like spokes from a wheel. Three of these, larger ones they saw rising to the head. One rises to the right eye and corresponds to the sun and the future. Another rises to the left eye and corresponds to the moon and the past. They understood how it was by a combination of these two organs that humans are enabled to perceive the movements of material objects in relation to one another in space and so also to have a sense of time passing.
The middle of the three arteries ran up from the heart and through the crown of the head. By this route, the way upwards is illumined from below, by means of a radiant heart. And it was by the route of this middle artery, too, that the spirit would depart up through the crown and out of the body at death.
The Neolithic ‘swastika’ carved on a boulder on Keighley moor in Yorkshire, England, is a symbol of the revolving two-petalled lotus and above — the same device — in a Celtic sun brooch found in Sweden. The Rig Veda says, ‘Behold the beautiful splendour of Savitva the Sun-God of the swastika to inspire our visions.’
To the ancients all life was involved in a pulse, rhythm or breath. They saw all human lives as breathed temporarily into the world of maya, or illusion, then breathed out again, a process repeated through the ages. They saw great flocks or shoals of souls being breathed in and out of material life together.
This ancient Indian civilization was in some ways an echo of the sun-filled, watery, vegetable world of the period before the sun and earth separated. In some ways it too was a lotus-eating period that would have to end if progress was to take place.
We saw how great beings from the higher hierarchies could no longer appear in physical bodies as they had earlier on Atlantis. They could still appear as semi-material spectres or phantoms, but even this was happening less frequently. By the end of the age people might only see them with their physical eyes once or twice in a lifetime. As the gods withdrew, people would have to find ways to follow them.
In this way yoga was born.
At the height of their meditations a rush of energy from the base of the spine would travel upwards through the middle artery via the heart to the head. Sometimes this energy was thought of as being like a snake, which rose through the spine up into the skull and bit at a point just behind the bridge of the nose. This bite released an ecstatic lace-like flux of luminous currents, seven hundred thousand lightning flares sounding like millions of bees. Adepts would find themselves in another dimension that appeared at first to consist of a mighty ocean of giant weaving waves of light and energy — the preliminary mystical experience in all traditions. As they became more accustomed to the spiritual world, these apparently impersonal forces would begin to resolve themselves into outer garments of the gods, and finally the faces of the gods themselves would emerge from the light, the same faces of the gods of stars and planets that have become familiar to us over the last few chapters.