Category: Merging With Siva

The Intuitive Nature

Observe the intellect as it is manifested in the world around you. You can see its limits. You can also see when it becomes a tool for the intuitive mind. When you discover great truths in the books you read, when creative ideas come to you, observe, with affectionate detachment, the people around you, the situations in life through which you pass. As you have learned, observations give birth to understanding, and understanding comes from your superconscious mind. Thus, the intellect must be developed to a certain extent and then controlled through the control of thought. Thought forms are manifestations of astral matter, or odic force, and travel through astral space, or odic force fields, from one destination to another. They can build, preserve and destroy. Thought forms can also protect, and they can create. Thought forms can also be seen, just as auras can be seen.

The intellect is the external ego, but it is only the external ego when it is in control and has cut itself off sufficiently from superconsciousness by becoming opinionated. When the intellect represents the ego, we say a person is unable to change his mind, no matter how much you try to convince or talk with him. He is stubborn, unyielding, even unfriendly if he becomes agitated or disturbed in his effort to hold the intellect together.

Should the intellectual nature become disturbed, the astral body then takes over and the instinctive mind or the instinctive qualities are prevalent at that time. This is quite apparent in undisciplined people, because the intellectual nature is undisciplined. When the astral body and the intellect work hand in hand, they create an instinctive-intellectual individual filled with opinionated knowledge, undisciplined instinctive drives, and emotions of hate and fear that have not been transmuted into the realms of reason and controlled through allowing a gridwork of positive memory patterns to build.

Within man, and functioning at a different rate of vibration than the intellect, is found the power or the motivating force of the mind, the chakras, or force centers. There are seven of these basic force centers, which are stimulated into action and unfoldment by the iḍā, piṅgalā and sushumṇā currents. The iḍā and piṅgalā are odic psychic currents (the Chinese yin and yang) interwoven around the spinal cord. Directly through the spinal cord runs the sushumṇā current, which is actinodic. The iḍā current is passive odic force; the piṅgalā current is aggressive odic force. The sushumṇā is an actinodic current. These currents govern the sixth aspect of man, the chakras. These currents are like the reins which will guide a horse as we ride in one direction or another.

The intuitive nature, man’s seventh aspect, is composed of a greater amount of actinic energy than odic. It is formed by the sushumṇā current that runs between the iḍā and piṅgalā currents up through the spinal cord. However, it is the state of mind that a yoga student must learn to identify as his own, so to speak. Until this time he usually identifies with the intuitive mind of his guru. This identification serves as a constant reminder of the existence of his own intuitive nature. Many students seem to know when the guru is in a higher state of intuitive awareness, but they may fail to realize that the knowing or recognition of that state is their own higher state of intuitive awareness, occurring simultaneously with that of the guru. This is one of the great benefits awarded a yoga student working in the guru system: his opportunity to identify with the intuitive mind of the guru.

When the yoga student learns to control his own odic force field to the point where he no longer identifies with his physical body, his astral body or his intellect, he can then identify his external ego with his intuitive nature, or subsuperconscious mind. This new and humble identity is a sporadic sense in the initial stages on the yoga path, for only when the student is really actinic does he utilize the intuitive mind consciously, perceiving it through the faculties of cognizantability. One does not entertain thoughts when in this state of full awareness. In this consciousness, one views and perceives through the anāhata chakra of direct cognition. The intuitive nature is the most refined aspect of the astral body. Although the intuitive aspect is made primarily of actinic force, there is enough odic force within it to enable man to enter into the realm of creation in the material world. This seventh aspect of man is a plateau, a leveling off of one cycle of evolution and the beginning, at the same time, of another.

The Intellect, Or Outer Ego

The fifth aspect of the soul is the odic causal sheath, or intellectual mind, known in Sanskrit as buddhi chitta. It functions on the odic causal plane within the Second World of existence, Antarloka, the creative realm of the intellect. Here the individual organizes information, gains new ideas or new ways of looking at old projects, and uses this knowledge to move vast magnetic force fields around on the Earth’s surface. This plane is primarily subconscious, with occasional influences from the superconscious. It is basically a mental plane where odic forces are manipulated. The intellect is the aspect of the soul you use when you sit and think, memorize or reason. The intellect can also be projected to distant places without leaving the physical body. Through this aspect, the adept can perceive what is there and accumulate knowledge or information.

The first shining forth of man’s individuality comes when he has the conscious control of the intellectual mind. After the practice of internal and external concentration has been perfected and the subconscious processes of meditation have taken hold, the thought forms of the yoga student become distinct and clear. A thought form is made of astral matter. It is odic force and has a color and is created within the consciousness of man. The intellectual mind works through the mechanism of creating, preserving and destroying thought forms. The intellect is the manifestation of a series of well-constructed thought forms. Therefore, the better a person is educated, the more distinctly and clearly does the intellect function.

There are people all over the world today who have only unfolded to the fourth and fifth aspect of man and are guided simply by the habit patterns of the instinctive-intellectual mind. But the governing of the odic force fields in the world as it is today is done through the conscious control of the intellect or the odic causal sheath.

Diplomacy, a kind of love—one not wanting to hurt one’s fellow man, suppression of the emotions of hate and anger—brings about a kind of harmony. These are products of the intellect which when developed into a strong intellectual sheath is able to control the baser emotions through controlled memory, controlled reason and controlled willpower, the three faculties of our ability to govern forces of nature.

Neither overrate nor underrate the intellect, for it fills several important functions in life, the great experience. But remember, the intellect is not the totality of man, it is only, figuratively speaking, the fifth aspect. The intellect is not the full mind, it is only one part, about one-tenth of the mind. The subconscious and the superconscious make up the other nine-tenths.

Opinionated knowledge is a faculty of memory. We study, we listen, we hear and we quote the opinions of others. Opinionated knowledge is stored up in the memory gridwork of the subconscious mind. This provides security, or a platform, for the intellect, making it strong, developing an ego. Therefore, intellect is our ego. The ego separates people from people, nations from nations and the soul from realization of the Self.

“Your real education is the innerversity.” Perhaps you have been thinking that this statement is anti-intellectual, against education. Let’s examine the real meaning, function and purpose of education. Education is not worn. It does not stick to you. It is not your collection of someone else’s opinions. Through education, you stimulate your intellect. Education is that which you bring out from within yourself as a result of your personal interest in the fulfillment of your birth karmas, or prārabdha karmas. Education means exposure to new ideas and old opinions, giving you the tools to explore your own opinions freely, make decisions, research and review them and advance your understanding of God, soul and world. This is education. It is not static. It is as fluid as a river. Or it should be. You have the choice, the ability, to remold your intellect any way you want. The great truths of life are a part of your being. They are within you. They unfold to you slowly as you evolve your comprehension of them. Yet, they are always there within you, waiting to be realized. The only real, permanent education is your unfoldment into the building of the intuitive mind through the control of the intellect.

Since the intellect is made fundamentally of thoughts which are ever creating, preserving and destroying themselves, the control of thoughts builds the seventh aspect of man, the intuitive mind, or actinodic causal sheath, known in Sanskrit as vijñānamaya kośa. Intuition, knowing, awareness and understanding—these are products not of the intellect, but of the intuitive mind. The dedicated student who has applied himself seriously leaves college not with a “know it all” feeling but with an awareness of the limits of the intellect, and profound respect for the vast amount of knowledge that he has yet to discover or unfold. Conceit is a sure sign of insecurity; humility denotes awareness.

Harnessing Instinctiveness

Yes, man has outgrown jealousy and deceit, but how often does he realize this? The newspapers are filled with examples of people who let themselves be controlled by these emotions. When jealousy is felt, one feels that the person they admire has more control over the odic and actinic forces than they do, and in a frantic effort to balance the forces, they devise plans to tear down the odic forces or cease the flow of actinic forces of their prey. Jealousy is treacherous when it turns active and aggressive and makes a person deceitful.

Many people do not feel deceit to be an emotion after it has been existent in their nature long enough to become a habit. Instinctive emotions often become habits when allowed to be indulged in too much, especially these basic and baser ones—fear, anger, jealousy and deceit—all of which are resident in the lower chakras, below the mūlādhāra chakra.

Fear, anger, jealousy and deceit produce an odic aura web of green, gray, black and red, running through and through the organs of the astral body, affecting the organs of the physical body, as well as draining the vital health body of needed odic power. This cuts the actinic flow to a minimum, so that the only life in the body exists in a dull, crafty sparkle in the eyes.

These basic instinctive emotions of the subconscious mind are the substance through which we evolve. As more control of the forces is effected, the colors of the aura lighten and the nature is refined. This refining process is done quickly through discipline on the rāja yoga path to enlightenment. Every effort that you make to curb and control your base, instinctive nature brings you that much closer to your spiritual goal. There is a very true saying, “You are only as actinic as your lowest active odic force.” Those things to which you still react represent your low points and must be turned into actinic understanding before you can dissolve the odic force field that contains them.

Another dimension of the instinctive mind is the habit mind. Habits are built into us from childhood. Some remain conscious and others enter the subconscious. The most difficult to overcome are our habitual identifications with the force fields of our city or state, our country, our race, and even the world itself. The many ramifications of human behavior which pertain to a study of the habit mind could fill many books. Prejudice is one of the negative emotions contained in the habit mind. We may not think of prejudice as being a habit, but it is. Many adults retain very strong habitual prejudices. They do not care for people who do not belong to their particular race, caste or social class.

When there is any sudden shift or disturbance in the race’s instinctive mind, its forces may very suddenly and quickly become aggressive, arousing the lower instinctive emotions. When, however, the race mind is allowed either to run its natural evolutionary course, or it is kept under control and its own sense transcended, then man realizes that he cannot judge himself or another on the basis of race, color, caste, creed or nationality, but rather on the basis of spiritual individuality.

Make a list of all the negative emotions which still reside in your instinctive force field. Should you find that you are dominated by one or more of these emotions, admit it to yourself honestly. This admission, this facing yourself, loosens the hold of the odic force and allows some actinic force to penetrate and dissolve the lower force field of the instinctive emotion you are examining. First step, admission; second step, observation. When, for instance, you become angry, fearful or jealous, observe yourself in this action. Immediately become aware of actinic force. Become an empty being of colorless energy; see the dark auric colors dissolve into a radiance of blue, yellow, lavender and white. You can do this with your present understanding that the actinic force is much higher than the instinctive mind, much greater than the astral or the physical or health bodies.

The Aura and Instinctive Mind

As we begin the study of the fourth aspect of man, let us hold in mind the first three: the physical body as the first aspect, the vital health body as the second aspect and the astral body as the third aspect. The fourth aspect is the instinctive mind and the human aura, the colorful spectrum that registers whatever state of mind the person passes through. The human aura is the reflection of specific evolution. But it registers most clearly the basic reactionary patterns of the instinctive mind.

Within the instinctive mind there are both aggressive and passive odic forces. Some of these are fear, anger, jealousy, deceit, pride, greed—and then there is that form of attachment sometimes called odic or magnetic love, as well as happiness and affection. These emotions are either aggressive or passive, depending upon the motivating factors involved. The motivating factors are desire, a lack of control of odic force, or a type of actinic, superconscious flow which motivates from within to the externals of human consciousness. When this actinic flow is in action, the more refined emotions of compassion, benevolence and joy are experienced. Basically, all of these qualities may be defined as being either odic or actinic. The actinic forces flow from the core of the soul out through the odic force field, and when the actinic forces become diminished, odic forces congeal and rush in to fill the gap.

Fear is passive odic force. Anger is aggressive odic force. The two basic colors of the odic aura are gray and red. Gray is the color of fear, which when it leads to depression or intense fear becomes black. Red is the aura’s registration of anger. In a suppressed state of the instinctive mind, when desire has not been met, the aura registers a reddish black to portray the emotion of lust.

Fear dominates the lives of many people, even when they have no reason for being afraid. It is a protective mechanism of the lower, instinctive nature inherent in every human being; animals, too. The fear of the darkness, for instance, was born in primitive man’s lack of a shelter. Long before he discovered the use of fire or even learned to live in caves, he trembled in the darkness when the sun went down each day, for he knew he was at the mercy of wild animals and other dangers of the night. Even today, the ability of men to fear endows them with a natural caution in the face of the unknown. The gray cast permeates the aura during protective investigation until it is proven that a condition of safety exists.

Today man still retains fear of the darkness. But now he surrounds himself with electric light, symbolizing the new golden age in which his actinic force has begun to penetrate through the instinctive mind, refining this mind just as the glow of electricity refines the vibration of the Earth at night. Among other forms of fear are fear of death, fear of poverty, fear of water and fear of high places.

Anger is also, like fear, an instinctive control, and at one time served its purpose. The onrush of anger served to protect man’s private interests in critical situations by injecting adrenaline into his blood and thus preparing him for defense. But as man evolves closer to his real, actinic being, he discovers that actinic love, understanding, compassion and wisdom are higher qualities than anger. Two more instinctive emotions that motivate the passive and aggressive odic forces into action are jealousy and deceit.

The actinic age is bursting forth upon this planet. Its signposts heralding the spiritual mind of man are portrayed in symbolic happenings upon the Earth, such as the electric light, atomic energy, probes into space, probes into the subconscious, probes into prior lives and dangerously expanding states of awareness stimulated by chemicals. All this and more show us that man has outgrown the lower, instinctive emotions such as jealousy, portrayed in the odic aura around and through the body in the color of dark green, and deceit, portrayed as green-gray.

Life on the Astral Plane

Each night when you read your lesson in this book, realize that therein is your key to entry into the astral school of Himalayan Academy. Going to sleep thinking about the lesson you have been reading, try to wake up slowly in the morning and, with effort, recall what you have been doing during the night on the astral plane.

The astral world is a plane in space, just as the physical world, as we know it in the conscious mind, is a space plane. It is the particular rate of vibration which each of these worlds generates that determines the space plane it occupies. Looking out through the conscious mind, we perceive outer space. Looking into the subconscious mind, we perceive inner space. As the habit patterns of the subconscious mind control many of our conscious-mind happenings on the physical plane, so does the superconscious mind control many of the occurrences of the astral plane through the subconscious astral body. This has to do with the awakening of the subsuperconscious mind. The subsuperconscious mind becomes stronger and stronger, providing we exercise our intuition on the conscious-mind level.

Just as you choose your friends on the physical, conscious plane, so do you attract kindred beings to you in the astral world. By keeping our homes clean and peaceful, by keeping our bodies and clothing fresh and clean, the odic force becomes quite pure and enables us to be more actinically alive. This condition also keeps lower astral people away from us, so long as we do not ourselves enter into an instinctive, astrally odic vibration. The spiritual, actinic vibration keeps all lower astral influences away, just as doors, locks, windows and walls discourage unwanted entrance into buildings.

It is not advisable to admit lower astral entities if you are sensitive to this possibility, for doing so creates a double influx of odic force, whereas the striving of a yoga student is to become actinically superconscious and not to intensify the odic subconscious. Astral entities live in their own world on the astral plane. Possibly you enter this plane at night, too, but during the day we must attend to our conscious-mind activities and take care of our immediate programs, keeping the two worlds apart as distinctly as our sleeping state is separated from the state of being awake.

When the physical body dies, this automatically severs the actinodic silver cord that connects the astral and physical bodies. Then the process of reincarnation and rebirth eventually begins. The physical body remains on the physical plane as a conglomeration of magnetic forces and begins to dissolve into the forces of surrounding nature. The actinic life of the physical body and the vital health body travels up the silver cord as it dissolves and lends a tremendous charge to the astral body. This movement registers on the subconscious astral body all conscious-mind memory patterns of the life just lived, and the person becomes fully conscious on the astral plane.

This tremendous charge of odic and actinic force registering upon the astral body at the time of transition, or death, is what stimulates and gives the initial impulse to the process of reincarnation. This process is largely controlled by the activity of subconscious habit forces. Before the reincarnation cycle fully takes hold, however, the person just departed often quickly recreates the same states of consciousness, the same interests he was accustomed to on the physical plane, and he may go on as usual, meeting his family who visit him during their sleeping hours in their astral bodies. Although the astral body is still bound by the habit patterns of its physical life, it continues to wear away from the moment of transition, and odic force is continuously fed back to the physical plane in an effort to make contact again with family, friends or loved ones through the medium of memory and desire. Another physical body is created, and a reentry into the conscious world is made. The old astral body is dropped off, and the newly generated actinic forces give life to a new physical body and a new health body, along with a new astral body. The new astral body is the sum total of all preceding subconscious experience, and it may be quite mature during the time the physical body is only a child. The odic astral form that was left behind is called an astral shell and eventually corresponds to the corpse of the dead physical body.

Your Astral Counterpart

You will recall from last week the first aspect of man, the physical body, and the second aspect, the vital health body. The third aspect is the astral body. The astral body is almost an exact duplicate of the physical body. However, changes that appear upon the physical body, such as aging, first occur within the structure of the astral body. The astral body is of the subconscious mind, at the level of the memory and reason chakras. It can be easily disturbed and is sometimes called the emotional body. It is made of odic prāṇa and kept intact by the general life flow of actinic prāṇa bursting constantly forth from its atomic structure. Being the exact counterpart of the physical body, the astral body appears like the physical body in size, shape, in every sense except weight. It differs in weight because it is composed of astral odic matter. This matter vibrates at a higher rate of vibration than what we might call physical matter.

Try to picture for yourself the fact that the physical body and astral body are of different vibrations and fit one inside the other, connected by the energy factor, which is the odic prāṇic energy of the vital health body. The astral world vibrates just inside the physical world that we see through our physical eyes and feel with our physical hands. Therefore, it is an exact duplication of everything that exists materially to our physical senses. This is logical to us, knowing and having identified the states of mind, for each state of mind is a form of vibration working together with all the others. The “one mind” is in different forms of vibration, all working together, one aspect within the other.

As we can walk and talk using our conscious mind and our physical body as a vehicle during our waking hours, so can we walk and talk using the duplicate of the physical body, our astral body of the subconscious mind, during the hours we are asleep. When we are in the astral body in the subconscious world, other people are also in that world, and forms of communication take place, as in the physical world.

There is a cord of odic and actinic force which connects the two bodies. It is called the silver cord. Should someone travel too far from his physical body astrally, or have an intense astral experience, an extra supply of energy would be drawn from the vital health body and the physical body, and he would be tired on awakening.

The inner study of you can be complicated, for you are a most complex being of many dimensions. As we embark on this week’s study of the inner you, it may be helpful to have a list which you can refer to now and then to put together the pieces in the right order. The age-old teachings which are captured in this book boldly claim “man” to be more than is usually understood, that being a mortal body with an intellect, small or large. Man, as the mystics understand him, is the immortal soul surrounded by seven aspects. Here follows a summary of the “seven aspects of man” established around the actinic causal body of the soul, ānandamaya kośa, “sheath of bliss:” 1) the physical body, annamaya kośa, “food-made sheath;” 2) the vital health body, prānic sheath, prāṇamaya kośa; 3) the astral body, instinctive aspect of manomaya kośa; 4) the human aura and instinctive mind, prabhāmaṇḍala and manas chitta; 5) the intellect, odic causal sheath, buddhi chitta; 6) the subtle nerve system, nāḍīs and chakras; 7) the intuitive mind, actinodic causal sheath, vijñānamaya kośa, “sheath of cognition.”

Just as we have school, entertainment, discussions and meetings with friends in the conscious mind on the physical plane, so do we go to school, enjoy entertainment, discuss problems and meet and talk with friends on the astral plane. And as the subconscious mind receives impressions from the conscious mind during our waking hours, so does the conscious mind receive impressions from the subconscious mind as we go through experience during our sleeping hours.

In the same way, people have seen with the eyes of their astral body, while simultaneously conscious through their physical eyes, people on the astral plane. Similarly, those who are traveling on the astral plane can see people on the physical plane, as they look out through the odic astral force field into the gross conscious-mind world. Travel is much faster on the astral plane, as it is done through desire, and the astral body is a much more refined rate of vibration than is the physical body, which functions close to the time sequence as we know it.