Control of The Prāṇas
A great flow of prāṇa is beginning to occur among the families of our congregation worldwide because each one has decided to discipline himself or herself and the children to perform sādhana. That brings the prāṇa under control. If the prāṇa is not under the control of the individual, it is controlled by other individuals. The negative control of prāṇa is a control, and positive control of prāṇa is a control. That’s why we say, “Seek good company,” because if you can’t control your prāṇa, other people who do control their prāṇas can help you. The group helps the individual and the individual helps the group. If you mix with bad company, then the prāṇas begin to get disturbed. Once that happens, your energies are like a team of horses out of control. It takes a lot of skill and strength on the part of the individual to get those prāṇas back under control.
The control of prāṇa is equally important on the inner planes. When you leave the physical body, you are in your astral body, your subtle body. It is not made of flesh and bones like your physical body—as the Buddhists say, “thirty-two kinds of dirt wrapped up in skin.” The astral body is made of prāṇa. It floats. It can fly. It’s guided by your mind, which is composed of more rarefied prāṇa, actinic energy. Wherever you want to go, you’ll be there immediately. And, of course, you do this in your sleep, in your dreams and after death. Many of you have had astral experiences and can testify how quickly you can move here and there when your astral body is detached from the physical body. However, if you don’t have control of your prāṇa, you don’t have control of your astral body. Then where do you go when you drop off your physical body at death? You are magnetized to desires, uncontrollably magnetized to fulfilling unfulfilled desires. You are magnetized to groups of people who are fulfilling similar unfulfilled desires, and generally your consciousness goes down into lower chakras. Only in controlling your astral body do you have conscious control of your soul body, which is, of course, living within the astral body and resonating to the energy of the higher chakras.
My satguru, Siva Yogaswami, spoke of Śaivism as the sādhana mārga, “the path of striving,” explaining that it is a religion not only to be studied but also to be lived. “See God everywhere. This is practice. First do it intellectually. Then you will know it.” He taught that much knowledge comes through learning to interpret and understand the experiences of life. To avoid the sādhana mārga is to avoid understanding the challenges of life. We must not fail to realize that each challenge is brought to us by our own actions of the past. Yes, our actions in the past have generated our life’s experiences today. All Hindus accept karma and reincarnation intellectually, but the concepts are not active in their lives until they accept the responsibilities of their own actions and the experiences that follow. In doing so, no blame can fall upon another. It is all our own doing. This is the sādhana mārga—the path to perfection.
The sādhana mārga leads us into the yoga pāda quite naturally. But people don’t study yoga. They are not taught yoga. They are taught sādhana, and if they don’t perform it themselves—and no one can do it for them—they will never have a grip strong enough over their instinctive mind and intellectual mind to come onto the yoga mārga, no matter how much they know about yoga. So, we don’t learn yoga. We mature into it. We don’t learn meditation. We awaken into it. You can teach meditation, you can teach yoga, but it’s all just words unless the individual is mature and awake on the inside.
To be awake on the inside means waking up early in the morning. You woke up early this morning. That may have been difficult. But you got the body up, you got the emotions up, you got the mind up, and your instinctive mind did not want to do all that. Did it? No! Spiritual life is a twenty-four-hour-a-day vigil, as all my close devotees are realizing who have taken the vrata of 365 Nandinātha Sūtras. It means going to bed at night early so you can get up in the morning early. It means studying the teachings before you go to bed so that you can go into the inner planes in absolute control. It means in the morning reading from my trilogy, Dancing with Śiva, Living with Śiva and Merging with Śiva, to prepare yourself to face the day, to be a strong person and move the forces of the world.
NANDINATHA SŪTRA 90: FAMILY TOGETHERNESS
Each of Śiva’s devotees who is a husband spends time with his wife and children daily. Monday is a family evening at home. One night monthly is devoted to the wife alone in an activity of her choice. Aum Namaḥ Śivāya.