The Vedas are a living body of Knowledge.
The body is a living Veda.
The Vedas are the living body of knowledge inspired by the seers of Truth who saw in this world, a secret all-knowing wisdom and occult almighty Power at work. It is living in the sense that, unlike a man-made mental system of thought or ethics, it can be renewed in contemporary experience, stated in contemporary terms and even expanded into a many-sided richness. Of course, the bedrock or the basic foundation of the Vedas is that there is a Conscious-Force that works in the depths of creation, hidden by our surface view of life. In creation it works completely hidden from sight acting through a blind intuition of which the animal and plant forms are themselves unaware. It is there submerged in the clod and the stone, arranging the indeterminate electrical horde into ordered Space and rhythms of Time. In man it begins to emerge, to recover or rediscover something of itself. This is the great marvel of man, his exceptional privilege. The real struggle of life is not the struggle for survival, but the struggle for the emergence of this secret Wisdom and Truth. Survival is only a first condition, not the last. If that were not so, then it is doubtful if evolution would have crossed the threshold of the first micro-organisms that can still outsmart man and his machines; nay it would not have taken even the first steps towards life emerging out of rocks and minerals. The human body, in this view, has to be seen as a tool of the Almighty Wisdom that works in the heart of creation concealed behind the surface of life. Man can recover this Wisdom, first in his inner being and then in his outer life. His body is given to him for this purpose, for the recovery and the unfolding of this greatness. The unwritten pages of the Vedic text must be written in his body just as they exist in the spiritual ether.
The Vedas reveal to us that this life is an evolutionary struggle, not just between one form of life and another (the horizontal view of traditional science), but between the forces of darkness and light (the ascending view of Vedanta). In man, this struggle has reached its climax or rather a crucial turning-point. In the animal creation, there is simply a blind habitual movement, a subjection to instincts and impulse. In man, this begins to be replaced with something like a reflection, a referral and appeal to thought before action flows out through us. This is the first glimmer of light that begins to dawn in us, the light of reason, the birth of conscious thought. With the birth of conscious thought and the power to reflect and introspect, man can assist the evolutionary struggle. The Vedic lore speaks of some human beings who joined the ranks of the gods to assist them in their battle against the dark and titanic powers. Indeed man can evolve to the stature of the gods, he can become, through his thoughts and deeds, a luminous shaft of light, a power of faith and love, a bringer of hope and joy, a catalyst of a great revolution or a much needed change. This is his destiny and the secret of achieving this is also enclosed in his body as a cryptic script. His body itself is a symbol. Unlike his predecessors, man neither crawls nor runs on his fours. He can neither swim like a fish does nor fly as a bird, but his body stands upright and his eyes face forward and not sideways. His vision of the world is rainbow-hued and he is able to look into the distant horizon as well as upward. The early stir of sounds has taken in him the form of speech and thought through which he can fly higher than any bird can even dream of and dive deeper than any creature of the sea. His hands are expressive of the capacity to hold and grasp, not just objects and things but also concepts and ideas that his hands must translate into practical realities of the earth-life through the use of pen and equipment that life would offer to his awakened intelligence. His feet help him to stand erect. All the five senses refer their data to the brain, where lies his seat of consciousness, his station from where he is meant to control and act. But his true centre, the point of electrical neutrality, lies in the heart where hides the mystery of mysteries, the flame of the Vedic seers, the altar where life offers the sacrifice of his days and nights.
Conscious choices
In fact all education is a way of breaking certain habits of the past and rebuilding new ones that can be good and useful for adaptation and evolution. We inherit certain processes and patterns from our past evolution. These become ingrained in our system as habitual mechanisms which were and are very useful to animal life-forms but have become counter-productive at a human stage. Let’s take the example of a typical stress response. It is designed to prepare the body for fight or flight. Faced with any stress, the animal body reacts spontaneously and automatically with the release of chemicals that activate the muscles and redirect blood to organs in ways that would be useful to undertake the flight or fight. The heart beats faster, the brain and the muscles fill with blood, while the skin becomes pale as blood is redirected. Our breath becomes heavy to draw more oxygen, the sphincters contract, there is a shot of adrenaline from within the body leading to heightened alertness, glucose is rapidly transferred to the blood as it is the energy provider. The whole body is in a state of heightened activity ready to act at any moment. This remains for a while and once the danger is passed, the response relaxes. If stress continues for long then another set of hormones come into play, the foremost of them being steroids. Now this is very useful in the animal world, where the danger and response are largely physical and usually short-lived. However, with the advent and development of mind in man, new situations arise that are very different from the animal world. In addition, new possibilities of intervention also begin to take shape. Thus, human beings can get stressed by the mere anticipation of a distant event that is still only in the realm of a remote possibility. They harbour grudges and make friends and foes for life, leading to an escalation of stress over time. Many of these stresses cannot be solved simply by an increased blood-flow to the heart and the muscles. We need to think and plan and act, find solutions through mental processes rather than pure physical ones. Nevertheless the atavistic reactions continue just as in the animal world. Even anticipatory stress leads to a heightened state of alarm, an increase in blood glucose, loss of sleep leading to diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes mellitus, cardiac arrhythmias, mental imbalance and all the rest. Thus the highly beneficial response of the animal world becomes a source of problem and disease in the human world. It is in this sense that we can truly say that disease is indeed an evolutionary challenge. Indeed, we can see today how certain meditative practices have come into mainstream modern medicine due to such stress disorders. Passing through the doors of a crisis that he alone can face, thanks to his mind, man discovers new ways and modes of life, again thanks to his mind!
Capacities of the body
Let’s take another example. Hypertension or high blood pressure! Now it is being recognised as a lifestyle disorder. So we already have two levels of intervention, one at the outer level through medication and supplements. Another at the lifestyle that is or was unhealthy, say a lack of exercise and bad dietary habits. So we can try to correct that and it helps. But then, if we take one more step we discover that the lack of exercise and unhealthy dietary habits are due to something more intrinsic in the body and mind, in the constitution itself. It may be a general lethargy, inertia or tamas in the system or perhaps an excessive emotionality that satisfies itself through an indulgence in food and sleep. In fact it may be a number of things alone or together. So until we correct these underlying problems we remain still prone to illness. We need to take our constitution into account when we look at the phenomenon of illness. That is how holistic systems of medicine work. They do not simply treat the symptoms but the deeper pattern. What they lack however is this ability to look beyond the existing pattern that we regard today as normal.
Towards the Light
Knowledge of the ancients
But there is something still greater. It is the evolutionary aspect of man. Modern medicine hardly takes note of it. The human body has its own innate resources that help it adapt to challenges and threats, and to evolve through them. But in man this evolution takes a double or even a triple aspect. There is of course the biological and the physical side of evolution. But there is also, in human beings this other psychological and subjective side. The challenges that human beings face are not only from without but also from within. We grow not only in terms of developing new dendrites and neuronal connections or the alteration of chemistry to tackle new learning but also new attitudes. Nay, we can go still deeper, evolve still further. The human body has within it certain occult doors through which it is inwardly connected to other, now hidden realms that lie beyond the range of our present sense organisation. Within the recesses of our brain, between the gaps of our nerves lie time-loops and trap-holes through which we can project into other dimensions and experience other realms and states of consciousness. Modern neuropsychology and neurobiology has touched some of these doors but it does not know how to enter through them. In modern quantum physics too man has discovered certain worm-holes through which our consciousness can slip into other dimensions that takes us swiftly through gaps of time, but we know not how exactly to manipulate them to actually undertake time-travel. There are junction points where the gross melts into the subtle and reorganises itself. There are bridges thrown across from this side, — the material to the non-material realms where there is another substance-energy combination, another time-space continuum than what we are presently aware of. The body is merely a symbol erected in three-dimensional space of something that exists in the fourth dimension. It is a little shadow cast against the backdrop of material nature from a Light whose source is within us but in another dimension. Man can find that Light, live and grow by it, even remake his entire world, his self-regard and world-view. But for that he must break free from the trap of the sensory world and take an inward turn, a feat of which only humans seem to be capable.
Sheaths of the soul
A great experiment
“More and more souls shall enter into light,
Minds lit, inspired, the occult summoner hear
And lives blaze with a sudden inner flame
And hearts grow enamoured of divine delight
And human wills tune to the divine will,
These separate selves the Spirit’s oneness feel,
These senses of heavenly sense grow capable,
The flesh and nerves of a strange ethereal joy
And mortal bodies of immortality.
A divine force shall flow through tissue and cell
And take the charge of breath and speech and act
And all the thoughts shall be a glow of suns
And every feeling a celestial thrill.
Often a lustrous inner dawn shall come
Lighting the chambers of the slumbering mind;
A sudden bliss shall run through every limb
And Nature with a mightier Presence fill.
Thus shall the earth open to divinity
And common natures feel the wide uplift,
Illumine common acts with the Spirit’s ray
And meet the deity in common things.
Nature shall live to manifest secret God,
The Spirit shall take up the human play,
This earthly life become the life divine (1).”
