Table Of ContentA jna C h a
Yoga Publications Trust, Munger, Bihar, India
Ajna Chakra
With kind regards, and prem
Ajna Chakra
Rishi Nityabodhananda
Yoga Publications Trust, Munger, Bihar, India
- -
Dedication
In humility we offer this dedication to
Swami Sivananda Saraswati, who initiated
Swami Satyananda Saraswati into the secrets of yoga.
Contents
Prologue ix
Introduction 1
1. Science is Catching Up 5
2. Science and Religion 18
3. Philosophical Background 27
4. The Guru Chakra 39
5. Kundalini Yoga in Brief 47
6. Ajna Chakra in the Tantras 58
7. Psycho-Physiological Aspects 63
8. Psychic and Mystic Concepts 76
9. Yoga Practices for Awakening Ajna Chakra 89
Appendix
Sat Chakra Nirupanam 108
Bibliography 134
Glossary 136
vii
Prologue
Karmas are what we have done, do and will do, and life is
an endless series of karmas. We move through life acting out
our karmas in the hope that life will improve. Life is never
perfect and our hopes are for the future. We collect ideas to
relieve our plight and embark on a path in the hope that we
can either solve our problems or escape into a new domain
free from the trammels of present day life. Just look at what
we are doing, endlessly making more and more plans for the
future to relieve our plight. Even when we have the best
available of everything, still we make plans to escape from
the agony of life. The agony is within and there is a root
cause. The great thirteenth century Sufi poet, Rumi, calls it
the lament: the lament of the reed flute plucked from the
riverbed of reeds; it laments with the agony of being separated
from its source, and the player of this reed flute also laments
with his separation from his source.
And what is this source from which we come? Well it
seems we don’t know, or rather we have forgotten. According
to our great traditions and teachings, we were once part of
that source and it was a perfect seamless consciousness.
According to Sufi traditions it is pure love. The love that is so
pure that there are no barriers or distinctions between the
lover and the beloved. It is all one; and just as the drop in the
ocean is a part of the ocean and at the same time is the whole
ocean, in the same way our origins are that drop, a part of
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the whole, and this is the ecstatic state of being. It is pure, it
is boundless, it is unchanging and it is beyond description,
yet its expression is an inspiration to ecstasy, a transport to
transcendental bliss.
We know that the path is from the particular to the
general, from worldly actions to inner truth, but where is this
path? Is it just in the mantra and the meditation? Is it just in
the karma yoga and the kirtan? After these things don’t we
remain with the same understandings and identifications as
before? We read and we know everything, yet we have learnt
that hope in external efforts is bound to end with dis
appointment. The successful man flying first class to Los
Angeles is driven by the will to escape his longing to reunite
and the subsistence farmer is driven by the same longing.
We suppress our original lament. The lament is the sorrowful
tune doled out in our hearts, for we have separated from our
source just like the reed flute that plays its mournful tune.
Every church, synagogue, mosque, gurudwara and temple
has but one altar, an altar to that one perfection, and everyone
bom into this world of hope takes a position or stand either
acknowledging or denying its validity. Yet who has come
close to it through an intellectual analysis? This draws us
into a debate on faith and conviction. Faith surely holds the
upper hand, the hand of experienced knowledge, knowledge
gained not by intellectual conclusion but by a truth, a vision
or an experience. Then we, the knower of that experience,
know what is true. When a truth is so obviously definite, then
faith is bom and a conviction is also. Seeing the truth, or
seeing the dawning of an idea which is so obviously and
definitely true because it has been seen in the form of spiritual
experience, is seeing through the eye of intuition, ajna chakra.
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