The Two Lilas and the Endless Worlds

 

Your life and your dreams are both made of stories. You won't forget this if you immerse yourself in one of the greatest storybooks ever made. The earliest version of the Yogavasistha was probably compiled in the seventh century. Its original title was the Mokshapaya, or Way of Release. Authorship has been attributed to the sage Valmiki, also credited with producing the epic Ramayana. The voice we hear is that of another sage, Vasistha. He takes on the task of restoring the spirits and the will to action of the boy prince Rama of Ayodhya. Hence the full title of the text, The great story of Rama as told by the sage Vasistha in order to expound his philosophy of Yoga. Rama’s services are urgently required to defend gods and humans against an army of demons, but he has slumped into lethargy and despair. 
    Rama asks the sage, “What is the point and purpose of this useless existence?” The whole dialogue that follows - filling more than 27,000 verses and powered by sixty-four extraordinary stories - is a response to that question. Vasistha charts the path to release from vasanas, the habitual tendencies and karmic traces that hold the soul in bondage to the wheel of repetition. He describes the way of ascension through higher worlds to the realm of pure consciousness. But this is not only a guide to moksha, or liberation. It is a call to re-engagement with the world, to live the bigger story.
    Vasistha is my kind of teacher. He offers real philosophy, deep as Advaita Vedanta or the Upanishads, but he does not teach through admonishment or abstraction; he teaches by telling really good stories. 
    One of his core teachings is that "this universe is but a long dream...There is no real difference between the waking state of reality and the dream state. What is real in one is unreal in the other - hence, these states are essentially of the same nature." [1]
     Beyond other systems of yoga, the yoga of Vasistha hinges on seeing the world as a dream. [2] In order to be truly awake, one must fully understand sleep and dream. The world appears and disappears, realities come and go like dream states.
    Make that worlds. There are countless worlds, including universes concealed inside stones or subatomic particles. "In every atom there are worlds within worlds." The Sanskrit term is jagadanantya, which literally means "the endlessness of worlds".[3] Hugh Everett III might want to join the conversation at thsi point; he was the atheist proponent of the Many Worlds Interpretation in quantum mechanics which holds that the universe is constantly splitting into parallel versions.
    The sage continues: "No one can count the number of universes (and consequent creations) that are arising at this minute from the Supreme Being. The mind that humans possess is ever fluctuating and gives rise to all things in these visible worlds. This external appearance which exists as a reality is a creation of human desires. It is as unreal as a goblin shown to terrify children. This world is as unstable as a stool made of banana leaves.”
    The longest story in the Yogavasistha, and one of the most wildly entertaining, is the tale of Lila, or rather The Two Lilas. Queen Lila, fearing the death of her beloved husband, King Padma, prays to the goddess Sarasvati that they should not be separated. When the goddess appears after the death of the king, she shows Lila how to preserve his body while traveling to find his soul essence in different realms. Lila is excited though incredulous when the goddess tells her than among other life experiences she and her husband have shared is the partnership of Visastha - no less - and his wife in a universe within a tiny space. How can Lila know this for sure? The goddess explains that she can go there and see for herself. But for this kind of travel, Lila must affirm to herself, “I shall leave my body here and take a body of light. With that body, like the scent of incense, I shall go to the house of the holy man." 
    Once Lila learns to drop her physical body and travel in a subtle body, she embarks on a series of fantastic journeys, involving parallel lives, reincarnation, mind-created worlds and the ascent to pure consciousness beyond the illusions of form. Lila and Sarasvati "roamed freely in their wisdom bodies. Though it seemed that they had traveled millions of miles in space, they were still in the same 'room' but on another plane of consciousness." 
   They fly to the top of Mount Meru, they see spaceships ang gods and celestial dancers and the abode of the creator. In a marvelous skirl of humor, the narrator tells us "like a couple of mosquitoes they roamed all these planes."
    In a scene made for big-screen sci fantasy, Lila meets her double - also a queen, in another life story - in a palace where they watch a futuristic battle. Rockets burst into a thousand warheads and gunships like elephants rain fire from the sky. "What looked like elephants had been propelled into the air from the battlefield and they were raining fire on the city." It seems a ninth century author is able to foresee twenty-first century battles or Star Wars scenarios from the ancient future. In this world at war King Padma is embodied as another king, Viduratha, who will be slain in battle because he has set his mind on liberation, not victory. “Whatever vision arises within one’s self is immediately experienced." 
    Lila wants to know why there is an exact double of herself in this scene. They can see and interact with each other though others may see only one of therm. Sarasvati explains that it was the longing of her deceased husband, Padma, that generated Lila’s double in this world where Padma has been reborn as Viduratha. “Due to excessive love towards you your husband Padma thought, at the moment of death, of enjoying your company without being ever separated. Accordingly he was able to get you here. Whatever is thought of by one at the time of his agonizing death, that will be realized by him afterwards."
    We are given a fascinating description of soul transfer, or body swapping. After the death of Viduratha, Sarasvati puts his jiva - his soul - into the embalmed corpse of the first Lila’s dead husband, Padma.

             Through the nose

Saraswati, removed the grip she had on the jiva of Viduratha which therefore entered into the nasal orifice of Padma's body in the form of prana and permeated the whole parched up body. Whereupon blood began to circulate freely throughout and the deceased king woke up, rubbing his eyes. Padma woke up and asked who they were.

     Lila is eventually able to remember eight hundred of her past lives and step in and out of lives that her parallel selves are living beyond the wheel of time.
     We are given hints as to the nature of the true life teacher. Sarasvati tells Lila she is more than a goddess; she is higher consciousness. Beyond the play of reality and illusion, waking and dreaming, there is the limitless nondual field of pure consciousness. This is the only reality. Both liberation and enlightened reengagement with the world require the jiva to understand this fully.
     Which brings us to Vasistha's most important teaching You must transcend the world but then return and embrace it. The aim is to become the jivanmukta, the living liberated being, who can engage with the world without being entangled with it. Lila means play. Beyond the gloom of the world, seek the divine play. If life is a dream, grow your ability to change the dream or create a new one.
     Vasistha’s purpose in telling stories to Rama is not only to awaken him to the fluid interplay of reality and illusion, and the conditions for moksha (liberation) but to help him acquire the non-attachment that will enable him to act in the world without succumbing to its entrapments “doing yet not doing what has to be done” The stories show that our lives are shaped by the mind’s capacity to create and sustain reality. Existence is a dreamlike projection of consciousness. Boundaries between waking life, dreams, past and future lives, and parallel realities are fluid.
     So, reality is not as fixed as we tend to tell ourselves. When we recognize that much of what we accept as real is a mental construct, we can change the construct.
     If we see life and death as illusions, perhaps we can bring more clarity and courage to our actions. Why fear death? And why get stuck in the conditions of a single life experience? We are many. Lila identified eight hundred incarnations before she stopped counting. How many doubles and counterparts does any one of us have, whether as aspects of our present personality or transpersonal counterparts in different times or dimensions?
    We are led to assume that all of this will bring Rama into the field to fight the demons. Be in the world not of it. Knowing that the world is an illusion does not mean withdrawing from it. We want to navigate with awareness and to live with awareness and non-attachment, lucid in the dream of life, taking part in life’s play while remembering that it is a playground. 
     Vasistha teaches us that will (paurusa) can overcome fate (daiva) when exerted by a mind that has awakened. “Those who have removed the veil from reality can imagine things so precisely that those mental perceptions are actually experienced.” Certain people, of whom Vasishtha is one, have the power of making their dreams, become physical objects- objects that did not existed until a powerful dreamer dreamed them into reality. [4] Don't forget

Your real life is a dream and the dream is real

Your real life is an illusion and the illusion is real

 

CODA: A Crown Prince Recommends a Book of Stories to Take You Beyond This World

In the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin is a Persian translation of the Yogavasistha with 41 miniature paintings, probably commissioned by the first Mughal emperor Akbar and completed under the patronage of his son and successor Jahangir. There is a fascinating note in Jahangir's own hand in the margin of folio 1b. A recent translator gives us this version:

"God is great! - This book Ğög Bäsistha [sic] which belongs to the stories of the ancients, (and) which I translated in the time when I was crown-prince ...is a very good book. Whenever somebody hears it with the ear of understanding, and if he considers only one percent of it, it is surely to be hoped that he will make the bațin ['what is beyond this world'] his destination by the instrument of the zahir ['what belongs to the apparent world']" [5]

From his time as crown prince, Jahangiir not only claims full credit for the translation but pierces to the main intent of this astonishing Hindu text, where philosophy is animated by amazing tales of doubles, parallel worlds and oneiric adventures. The yoga of Vasistha leads to awakening to ultimate reality "beyond this world" through the magic of story - and then guides the hearer to act in the world with the clarity and courage of non-attachment. To hear or read just one of Vasistha's stories, it's been said, is to become enlightened.

 

References: 

1. Swami Venkatesananda. Vasistha’s Yoga. (Albany NY: SUNY Press 1993) p. 71. Unless otherwise mentioned, all quotations from the Yogavasistha in this essay are from this 800-page abridgment.

2. Christopher Key Chapple gives an elegant summary of the seven states in Vasistha’s yoga: “Vasiṣṭha’s sevenfold Yoga begins with restraint from activity (nivṛtti) leading to deep thinking (vicāraṇa) and non-attachment (asaṃsaṅga). After these three preliminaries Vasiṣṭha proclaims that in the fourth state one sees the entire world as if it were a dream. For Vasiṣṭha, this process of dissolution holds great lessons. Is the world real? According to Vasiṣṭha, the answer is a resounding no. Once one sees through the fixity of any given circumstance. In the fifth Yoga, one can descend (or ascend) into the realm of an experience of non-duality, wherein one operates as if in a state of deep sleep, translucent and transparent (advaita suṣupta). This catapults the individual into a state of true freedom (jīvan mukta), preparing one for the seventh Yoga, one’s final release from the body (videha mukta) at the time of death. Unlike any of the other Yoga systems, the Yogavāsiṣṭha process hinges on seeing the world as a dream.” Christopher Key Chapple.  “Worlds of Dream in the Yogavāsiṣṭha: Virtual and Virtuous Realities” Embodied Philosophy 2020 

3. Garth Bregman. “The Existence of an Endless Number of Worlds Jagadānantya in Mokṣopāya and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics” in  Christopher Key Chapple and Arindam Chakrabarti (eds) Engaged Emancipation: Mind, Morals, and Make-Believe in the Moksopāya (Yogavāsistha) (Albany: SUNY Press, 2015) p.97.

4. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty.“The Dream Narrative and the Indian Doctrine of Illusion in Daedalus  vol. 111, no. 3 (Summer, 1982),p.102

5. Heike Franke. “Akbar's Yogavāsiştha in the Chester Beatty Library” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 161(2) (January 2011) 359-375

 

Illustration: Two Lilas with the Goddess. RM + AI

 

A Yogi Learns about Astral Worlds from his Dead Guru

 

One of the most valuable pieces of life counsel in Autobiography of a Yogi comes from the author's guru, Sri Yukteswar: “Forget the past. The past lives of all men are dark with many shames. Human conduct is ever unreliable until anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now.” This is said to have been Paramahansa Yogananda's favorite passage in his book.

Though his whole life practice had prepared him for death, Sri Yukteswar was nervous as the moment approached. While talking to Yogananda about his impending death, the guru "trembled like a frightened child". The great yoga teacher Patanjali wrote that "attachment to bodily residence, springing up of its own nature, is present in slight degree even in great saints." Before his last days, Sri Yukteswar, in similar vein, often compared a human approaching death to a "long-caged bird" that "hesitates to leave its accustomed home when the door is opened."

After burying his master, Yogananda grieved and meditated in the Regent hotel, a classic pile in the city of Bombay, now called Mumbai. One afternoon he saw an immense golden glow rise above the buildings across the street. It took the form of Lord Krishma.

A week later, sitting on his bed on the third floor of the hotel at three o'clock in the afternoon on June 19, 1936, Yogananda saw a golden light flower inside the room. In this "beatific light" Yogananda found his room transformed into "a strange world". Sri Yukteswar, appeared before him in "flesh and blood form". His guru assured him, "I am in truth resurrected-not on earth but on an astral planet."

Yukteswar proceeded to give a detailed account of the geography and physics of the astral worlds, the causal realm beyond the astral, and the higher realm where forms dissolve into a sea of light. This fills chapter 43 of Autobiography of a Yogi, and is of perennial interest. Some key revelations:

* "Astral beings dematerialize or materialize their forms at will. All astral beings are free to assume any form, and can easily commune together."

* "The recently physically disembodied being arrives in an astral family through invitation, drawn by similar mental and spiritual tendencies."

* "The span of life in the astral world is much longer than on earth. A normal advanced astral being's average life period is from five hundred to one thousand years,." 

* There are multitudes of astral realms, from astral prisons where the evil dead are confined to gated communities for the holy evolved like the one where Yukteswar said he had taken up residence. The residency status of the population of the astral worlds ranges from "temporary visitor" - someone who has not worked off earthly karma and will need to go through reincarnation, maybe again and again and again - to "long-term resident", who will eventually be able to doff their astral body and ascend to a home on the higher causal plane - to "savior", someone not obliged to remain on the astral (and not required to reincarnate on earth) who stays to help others on this level.  

* Astral beings "have the privilege of costuming themselves at will with new, colorful, astrally materialized bodies. Just as worldly men don new array for gala events, so astral beings find occasions to bedeck themselves in specially designed forms."

* "Friends of other lives easily recognize one another in the astral world."

* "The intuition of astral beings pierces through the veil and observes human activities on earth, but man cannot view the astral world unless his sixth sense is somewhat developed."

* "The advanced beings on Hiranyaloka [a higher astral realm] remain mostly awake in ecstasy during the long astral day and night, helping to work out intricate problems of cosmic government and the redemption of prodigal sons, earthbound souls. When the Hiranyaloka beings sleep, they have occasional dreamlike astral visions."

* "The undeveloped man must undergo countless earthly and astral and causal incarnations in order to emerge from his three bodies. A master who achieves this final freedom may elect to return to earth as a prophet to bring other human beings back to God, or like myself he may choose to reside in the astral cosmos."

Picture: "Astral Seminar in Bombay" (c) Robert Moss

Dion Fortune's psychic detective

In his nursing home, Dr. Taverner reaches the parts that physicians and psychiatrists cannot reach. A shaman in country tweeds and a psychic Sherlock Holmes, Taverner deals with complaints that result from psychic attack, soul theft, energy vampires and diseases of the group mind. His creator, Dion Fortune (born Violet Firth) knew her stuff.     
    The founder of her own esoteric school, which came to be known as the Society of the Inner Light, Dion Fortune (1890-1946) modeled the hero of the stories collected in The Secrets of Dr Taverner on one of her own early mentors, an extraordinary Anglo-Irish magus named Theodore Moriarty. Some of the stories were first published in the Royal Magazine in 1922, a year before Moriarty's death. Remarkably, the illustrator made the fictional Dr Taverner look very much like Moriarty, though the artist had never seen a picture of Moriarty or even heard a description.
     Jelkes, the bookseller in Dion Fortune's novel The Goat-Foot God, says that "writers will put things into a novel that they daren't put in sober prose." Dion herself said that while books of hers like The Mystical Qabalah give the theory of high magic and spiritual reality, "the novels give the practice."
   There are five of those novels, and some of them have left a profound mark on esoteric and neo-pagan practice. The Sea Priestess contains a ritual for Drawing Down the Moon that has been much-borrowed in ceremonial work, not always with attribution. But of all her fiction, it is the stories of Dr Taverner to which I return again and again. I have asked some of my advanced classes to read several of these stories as the basis for focused discussion and investigation of such phenomena as the nature of the energy bodies, past-life connections, psychic defense and astral repercussion.
    Fortune is rather direct about what she is doing in The Secrets of Dr Taverner. She describes her tales as "studies in little-known aspects of psychology put in the form of fiction because, if published as a serious contribution to science, they would have no chance of a hearing." She wants it understood that her stories are based on fact. Her characters are mostly composites, but they are based on actual people and situations. She states that the first of the stories she completed, the tale of a hungry ghost attached to a living person that she titled "Blood-Lust", is "literally true". Noting that she was one of the first British students of psychoanalysis, she expressed the hope that the Taverner stories would be received as "a serious study in the psychology of ultra-consciousness."
     In my opinion, she succeeded beyond her ambition. The Taverner stories are both gripping and entertaining, and a valuable source of practical guidance on psychic protection and spiritual cleansing and many other facets of psychic well-being that are missed in our standard approach to healthcare and therapy. In its fictional wrapping, The Secrets of Dr Taverner is a practitioner's casebook, of the greatest value to subsequent practitioners. It is perhaps the most accessible of all Dion Fortune's works for the contemporary reader.
     Her narrator is a medical doctor named Rhodes, a supposed ingénu in regard to psychic phenomena and esoteric techniques. This makes it easy for Fortune to draw the veil over certain procedures. But enough shows through to make the story collection a kind of manual, especially when read together with Fortune's well-known later (nonfiction) work Psychic Self-Defence.
    She dramatizes key principles of her work, including these, as expressed in Psychic Self-Defence:

• "The driving forces of the universe, the framework upon which it is built up in all its parts, belong to another phase of manifestation than our physical plane, having other dimensions than the three to which we are habituated, and perceived by other modes of consciousness than those to which we are accustomed."
• "We live in the midst of invisible forces whose effects alone we perceive. We move among invisible forms whose actions we very often do not perceive at all, though we may be profoundly affected by them." 

One of the scariest Taverner stories is titled "Blood-Lust". The author claims that this is nonfiction fiction: that it is based on true events, exactly described, and that only the names have been changed.

    Captain Craigie, back from war, starts killing for blood. He starts by raiding chicken coops and works his way up to sheep. Along the way, he can't help trying to sink his teeth into his fiancee's neck. He tells Dr Taverner that he suffered "shell-shock" in the trenches. This was a familiar term in the World War I era; today we are more likely to speak of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). But in this case, "shell-shock" seems an exact description. Captain Craigie was blown out of a trench.
    The source of the problem becomes literally visible when people start seeing the apparition of a German soldier in a flat cap and field-gray uniform. This, we learn, is the etheric or dense energy body of a dead enemy soldier who has attached himself to the unfortunate Craigie, seeking to feed his "vitality hunger" (as Taverner diagnoses his condition) through his living host.
    Dr Taverner's solution involves baiting a trap, by nicking the neck of the captain's girlfriend. While Craigie is physically restrained, the hungry ghost of the German soldier leaves his body to seek the fresh blood. Taverner stands between the ghost and its host and forces it into "a psychic killing-pen" in the form of a triangle.
    Dion Fortune is discreet about what happens next. Taverner makes "a Sign and a Sound". The gray etheric form spins into a whirling spiral and disintegrates. Captain Craigie is released from the hungry ghost that was riding him,
    Dr Taverner pronounces that the source of the problem was "a corpse who was insufficiently dead."
    While some parts of the plot summary may sound like the script for one of those creaky old Hammer horror flicks, the story touches on themes of perennial importance, including the plight of veterans of foreign wars yesterday, today and tomorrow, who may be carrying unwanted energies of the dead.
     One of Dr Taverner's lessons, in this story, is that we have more than one physical body. To be specific: 

We have two physical bodies...the dense material one...and the subtle etheric one, which inhabits it, and acts as the medium of the life forces, whose functioning would explain a great deal if science would only condescend to investigate it.


By my observation, this is exactly correct. Failure to understand the nature of the etheric body and its survival of physical death confuses our relations with the dead and delays or prevents recognition of the need for spiritual cleansing and releasing in healing cases of PTSD, addiction and other disorders.
     Dr Taverner instructs that "it is possible to keep the etheric body together almost indefinitely if a supply of vitality is available". In "Blood-Lust", the supply of vital energy comes through "a human feeding bottle" that feeds on others in an effort to replenish itself.
     How common is the problem? Well, literal vampirism and blood-drinking may be rare (despite the contemporary vampire fad) but energy vampirism has never been uncommon, alas. Dr Taverner, the magician, alludes to dark side magical practices by those who seek to avoid the second death (of the etheric body) by forming "a connection with the subconscious mind of some other soul that still has a body." He cautions that "the lower type of medium" is especially vulnerable to this type of parasitism. But "higher" types can be vulnerable if in a weakened or absent condition, as when Captain Craigie was blown out of his trench, and (for a period) out of his body.
     Who ya gonna call, if you don't have a Dr Taverner down the street? Well, I give rather specific guidance on spiritual release, including staging a "second burial" for an etheric body that does not belong with the living, in The Dreamer's Book of the Dead. And we have Dion Fortune's classic Psychic Self-Defence. 

Manhattan transfer and used karmas at O'Hare airport

I am changing planes at Chicago's O'Hare airport and stop in at a bar restaurant near my gate for refreshments. A well-dressed older woman comes in and asks for a manhattan. That's a classy bourbon cocktail you don't often hear ordered at 10:00 a.m, except maybe by Don Draper in "Mad Men".
     Before the bartender has mixed the drink, she switches her order and asks for bourbon with ginger ale. I can't resist. I say to this stranger, "You raised the tone of this establishment and then you dropped it down again."
     She laughs, then peers at me and screeches, "We know each other!" I don't recognize her until she introduces herself. She came to some of my workshops twenty years ago. We last saw each other on a group adventure in the high Andes in 1999. How come she's in the bar now? Three of her flights were cancelled, she had to stay overnight at an airport hotel.
    "Do you have a story for me?" I ask.
    "I've been going deeper into Buddhism," she tells me. "I just came from a Buddhist retreat in Wisconsin."
    "Okay. Always good to ground and balance after something like that. Cheers!" We clink glasses. I am an Australian. I'll have a beer anytime I feel like it when traveling, especially when I have been up since 3:00 a.m. But I'll leave the morning manhattan to someone coming off a Buddhist retreat.
    She is earnest about what she has been studying. She wants to know my opinion about karma.
    I tell her I think there are consequences or everything we do, and that it's important to think about how we are collecting karma of every kind in our present lives, as well as carrying karma from other lives. "I like the Buddhist idea that we can be released from all of that in the moment of enlightenment," I say. "Tathagata time!" We toast again.
    More serious now, I reflect on the apparent contradiction between the idea of linear karma and the probability that in  the multidimensional universe everything is going on Now - and on limitless parallel event tracks. Einstein suggested that time and space, as we commonly think about them, are just a human convenience, not a fundamental reality. It may be convenient to step out of them, or across them.
    If I think that the Scottish druid who lived and died 1,500 years ago and the Royal Air Force pilot who was killed in World War II are part of my story, and that I have inherited karma from what they did or did not do, maybe I can reach back to them, launching from the moment of Now. Maybe my thoughts and actions now help or hinder in their own time - which is also now - and may be more helpful as I rise to greater consciousness of how all this works.
    It is possible to operate with these two seemingly contradictory visions of reality: linear karma in Chronos time, and the simultaneity of experience in the multiverse in a spacious Now. It is like the observation in physics that something can be both a particle and a wave, and you will see it one way or the other according to how you observe it.

- from my travel journal for Friday, January 9, 2015.