Chakras - your pathway to bliss

 

There are seven chakras or seven nerve/energy centers connected with different glands in the body — thyroid gland, the adrenalin glands, pituitary gland, pineal gland, etc. Science also agrees that these glands are responsible for our experiencing various emotions. Our ancient Rishis knew this fact thousands of years ago and mentioned it in the scriptures. 

The Rishis depicted each of the seven chakras in the forms of a lotus or different flowers. This is because when you go deeper in meditation, the consciousness becomes very subtle, and your mind becomes fresh like a flower. It becomes fresh, alive and soft. In such a delicate state of consciousness, you experience the rise of energy in the system. 

Lightness is connected with subtlety. Grossness is connected with inertia and negative sensations; negative feelings. When you are negative, when you are rude or rough in your behavior, there is a certain inertia, a certain heaviness in the system. 

When you feel all the positive sensations, you feel a sense of lightness. When the energy moves upwards, then the inertia transforms into enthusiasm and then next to creativity. From creativity wells up joy. When you are happy, you are naturally generous. Then the energy moves up further into the heart chakra where you only feel love for everybody around you. When you feel immense love, you feel an equal amount of gratitude and from this gratitude stems awareness. Awareness leads you to bliss.

Recognize duality to see unity

 

Some people misuse yoga for the fulfilment of their carnal instincts; this is wrong. It should be the other way around. Whenever there is a carnal instinct, it should be transformed into a divine inner experience. There is a beautiful word in Sanskrit called atma rati, union with one’s being, rejoicing in one's self. 

There are two things, prakriti (nature) and purusha (consciousness). There is an interplay of nature and consciousness all the time. The union of your body and soul — your body is female (prakriti), and your soul is male (purusha) — is happening all the time. And, seeing that union within oneself is samadhi. 

That is why samadhi is considered to be a thousand times more joyful than carnal desires. Whatever joy sex gives, samadhi offers a thousand times more because there is no effort and no action there. It is only being and just being. When just the being, the play and display of consciousness come to one’s awareness, it becomes one’s experience — exquisite and beautiful! 

Don’t keep any corner of your existence away from divinity. The divine should be interwoven into every aspect of your life, and this is called brahmacharya, which means moving with the infinity, uniting with the infinity. In India, you find both aspects — Shiva and Parvati who symbolize prakriti and purusha, consciousness and matter — everywhere. First recognize the duality and then see the unity. They are not two, they are not different but two sides of the same coin.

You are complete. You are both man and woman. Getting rid of this label, ‘I am man’, ‘I am woman’ — getting out of your limited identity, this is the highest philosophy of the universe. We keep identifying ourselves, ‘I am a man’, ‘I am a woman’, ‘I am old’, ‘I am young’, ‘I am educated’, and ‘I am illiterate’. Throw away all these labels. What remains is pure consciousness. Just know that you are the consciousness.

Don’t go around saying I am nothing. Adi Shankaracharya once said, ‘One who labels himself as something is a fool and one who labels himself as nothing is a bigger fool.’ One who is nothing does not talk, so just keep quiet. How can you say, ‘I am nothing’, when you are saying something! There cannot be somebody there saying, ‘I am nothing.’ 

When you consider the basic necessities of food and sex as sacred, then aggression in you disappears and surrender, gratefulness and love dawn in you. That is when the devotee and the divine have become one. They have blissfully merged into one. But there is a difference between bliss and sex. Sex is energy consuming and draining while bliss is energy conserving. All emotions that you experience are nothing but energy moving through you, through the chakras in the body.