Prepare to enter the inner plane school during sleep. Intense temple ceremonies open one world to the other. Use intuition on the conscious level to cultivate subsuperconscious habits, resolve mental issues. Protect from negative influence of lower entities. Who we are in this life is important; after transition our spiritual inclination is unchanged; you go where your mind is; there is continuity between worlds.

Unedited Transcript:

This is also, it's an excellent sadhana for preparation for pilgrimage such as coming here for a special event, those of us who don't live here. It's in the sadhana booklet we're working on. I forget exactly how many days it suggests but it would probably say something such as: For two weeks prior to pilgrimage make sure you read from Merging With Siva each night, extra. And the idea is it puts you deeper into the inner plane. Inner plane school.

Different individuals have different abilities to remember what they do in their sleep. Quite often someone tells me: "Oh, you were in my dream last night and you did this, this and this."

And I say: "Oh, that's good."

I don't remember being in their dream, necessarily. But they remember the dream. Likewise some individuals will remember attending an inner plane school and even remember what was studied to some degree though it usually gets distorted, slightly. Others won't remember at all. So how do you know if you learn something that you can't remember? You ever thought about that? How do you know if you learned it if you can't remember what it was? Well, there's a number of ways but one is that you speak out with confidence on something that you really hadn't thought much about before. You seem to have an understanding or a knowledge about something that you hadn't thought much about before. Where did that knowledge or understanding come from that makes you speak with such certainty rather than just speaking with normal -- some certainty, some uncertainty, new idea, usually a new idea; you're not totally certain about it. You're not totally confident it's right because it's new. You need time to judge it and all. But if you speak out with confidence on something new maybe it came from the inner plane school.

The basic idea is preparation when we're going to sleep is important. So Merging, reading Merging with Siva depends on the individual and depends what state of mind that you're in. The extent of preparation that would be recommended if you were serious about going into inner planes. If we're upset at all then, ideally, we take time to get ourselves un-upset because being upset won't, won't get us there. This is deeper than the realm of the astral plane where we get upset. So if we're upset we just go to sleep and go into the part of the astral plane where other people are upset. We can console on it. But, you know, if we want to go deeper then we can't be upset. We shouldn't be thinking about problems or something that needs to be solved either. We should drop that off and just, just let everything go and go within. That helps us get to the inner plane.

"The astral world is a plane in space, just as the physical world, as we know it in the conscious mind, is a space plane. It is the particular rate of vibration which each of these worlds generates that determines the space plane it occupies. Looking out through the conscious mind, we perceive outer space. Looking into the subconscious mind, we perceive inner space."

In general, the two worlds, the physical world and the astral world -- for most people -- don't interrelate that much. But there are exceptions. One of them is a haunted house. What's a haunted house? A haunted house is usually a house where the previous owner still thinks he or she owns it. People get very attached to their houses particularly if they lived in the same house their whole life. You know, the house is their life, is their memory. And where my memory and my house and my life divide isn't so clear. So, it's easy to get very attached to a house. More so in the old days when people moved around less. So, the new inhabitant in the house might sense the old inhabitant in some way, to some degree depending upon their sensitivity. That's when they overlap, sometimes in the temple you'll -- in certain individuals -- will see devas or even see the Deity, see Gurudeva, usually because of the ceremony that's, that's going on. The intensity of the ceremony has opened up one world to the other. That's part of what a ceremony does. It has, has a part of it that opens up the inner world and at the end it closes it off. So it's not just staying open. Opens up one world to the other.

Sometimes in certain dreams we'll, we'll be aware of this world. Some individuals do that, astral travel kind of experience where they're aware of the physical world but they're able to move through objects because they aren't... They're in their astral body so they can move through physical objects. So sometimes they overlap but not usually.

"As the habit patterns of the subconscious mind control many of our conscious-mind happenings on the physical plane, so does the superconscious mind control many of the occurrences of the astral plane through the subconscious astral body. This has to do with the awakening of the subsuperconscious mind. The subsuperconscious mind becomes stronger and stronger, providing we exercise our intuition on the conscious-mind level. "

Couple of different thoughts in that one. Our ability to do two things at once is based upon the subconscious mind, the habit mind. We're doing one thing with only part of our mind paying attention to it because it's such a strong habit. And we're doing something else talking to someone. So, for example, we're washing dishes and talking to someone at the same time. Well we can only do that because our subconscious mind is well schooled in how to wash dishes. If we'd never washed a dish before we couldn't do that. We absolutely couldn't wash a dish and talk at the same time. That wouldn't be possible. So there's so many things we do simultaneously, not necessarily just two of them at once; we can even do three or four things at the same time and one of them may not be subconscious or habit but all the rest would be. And they can even all be habit.

The story I mentioned once is driving, you know. You're driving and you're downtown, next thing you know you're home. How did you do that? Your habit mind got you home, fortunately because you were thinking about something else. You weren't, weren't paying attention. That's why cell phones are, you know, really challenging to use. Our, our habit mind takes over the driving and it really can't adjust for unusual conditions. Someone walking out in front of us and so forth. The habit mind will respond slowly to that. Won't know what to do. It'll just kind of wake you up and say: "There's something I don't know how to do here. Please pay attention; put down the cell phone." So, that's one reason.

So that's the first idea. Many things we do in the conscious mind we've learned to do as habits where the subconscious mind controls it.

So we're just saying, Gurudeva's saying: "Likewise, in the inner worlds we can build up subsuperconscious habits." Which means intuitive ways of thinking or intuitive ways of resolving mental issues. That's what Gurudeva means. How do we cultivate that? By using our intuition on the conscious mind level. In other words, we don't lock into reason to solve everything. We try and use our intuition as well. We may not that frequently succeed but the effort to try and use it is what Gurudeva's saying here.

"Just as you choose your friends on the physical, conscious plane, so do you attract kindred beings to you in the astral world. By keeping our homes clean and peaceful, by keeping our bodies and clothing fresh and clean, the odic force becomes quite pure and enables us to be more actinically alive. This condition also keeps lower astral people away from us, so long as we do not ourselves enter into an instinctive, astrally odic vibration. The spiritual, actinic vibration keeps all lower astral influences away, just as doors, locks, windows and walls discourage unwanted entrance into buildings."

As we were mentioning, an older house can tend to have other people attached to it. That's something to keep in mind. New house wouldn't. Also, the density of where you live. When you live in Singapore and there's five floors below you and ten floors above you and, you know, there's people all around you. And therefore, it's very easy to get influenced by the people in the building because it's so dense. Whereas if you're on a 5 acre farm and nobodies within two acres of either side of you, then you're not going to be influenced by neighbors.

Otherwise, cleanliness is important. Keep our homes clean and our clothing clean. Moving into a new home can have a house blessing or even after a major renovation when the house has been disturbed by renovation, you can have a house blessing. One of the things on house blessings I noticed once is the corners of the room tend to accumulate odic energy more than the rest of the room. Someone, Hindu family once asked me, you know, why am I, I was blessing the home back then. Why am I putting so much energy into the corners. And I said: "Well they seem to have the most congestion." And then the wife spoke out that when she was young she was trained you never sit in the corner of a room. Meaning that's where a negative influence could be. I thought that was interesting. Never sit in the corner because it accumulates odic force more than the rest of the room.

As Gurudeva says: "Just as you choose friends on the physical so do you attract kindred beings in the astral."

So that can be, in this world they can be attached to you in this world. Sometimes that happens to children. They get someone attached to them. Happens to mentally disturbed people, get people attached to them. And it also relates to the people you naturally are attracted to in dreams. Like minded people will congregate. We want to particularly in, in, be careful in cities, for example. These congested areas because you're more prone to experience something that's being created by your neighbors rather than something you're creating. So you want to protect yourself against that when you're in congested living conditions.

Puja in the home is very helpful to keeping the home actinic, spiritual. Just ringing a bell is helpful in chasing away certain vibrations. Most cats can't stand still if you ring a bell. We don't do it on purpose. Sometimes they'll come in the temple and the bell will ring and they'll run out. The same thing happens to lower entities. They don't like bells so they run away. Cats can't control that part of themselves which is similar in that regard.

"It is not advisable to admit lower astral entities if you are sensitive to this possibility, for doing so creates a double influx of odic force, whereas the striving of a yoga student is to become actinically superconscious and not to intensify the odic subconscious."

That's channeling. The idea of talking to someone means establishing a really strong communication ability with someone in the astral plane. And regularly channeling or communicating can cause you to have too much odic force. Meaning it's hard to be spiritual.

"Astral entities live in their own world on the astral plane. Possibly you enter this plane at night, too, but during the day we must attend to our conscious-mind activities and take care of our immediate programs, keeping the two worlds apart as distinctly as our sleeping state is separated from the state of being awake.

"When the physical body dies, this automatically severs the actinodic silver cord that connects the astral and physical bodies. Then the process of reincarnation and rebirth eventually begins. The physical body remains on the physical plane as a conglomeration of magnetic forces and begins to dissolve into the forces of surrounding nature. (Assuming it wasn't cremated.) The actinic life of the physical body and the vital health body travels up the silver cord as it dissolves and lends a tremendous charge to the astral body. This movement registers on the subconscious astral body all conscious-mind memory patterns of the life just lived, and the person becomes fully conscious on the astral plane."

That's why we're so much more conscious on the astral plane at that point then we are when, for example, now we just are asleep and we go into the astral plane. We have trouble remembering exactly what happened and so forth. At least most people do. That's because this hasn't happened. We don't have our full energy, our full intelligence in that structure.

"This tremendous charge of odic and actinic force registering upon the astral body at the time of transition is what stimulates and gives the initial impulse to the process of reincarnation. This process is largely controlled by the activity of subconscious habit forces.

"Before the reincarnation cycle takes hold, however, the person just departed often quickly recreates the same states of consciousness, the same interests he was accustomed to on the physical plane, and he may go on as usual, meeting his family who visit him during their sleeping hours in their astral body."

That's the idea that after transition things are pretty much the same. Our state of consciousness doesn't change dramatically. We're pretty much the same person. It's just we don't have a physical body to, to need to deal with. But, our mental interests are, they're still the same. Our inclination or lack of inclination towards spirituality is still the same. It doesn't change. We don't become a different person just because we don't have a physical body.

Therefore, it's very important who we are in this body. Cause that's how we carry on and that's going to create the pattern we follow when we reincarnate. In other words, we don't want a lot of unfulfilled desires. That's not good cause that will take us to a place where we can fulfill them. And so, we want our mind to be unified not for part of it to be suppressed or unfulfilled.

So we need good habits. Gurudeva often joked: "It's the cheapest way to travel between countries is to reincarnate." Meaning you go where your mind is. If you're in India and you wanted to be an I.T. engineer in the U.S. but you couldn't get a visa and always wanted to do that then maybe that's where you'll go in your next life. You'll be born in the U.S. because you were thinking about it so strongly. Similarly, there's still, not as much as it used to be, but there's still in the Hindu communities large families. By large I mean, you know, counting cousins, second cousins and so forth, you have a hundred people.

We had a ceremony, a namakar.., what was it? It wasn't a namakarana it was just a, must have been first feeding. First feeding ceremony for an adopted child in Malaysia. So the couple, the husband brought his relatives and there was forty people in the room. We had forty people in that family just who were living in the area of Kuala Lumpur. So a hundred people in a large family isn't, still is, exists in some Hindu communities and quite often individuals are content in that family and therefore, they reincarnate back into the family. They don't want to go anywhere else. They like the family. They want to stick with the family. So, they keep reincarnating into the family maybe for five or ten lifetimes. They just keep coming back. Similarly, that's part of the idea of a clan or a jati, an occupational group. Marries into itself and again you have a group of individuals moving forward together. Staying together, moving forward together and provides more continuity of culture then jumping around from, into completely different cultures. If you stay with the same culture you can stay with the same religion, religious tradition, same guru. Then there's more continuity and you're able to make faster spiritual progress because you're staying. You have continuity from one life to another by reincarnating into a specific group.

"Although the astral body is still bound by the habit patterns of its physical life, it continues to wear away from the moment of transition, and odic force is continuously fed back to the physical plane in an effort to make contact again with family, friends or loved ones through the medium of memory and desire. Another physical body is created, and a re-entry into the conscious world is made. The old astral body is dropped off, and the newly generated actinic forces give life to a new physical body, a new health body, along with a new astral body. The new astral body is the sum total of all preceding subconscious experience, and it may be quite mature during the time the physical body is only a child. The odic astral form that was left behind is called an astral shell and eventually corresponds to the corpse of the dead physical body."

Meaning we don't have any attachment to it. Eventually isn't around us. It's just disintegrating somewhere and eventually does disintegrate.

That's pointing out the continuity in the astral world. That we're not starting over. That the maturity that we've achieved, emotional intellectual maturity that we've achieved carries forward in the astral world.

OK. Well thank you very much for listening to all that.

[End of transcript.]