All Knowing Is Within You, Part 1
Author: Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami
Description: Gurudeva's 1970 Audio Cassette Editions of “The Master Course”. The Immortal Body of the Soul is rather mature when the individual asks for realization, it has lived many lifetimes; it wants its last experience on this Earth, Self Realization. We're not here on earth to go straight for liberation, we need certain experiences first. Our individual existence should be identified with the immortal body of the soul. Shum: yula, yulam, yulaf, yulamf. Everything is within you, the body of light of the soul; all knowing. The experience is part of the path to you. "The Master Course", 1970 Audio Cassette Edition.
Transcription:
Good morning everyone.
And today we're beginning a new chapter in "Merging with Siva" which is Chapter 2, and is entitled: "All Knowing is Within You." It's drawn from the 1970 "Master Course" and this is the first lesson that we've done that is 100% drawn from material given in 1970. So we've moved from 1967 to 1970; congratulations! And that gives me the opportunity to tell lots of stories from "Guru Chronicles". Lots happened between 1967 and 1970. February 1970 is when Gurudeva moved here.
The Index in the back of "Merging with Siva" for the Inspired Talks gives this description of Chapter 2:
"Drawn from the 1970 Audio Cassette Edition of "The Master Course", recorded in the Guru Pîtham (the seat of spiritual power from which the Satguru presides) at Kauai Aadheenam. About thirty Himalayan Academy students had come to the Garden Island of Kauai to be with Gurudeva. He gave dozens of recorded talks during this Innersearch Travel-Study Program, sharing personal details about his spiritual path, his teachers and more.”
So 1970 audio cassette edition of "The Master Course."
And Lesson 8:
"The Immortal Body of the Soul
"As soon as we start on the path to enlightenment, we begin to wonder about our own personal life, and that becomes very important to us, even to the point where it sometimes could make an aspirant rather selfish, because he becomes more interested in himself, his own personal life, than people around him.
"This is one of the things on the path that really should be avoided, and again a complete change of perspective is needed. We need to change our perspective and begin to realize that beautiful body of the soul which has been growing through the many, many lifetimes that we have spent on the Earth. It’s an indestructible body, and each lifetime it grows a little bit stronger in its nerve system. This is called the soul, or the psyche.
"This body has been in existence for some thousand years or more on this planet, through the reincarnation process, and it is rather mature when the individual asks for the realization of the Self. It has lived so many lifetimes and gone through so many different experiences that in its maturity it wants its last experience on this Earth, that of Self Realization..."
That's a nice way of describing Self Realization, "...the last experience..."
So, my comment:
This paragraph has introduced the idea of going through experiences and Self Realization being the last. There is one verse in "Patanjali's Yoga Sutras" that talks about experiences:
"What is experienced has the character of brightness, activity, and inertia. (Three gunas.) It is embodied in the elements and the sense organs. Its purpose is to provide... (What do you think its purpose is to provide, according to Patanjali?)...both experience and liberation."
So it's right there. We're not just here to go straight for liberation. We need certain experiences first. And then of those experiences, Self Realization is the last.
Then my comment on the verse:
Brightness (sattva), activity (rajas), inertia (tamas) is referring to the three gunas. Note the dual nature of the world: experience and liberation (so that's basically what I said). Each purusha needs a certain amount of experience in the world before it is ready to transcend the world through achieving liberation.
I'm consistent. Sometimes I do that in my Zoom presentations. I say something spontaneous and then it happens to be what's on the next line, so, shows I'm consistent.
Back to the text:
"...So, therefore, our individual existence, our individual life, should be identified with the immortal body, not with the physical body, not with the emotional body, not with the intellectual body, not with the astral body, which of course is the instinctive-intellectual body, but with the body of the soul that has come along and had one body after another. It’s come along on the physical plane and had a physical body. Then it was overshadowed by an astral body. Then it was overshadowed by another physical body. Then it was overshadowed by an astral body. Then it was overshadowed by a physical body. And the layers went onto the body of the soul—the instinctive, the intellectual, the physical. And now, in its maturity, the layers are coming off again.
"We drop off the intellect. We drop off the instinctive actions and reactions. The only thing we want to keep is the physical body and the body of the soul. And that is the path that we are on. And when this begins to happen, when the beautiful, refined body of light and the physical body merge as one, we see light all the way through the physical body, right into the feet, into the hands, through the head, through the torso, through the spine. We’re just walking in a sea of light..."
And we get my commentary; it's drawing on Shum. The idea of different bodies and identifying with the soul body is nicely explained in Shum terminology. So first one:
yula
Being and life in the first and second dimensions, conscious-mind, physical existence; the vibration, energies, emanating from the physical or odic body; pronounced yula and often written simply as la.
yulam
Being and life in the second and third dimensions, conscious-subconscious, intellectual-emotional existence; the vibration, energies, emanating from the instinctive-intellectual, astral sheath (the odic causal/odic-astral sheath); pronounced yulam and often written simply as lam.
yulaf
Being and life in the fourth and fifth dimensions, subsuperconscious existence; the vibration, energies, emanating from the actinodic causal sheath, the soul’s celestial body; the ability to understand the difference between the physical, astral and soul bodies; pronounced yulaf and often written simply as laf.
(Then we get the last one.)
yulamf
Being and life in the sixth and seventh dimensions, superconscious existence; the vibration, energies, emanating from the actinic causal body of a realized soul as a result of many repeated im'kaif experiences; awareness of the physical, astral and soul bodies and the quantums that have constructed them; the ability to understand the nature of quantum particles; pronounced yulamf and often written simply as lamf.
And back to our text; it's talking about inner light.
"...This inner light is so beautiful. All day long my head has been filled with light. It feels that if I were to reach up and put both hands around the top of my head, there wouldn’t be a head there. It feels like there is nothing there. It just goes on and on and on into endless space, as I look back within the head. When I look into the back of my neck, I see an array of, they look like, wires, and these, of course, are the nerve currents that run through the spinal cord.
"They’re all bright and active and scintillating, drawing energy from the central source of energy. And, of course, if you looked into the central source of energy, what would you see? You would see light coming out of nothing. That’s what it looks like, light coming out of nothing."
And we get Lesson 9:
"Everything is Within You
"The Self God is within all of this. It is beyond all bodies. It is beyond all form. It is beyond all intellect, beyond time, beyond space. That is the big realization on this planet, the thing that should be yearned for, sought for; all desires should be pointed in that direction. And then, once realized, you live out the life of the physical body and do what you can in service to your fellow man, who is also coming along the same path that you have walked on before.
"All knowing also is right within you. This body of light of the soul is the body of the superconscious mind. It is all-knowing. We have to approach it through the physical brain, and it takes a little time to draw forth inspiration and knowing, but the more refined the physical body becomes, the more like this soul body, the knowing is there superconsciously. It’s a beautiful thing to think about, that all knowing is within man. Everything that has been brought through—all books, all systems, all religions, all philosophies—has come through man, but not always through the intellectual man or the instinctive man, but through the man whose body of his soul and his physical body have merged as one.
"There are other things that are within us, too. Even the devil that they talk about, it’s also right within us. That’s the instinctive mind. That’s also the intellectual mind, the doubter that says, 'I don’t know if I should be on the path to enlightenment. Maybe I should be doing something else.' That’s the area of the mind that causes us to argue with ourselves, or have a mental argument with a friend of ours. That’s the antagonistic force of the instinctive area of the mind, as well as the intellectual area of the mind."
And Lesson 10:
"Handling Each Experience (These are all pretty short so I thought we could fit in three of them).
"And while this is going on, what does the body of the soul, the real body of you, what does it do? It’s about its business, working, learning, studying on inner planes of consciousness and waiting for the instinctive and intellectual and physical elements to grow up a little bit and merge, for life is just a tremendously great experience. Each lifetime has been a great experience for the soul.
"The more experiences we can have during a lifetime and approach those experiences in a positive way, the more we begin to crush out the instinctive elements, the more we begin to mold the intellect so it is like the superconscious mind rather than being like the instinctive area of the mind, the more we can begin to mold the physical atoms so that they become closer attuned to the spiritual forces emanating from the soul body. The more experiences we can have and face those experiences positively, the faster we evolve. The fewer experiences we have, the slower we evolve. The knowing of how to handle each experience that comes to us in our lifetime comes from the soul. It’s our superconscious self.
"The instinctive mind will want to run after certain experiences and be repelled by other experiences. It is the area of duality, of likes and dislikes. The instinctive mind will react and resent experiences of a certain nature. The intellectual mind will rationalize other types of experiences that happen to us during a lifetime, argue them out and try to find out reasons why. The superconscious mind of the soul will know the reason why. It will come in an intuitive flash. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter anyway.
"The spiritual body of you, which is permanent, has always remained constant. It has always been constant because it’s directly in tune with the constant central source of all energy of the universe. This one source of energy feeds through your spiritual body and out through the intellectual sheath, the astral or emotional sheath, and the physical body. So, identify yourself as the inner being. Never see yourself as an outer being. Then experience won’t be reacted to. It will be understood from a mountaintop consciousness. Then experience won’t be sought for the enjoyment of the experience. The Self will be sought for, and the experience will be part of the path to you."
So that's interesting, 1970 style of presentation.
Have a wonderful day.