Introduce yourself to your physical body by looking into a mirror today, a full-length one if possible. Say to yourself aloud, “I am not my physical body. I am much greater than my physical body.” You will immediately see this to be true if you approach the mirror and stand before it with these two thoughts in mind. Then listen to yourself saying, “I am not my physical body. I am much greater than my physical body.” The physical body is only one of the vehicles through which your highest being functions. To gain a concept of how much greater you really are, you must first begin bringing those several vehicles under your conscious control. This is done first by using the power of understanding, which is about fifty percent of the application of control when it comes to the world of the mind. ¶Quite often new aspirants coming to me to enter the classical yoga path will say, “I am sick of this body and its desires. I want to renounce it and live entirely spiritually.” There is nothing wrong with such a resolve, except that usually the aspirant really means, “I have no control over my body. I don’t understand it, nor any of my emotional drives. They control me, and somehow I can’t get away from the consciousness of them.” ¶As long as you react to your physical body, despising or cherishing it too much, you cannot progress well in sādhana or religious life. However, through the practice of concentration of the flow of thought forces, and through the deliberate use of your willpower, the power of cognition, deep understanding will unfold within you, acting as a controlling agent of the odic forces that sometimes can be so turbulent. ¶As an exercise in concentration, locate the different parts of your physical body through feeling while sitting still. Feel all of your muscles. Feel each bone. Locate them with your mind’s eye. Feel every organ, your heart, your liver, etc. Feel your circulatory system, the warmth, the flow. You are using the feeling faculties of the subconscious mind, the part of the subconscious that governs the involuntary processes of the body. The other part governs the involuntary processes of the mind, such as habits. In feeling the various parts of the body you are actually becoming consciously conscious of odic force, using the aggressive vibration of this force to become conscious of the physical body. §
Did you know that the physical body reflects the higher states of your consciousness and actually registers the flow of actinic force? There are advanced yogīs who can look at the physical body of a beginning seeker and observe how evolved he may be on the spiritual path. He would also be able to intuit from his observation the remaining subconscious seed experiences that yet must be worked out either physically or mentally. ¶Your physical body will express the highest that is within you when the actinic forces are flowing freely through it. Often the physical body reflects the lower nature when the odic forces are turbulent and in or out of control. The best way to keep the actinic force flowing through the physical body is practicing the art of giving, doing little things for others that you have not been asked to do. This keeps you creative, and being creative is actinic, superconscious and religious. Giving, doing without thought of return, affectionate detachment, creates an odic vacuum which your actinic, spiritual forces flow into and fill. As you practice this bhakti and karma yoga art, your relatives and friends, even strangers, will recognize your unfoldment, for the actinic forces, the real you, will permeate your physical body, making each of your features alive. ¶Here is a five-minute routine for rising in the morning that will help keep the actinic forces flowing. 1) As soon as you awaken in the morning, take a deep breath, slowly exhaling. Say aloud, “Jaya Gaṇeśa! Anbe Sivamayam, Satyame Parasivam.” Then, to move the vital health body into action, stretch out the fingers of both hands so that the palms are flat, then close the fingers into the heel of the palms pressing with a firm pressure, and scrape the fingertips up the palm of the hand until the fingers are again extended straight. Do this several times with a firm, even pressure. This stimulates the vital prāṇic body and the subtle nerves. 2) Again extend the fingers of both hands out straight. Slowly move first the little finger in toward the palm of the hand, followed by the next and the next, making a fanlike motion until all the fingers are again parallel and pressing into the heel of the palms. Again scrape the fingers up across the palm of the hand and extend them. Each finger is connected to vital nerves which govern one of the organs of the body. Through stimulating the movement of the hand, you are actually organizing and awakening the odic forces in the entire body. 3) The next exercise is also done before you get out of bed. Clasp the hands behind the neck and with knees straight and toes pointed, raise the body, touching the right elbow to the left knee. Lower the body slowly to the prone position, then raise again and touch the left elbow to the right knee. Practice this each morning, to strengthen the abdominal muscles and stimulate visceral activity, until you can do sixteen to twenty repetitions with ease. 4) Next clasp the hands behind the back of the neck, lifting the head up six or eight inches, pulling the elbows down toward the chest. 5) Next, rotate the ankles around and around. Do this eight or ten times, then point the toes down, pull them back, down and back. These exercises will contribute to moving the vital health body into action. They bring vital health odic force and prāṇa into the muscles, the bloodstream and the vital nerve currents of the body. This entire series of exercises should take about five minutes, after which time you should feel like jumping out of bed and facing an actinic day. This series of exercises immediately breaks up the astral congested, instinctive odic forces of the mūlādhāra that may have accumulated during sleep, flushing the vital fluids into the circulatory system and on into the muscular structure. A strong, healthy body is an emblem of a stable, well-balanced conscious and subconscious mind. §
You can only detach yourself from your odic physical body when you know that a higher you exists, when you have gained stability by identifying yourself as actinic force. Don’t mistake your personality or ego for your actinic individuality. ¶Often the two terms individuality and personality are taken to be synonymous, but this is far from true. In classical yoga teachings we look at individuality as being the actinic energy, or the clear white light, the pure energy substance of the mind, which is constant, ever unfolding itself, peaceful and controlled. The personality we consider as the various masks or personae which cover the individuality. The personae which are heavy, dark and glued on to one’s face, so to speak, are those of an intense ego, congested odic force. They are most difficult and rather painful to drop off, or even to pull off. The personae which are transparent allow the clear white light from the actinic being to shine through. One can have many of these personalities and have fun using them constructively in the world, doing things of the world, always recognizing that the clearness of actinic vision shines through the mind-constructed personality of the individual’s race, occupation, social background and various accomplishments. ¶Many people become attached to their personality and suffer when it changes. One cannot, however, be attached to his individuality. In identifying the difference between personality and individuality, we can say that man’s individuality is the actinic, superconscious mind, which is constant, permanent, ever-unfolding and secure, and deep within, at a more intense rate of vibration than his odic conscious and subconscious mind, which make up the ever-changing personality. It is conceivable that man can have many different personalities, but he can have only one constantly unfolding individuality. And so it is the ego or personality masks we must identify as being the unreal and impermanent, and the actinic individuality as being the permanent, secure, ever-unfolding and refined actinic phase of the mind. This week do an internal concentration on the words personality and individuality. Try to locate your individuality by identifying your several masks or personalities that you have created in this life and write your findings on why you can get attached to personality but cannot get attached to individuality. ¶You perhaps have had a series of good, positive and constructive experiences. They have gone deep into your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind has reorganized itself, giving you a more positive, constructive, fruitful outlook on life. As a result, several weeks later your friends say to you, “You look different. Your face has a glow. You appear eight years younger.” These compliments also go into your subconscious mind, and you begin to feel good about your physical body. These good feelings, constructive, healthy feelings, again go into the subconscious mind and build from within itself a new atomic structure for the physical body. You take a new lease on life. Your body grows younger because your mind has had good impressions placed within it. ¶Think on this. Be renewed by a change of your mind, and seek for the constructive experiences with a positive reaction. Allow the reaction to bear fruit within the subconscious mind. Concentrate and feel the good feelings permeating the nerve currents running through the physical body, thus being renewed actinically from within. Good feelings are like food to the physical body. Food from deep within the nervous system, fed out through the circulatory system, right out to the skin, makes for an inner glow which can be seen on your face and through the rest of the body. This constitutes happy organs. In other words, all of the organs of the body are working in perfect timing, one with another, being proportionately fed by actinic energy and the vital odic forces. A good, well-balanced “force diet” makes for healthy organs and controlled, calm, central and sympathetic nerve systems. §
When we live in our personality, we are limited, but our individuality reigns supreme. A balance of actinic and odic forces running through the physical body bursts forth into individuality within the aspirant on the spiritual path. This cherished individuality, the feeling that you are the center of the universe, and your created world revolves around you, does not make one egotistical, but rather forms within the consciousness a deep humility, or a deep feeling of the realities of life, thus laying a solid foundation for meditation. ¶Haṭha yoga is a science of perfecting the physical body through the use of certain postures, or āsanas. In a deeper sense, it is a system of handling the physical body so that you are able to gain a conscious, actinic control of the odic forces of your subconscious mind. When the body is tuned up to a rhythmic pitch, you can single out the seeds of basic odic desires and destroy them. ¶The practice of haṭha yoga places the physical body in different āsanas in a regular, routine arrangement, so that the nerve currents in the body area are tuned up to a perfect pitch. No stretching, no straining, no pulling, no stresses. Once you have memorized the correct postures of haṭha yoga in their progressive order, you will find that after practicing them for only a few minutes, your mind will be able to concentrate itself without any effort whatsoever. You will be in an automatic state of subconscious concentration because you will have no nerve strain to distract your mind or bottle up the odic force. You will find yourself more alive consciously, and much more alive subconsciously, than you have ever been before. A child can do most of the haṭha yoga postures quite naturally. When you can, too, you will have that youthful freedom of mind-flow again. ¶Haṭha yoga, practiced correctly over a period of time, makes the mind so acute that you become able to “single out the seed of desire by disregarding all other corresponding erroneous thoughts.” In other words, in the practice of this science alone, the yoga student begins to burn out congested seeds of desire from within without even thinking about them. As you become more and more perfected in haṭha yoga, the odic forces, both passive and aggressive, become adjusted, balanced and controlled. ¶Through the practice of haṭha yoga, the physical body becomes a perfect vehicle for the mind to live in. The tensions which have been built up through the years become fleeting, and the mind becomes actinically alive. This enables the yoga student, as he presents himself to the yoga master for personal training, to single out the seed of desire and, in the light of understanding, destroy it. This retroactively brings forth a great wisdom through the conscious use of the subsuperconscious mind. When this happens, you don’t have to think to know. You know, and thinking is the result. Affectionate detachment from friends and relations is automatically accomplished, and a greater love for them flows in through actinic understanding. §
In the West we have only a few close equivalents for the Sanskrit word prāṇa, and they are odic force, actinic force and energy. But prāṇa is not really a form of energy or a force; it is the sum total of all energy, all force, in its various manifestations. Science has proven that all matter is in vibration, that the difference in these vibrations are what gives matter its form. At one time scientists believed the atom to be the smallest unit within matter, but progressively smaller units have been discovered. When the smallest subdivision of matter is reached, prāṇa, or pure energy, remains. Prāṇa is the sum total of energy, because the whole material universe is, in a sense, manifested from it. ¶The odic prāṇic sheath is the health body, prāṇamaya kośa, hovering just within and through the physical body, extending out from the physical body about two to five inches. Odic prāṇa is physical vitality. Actinic prāṇa and willpower are one and the same. ¶You have probably read of cases of suspended animation, men buried alive for hours or days without air or food. When this actually occurs and it is not faked, it is usually due to the control of prāṇa. After extensive training, odic force can be stored in a static state in the body and then used in the absence of air or food, for it is the essence of air or food. Some animals that hibernate do this as well. Frogs have been found buried in earthen mounds in the United States and are said to have been hibernating there hundreds of years without food, water, or air, yet once liberated they showed every sign of life. And man can do it, too, with proper training over a long period of time. This, of course, is not a complete unfoldment of the meaning of life. It is only the conquest of the second aspect of man, odic prāṇa. ¶Breathe deeply in and out, in and out, in and out. As you breathe in, feel as though you are pulling odic prāṇa into you as well as air. As you breathe out, feel as though you are sending out the air, but keeping the odic prāṇa in the body, all the time storing it in the solar plexus. Soon you should begin to feel full of energy, solid and stable. ¶Here is another exercise. Select a dimly lit place that you can use as a background against which to view your hand, such as a closet. Open your right hand, in which you have been storing odic prāṇa, and hold it against the dark background. With your eyes half open, gaze at your hand relaxed. Don’t try too hard. You should be able to see the odic prāṇa around each of your fingers. It will be seen as a cloudy, vaporous substance. If you are in perfect health, the odic prāṇa will be clearer and more readily apparent. Some sensitive yoga students can see the odic prāṇa around the physical body of people. §
Fill six glasses with water. Place them on a table before you. Take one of these glasses of water and hold it in one hand while with the other hand you shake the fingertips into the glass but without touching the water. Feel the odic prāṇa falling from the hand and fingers into the water, being absorbed into the water and held there. Thus we have mixed two forms of odic power, that of the physical-health odic prāṇa and the odic manifestation of water. This creates magnetism when these two forces come together in the external, odic water. Mark the glass of water that you have magnetized so that only you will later be able to identify it, then place it with the other five glasses. Switch the glasses around so that it is not apparent which glass was magnetized. If you are doing this exercise by yourself, you may close your eyes when you switch the glasses so that you do not identify the glass that has been magnetized. Now, the test. Close your eyes and drink from each glass. You close your eyes so that your taste will be most keen, and you will not be distracted by anything you see, having your entire mind on your taste buds. As you taste each glass of water, you will notice a distinct difference in the taste of the water in the glass you magnetized with odic prāṇa. ¶You will achieve a great control over your prāṇic sheath by learning to breathe diaphragmatically. The following experiments, coupled with diaphragmatic breathing, will help you awaken your own knowledge of the controls over odic prāṇa and your own odic prāṇic sheath. Take a deep breath through the nostrils, at the same time holding a mental picture of taking odic prāṇa into the body from within the air. You may visualize it in the form of a vapor, like the odic prāṇa you perhaps saw around your hand. Visualize the odic prāṇa going all the way down to your solar plexus, while the air is only held in your lungs. The odic prāṇa stays in your solar plexus while you exhale air from the lungs. From the solar plexus area, the odic prāṇa will automatically flow through the muscle tissue to the blood and begin to store up in various nerve centers in reserve for future use. In mastering this exercise, you will build up the vital body energies and calm the nerves. It is not necessary to do this often, only when you feel the need of storing up odic prāṇa. ¶Odic prāṇa is often used unknowingly for healing various physical distresses, emotional upsets and mental strains. A child runs to his mother; the odic prāṇa coming from the mother, freely flowing toward the child, comforts any distress the child may be going through. The child runs off vigorously, taking a good supply of odic prāṇa from his mother through absorption. You can supply odic prāṇa to any part of your body that may be ailing and gain some relief. For emotional distress, store odic prāṇa in the solar plexus, and to relieve mental strain, store it in the upper back and chest area. ¶As you inhale odic prāṇa, draw a mental picture of the process. When you make a mental picture, you are also employing odic force to form the picture, for all mental pictures are made out of odic force. After the mental picture of the physical area in your body that is in distress is well formed, visualize the odic prāṇa being sent to that particular organ or part of the body. Inhale, then hold your breath a few seconds as you visualize the odic prāṇa flowing from the solar plexus to that area of your physical body. When you manage to flow enough odic prāṇa into the distressed area of your physical body and the health body becomes more vibrant, you will notice the distress ease. Do this for short periods of time. Remember, inhale, hold a few seconds while sending the energy to the distressed area, then exhale the air, holding the odic prāṇa in the part of the body that needs extra energy most. “Where awareness goes energy flows.” All breathing should be through the nostrils, not the mouth, deep and slow, natural and rhythmic. §
Prāṇa is not air, of course, yet it is contained in the air in a certain manifestation. Much prāṇa is found in the air among the trees or near the ocean. All of nature and the forces of nature are various manifestations of odic prāṇa that have taken visual shape. Plants feed on the odic prāṇa in the air. You can absorb prāṇa simply by walking through a grove of trees. The air is filled with it. Take a walk today, out into the odic force field of nature and absorb the prāṇa in the air through your breath and through the pores of your skin. You will feel the prāṇa entering into your prāṇic sheath, or vital health body, and remaining there while you exhale. ¶Sit quietly and use the internal method of concentration when you think on this. Each time your mind wanders, pull it firmly back to the subject of concentration. Remember, in concentration, that the process of making the mind return to the object or subject of concentration forces a flow of odic as well as actinic prāṇa through the most subtle nerve currents, causing them to grow strong, so that soon your concentration will be effortless as your subconscious responds to your conscious-mind concentration efforts, causing a new process called meditation to occur in the wonderful world of the mind. ¶Concentrate on the prāṇic health body flowing through and just within your physical body. Mentally go over the exercises we have done this week in proving the flow and existence of odic prāṇa to the subconscious habit mind, so that by establishing a new habit pattern, the subconscious will aid instead of barricade your natural unfoldment on the path to enlightenment. Your subconscious needs certain proofs of these inner laws to solicit full cooperation. ¶Mentally trace odic prāṇa to its source and cause. Does it come to an end? If so, where? Where does actinic prāṇa begin? You will soon find that odic prāṇa does come to an end, for it merges in the subconscious area of the mind into the subsuperconscious. You will find that odic prāṇa depends on the existence of actinic prāṇa for its existence. As you concentrate on the interrelated flow of odic prāṇa and ascertain the area of the inner mind where actinic prāṇa begins, you should conceptually see how you have been controlling odic prāṇa during this entire week through the use of your subsuperconscious state of mind. ¶You are maturing through the knowledge of the within of your Being, which you have been studying these last few months. Remember, in the wonderful world of the mind, understanding, gaining mental perspectives, finding proof, no matter how small, within ourselves—these form important controls over the mind. The art of concentration, though the basic and most fundamental control of all, is not the only control over the mind on the classical yoga path to enlightenment. Harmony is control of even deeper aspects of the mind, as are understanding and actinic love. As we expand our consciousness on the yoga path to enlightenment, we hear more, see more, feel more, know more within ourselves. This is intense. We must not fear intensity, for intensity is actinic. Your actinic Being is intensity itself, actively alive and always shining out. Man can be thought of as seven aspects of form, but the Self is beyond the mind or beyond form, for mind is form. Mind is consciousness; consciousness is form. The Self is formless. Therefore, you can contemplatively say, “I am That, I am.” §