While we are still in the introverted state, let us also look at another great spiritual object - the third (or, spiritual) eye. In several of his essays, Paramahamsa Yogananda has tried to explain what the spiritual eye really is.
The spiritual (or, single) eye seems to reside in a subtle, spiritual centre inside the medulla oblongata. The medulla is where the brain meets with the spine. This spiritual eye, he says, has the power to perceive all the higher dimensions as well, besides the physical. This is accomplished via three rays or lights which, when penetrated in deep meditation, help the yogi know the three wolds. In deep meditation, he says, a reflection of this spiritual eye can be seen in between the eyebrows as a single, circular eye with three layers of color.
The outermost is a golden ring, which in deep meditation, shows the yogi the minutest of the details of the material world as required (atoms and other subtleties of the physical world are not hidden to the one who sees through the spiritual eye). Inside the golden ring is a ring of purple or blue, which, when used in deep meditation, gives knowledge of the universal intelligence of God, the Christ consciousness or Kutastha Chaitanya. The third and innermost is a white coloured five pointed star, which gives the yogi the knowledge of the vibration-less state of God, even beyond the Kutastha chaitanya. Through this spiritual eye, then, all the higher dimensions of reality are made known to the practitioner, including the astral and causal worlds.
Yoganandaji agrees that in the initial stages, most of us find it difficult to attain the state of calmness of breath and mind required for deep meditation, but then, that's what the Mahabharata was all about! Although that is yet another story, let me go into an outline of it here.
According to Paramahamsaji, the Mahabharata very much contains a deep spiritual symbolism, and in fact, the symbolic meaning of the story is so important to him, that he has written his two volumes on the Gita (called God Talks with Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita) with this symbolism as the backbone of the explanations. As you might expect, each character stands for a subtle aspect of our spiritual anatomy, and the battle is all about making the practitioner give up aspects which prevent his progress towards God, meditation and true understanding. For example, the five Pandavas are the five basic elements of creation, which govern five of the seven chakras in the human body. Dhritarashtra represents the blind sense-mind, and the Kauravas represent material desire, anger and all the outgoing propensities of the sense-organs and organs of action. Drona represents samskara - or the power of habitual tendencies - and is thus the teacher of both the Pandavas and Kauravas.
While Yoganandaji does not deny that epics like the Mahabharata are typically found to be consistent at several levels, he is less concerned about the simple physical interpretation of the story. In other places, he agrees that a righteous war is sometimes a practical necessity of our times, but that does not mean that his heart did not weep for the seemingly unnecessary killing and hurting that is involved in wars. In the two volumes of his Gita commentary, these outer meanings of the Mahabharata are left behind, and the focus is almost totally on the symbolism, and on bringing out the details of the kundalini, the chakras, the need for restraining unregulated senses for meditation, and on the subtler realms which slowly get opened up as meditation makes the aspirant more and more aware of these realities via the spiritual eye.
In fact, it is the three rays of the spiritual eye which (through a complicated process) get transformed into the human body. The golden rays of cosmic energy are predominant in blood, the blue rays are dominant in the grey matter of the brain, and the white rays are predominant in the inner, white matter of the brain. If you believe Paramahamsaji, then it is clear from these writings that it is not Man who has created God in his image, but God who has created Man in His image. To know this, though, the battle of Kurukshetra might need to be fought valiantly and won. Peace!
Sadanand Tutakne
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