VBT – Meditation 70.0
CONSIDER YOUR ESSENCE AS LIGHT RAYS RISING FROM CENTER TO CENTER UP THE VERTEBRAE, AND SO RISES ‘LIVINGNESS’ IN YOU.
The Vertebrae
Many yoga methods are based on this. First understand what it is; then the application. The vertebrae, the spine, is the base of both your body and mind. Your mind, your head, is the end part of your spine. The whole body is rooted in the spine. If the spine is young, you are young. If the spine is old, you are old. If you can keep your spine young, it is difficult to become old. Everything depends on your spine. If your spine is alive, you will have a very brilliant mind. If the spine is dull and dead, you will have a very dull mind. The whole yoga tries in many ways to make your spine alive, brilliant, filled with light, young and fresh.
The spine has two ends: the beginning is the sex center and the end is SAHASRARA, the seventh center at the top of the head. The beginning of the spine is attached to the earth, and sex is the most earthly thing in you. From the beginning center in your spine you are in contact with nature, with what Sankhya has called PRAKRATI – the earth, the material. From the last center, or the second pole, SAHASRARA, in the head, you are in contact with the divine. These are the two poles of your existence. First is sex and second is the SAHASRARA. There is no word for SAHASRARA in English.
These are the two poles. Either your life will be sex oriented or SAHASRARA oriented. Either your energy will be flowing down from the sex center back to the earth, or your energy will be released from the SAHASRARA into the cosmos. From the SAHASRARA you flow into the BRAHMAN, into the absolute Existence. From sex you flow down into relative existence. These are the two flows, the two possibilities. Unless you start flowing upwards, your misery will never end. You may have glimpses of happiness, but only glimpses – and very illusory ones.
When the energy starts moving upwards you will have more and more real glimpses. And once it reaches the SAHASRARA and is released from there, you will have absolute bliss with you.
That is NIRVANA. Then there is no glimpse; you become the bliss itself. So the whole thing for yoga and tantra is how to move energy upwards through the vertebrae, through the spinal column, and how to help it move against gravity. Sex is very easy because it follows gravitation. The earth is pulling everything down, back; your sex energy is pulled by the earth. You may not have heard it, but astronauts have felt this – that the moment they move beyond the earth’s gravity they don’t feel much sexuality. As the body loses weight, sexuality dissolves, disappears.
The earth is pulling your life energy down and this is natural, because the life energy comes from the earth. You eat food and you are creating life energy within you; it comes from the earth, and the earth is pulling it back. Everything goes to its source. And if it continues to move in this way, life energy going back again and again, and you are moving in a circle, you will go on moving for lives and lives. You can go on moving this way infinitely unless you take a jump just like the astronauts.
Like the astronauts, you have to take a jump and move beyond the circle. Then the pattern of earth’s gravitation is broken. It can be broken!
Tags: The Vertebrae
