THERE SHOULD BE AN AVOIDANCE OF ANY ATTACHMENT OR PRIDE TO INVITATIONS FROM THE SUPERPHYSICAL ENTITIES IN CHARGE OF VARIOUS PLANES BECAUSE THIS WOULD BRING THE POSSIBILITY OF THE REVIVAL OF EVIL.
When these powers start happening, you start receiving invitations from higher entities, supraphysical entities. You must have heard or you must have read about the Theosophists. Their whole work had to do with these supraphysical entities. They used to call them “the Masters.” There are superphysical entities who go on communicating with human beings, and whenever you rise high, you become available to them; you become more in tune with them. You receive many invitations, many messages.
That’s what Mohammedans call “paigam,” the message; and they call Mohammed “paigambar,” one who received the message. They don’t call him an avatar, they don’t call him “God reincarnate.” They don’t call him a Buddha, one who has become enlightened.
They don’t call him a jina, one who has conquered. They don’t call him a messiah, a Christ, no. They have a very, very perfect, scientific terminology for it: they call him “the messenger” – paigambar. It means simply that he has risen high and now he is functioning no more; some other entities, higher entities, have taken possession of him.
He has become a medium.
And it is so. Mohammed was illiterate; it is almost impossible to think or imagine that he could have given birth to the beautiful poetry of the Koran. It is incomparably beautiful; it is one of the greatest songs; and if you can hear somebody singing it, you will be affected by it immediately. Even if you don’t understand its meaning, it has tremendous power. The very sound has tremendous power to stir you.
Mohammed was illiterate, not knowing how to read, how to write, not knowing anything about literature and the world of letters. Suddenly, meditating on a mountain, he became available, and he heard, “Read!” this word “read,” but said, “How can I read?” The word “koran” means “read.” “How can I read? I don’t know,” Mohammed said, and he became very much bewildered, who had said this. He could not see anybody anywhere. Again this voice came, “Read!” It was coming from his own heart; he had become a channel. And, of course, he was thinking about his past, and the voice was saying something about his future. The voice was saying, “I can read, don’t be worried. Just read – I will be reading through you. You recite – I will be reciting through you. You say – I will be saying it through you. Just put yourself out of the way.”
It was so strange, so unexpected, that he had a high fever; he became puzzled so much.
He came home, fell ill. The wife asked, “What has happened? Just in the morning you were perfectly well, and now you have such a high fever?” He said, “I will tell you one thing. Either I have gone mad or something has happened from the beyond. I cannot believe that I am capable of anything, but I have heard a voice which says, ‘Read! Recite!’ and I don’t know what to recite – and not only that, I started reciting! I heard myself saying things I have never thought about, and they were coming in perfect poetry, with meter, rhythm, and everything. I cannot believe it. Either I have gone mad or I have been taken possession of by somebody – but I am no longer the same husband. Run and fetch a physician; I will need treatment. I am going continuously mad, and I am still hearing this voice, ‘Recite!’ – and beautiful poetries are descending in me and filling my heart.”
The wife was his first disciple. She touched his feet. She could see the radiance all around him. It was not fever; it was the first explosion of his aura. He was feeling feverish because it was so hot, so new, and he was disturbed because he was not ready, he was never expecting, he had not planned for it.
This would not have happened if he had known about Patanjali. Patanjali has noted everything; he has mapped the whole journey, the inner journey. Then he would have understood this sutra. This sutra was needed.
“There should be an avoidance of any attachment or pride to invitations from the superphysical entities in charge of various planes because this would bring the possibility of the revival of evil.” But Patanjali says remember, when you become a vehicle of higher planes, don’t start feeling proud, and don’t start feeling yourself to be the chosen few or the chosen one. Don’t start feeling that you have been elected, selected, chosen, and you are special. Otherwise that will be the cause of your fall.
There is a Sufi story:
The Murshid of the Murshid of the Murshid was speaking to a group of people when he was still a young man. In the group was a wide-eyed dervish dressed simply in brown clothes. This dervish looked continuously at the speaker. He looked with such a knowing stare that the speaker was embarrassed and turned away. At the end of the talk the dervish approached him and told him that he had been sent to initiate him. “That cannot be so, you see my father has already arranged for my initiation.”
“I told you that I have been sent,” said the dervish.
“No matter, I must obey my father’s wish.” With this insistence of the young man the dervish departed.
That night the man dreamed that his father was instructing him to be initiated by the dervish. In the morning the dervish came to his room, saying that he was there to initiate him.
“Do you not remember from day to day? Go, my father is arranging my initiation.”
The dervish looked at him, smiled with his eyes, and said, “Have you already forgotten your dream?”
At this the man bowed and was initiated by the dervish. For days afterwards the man put all kinds of spiritual questions regarding life and holy scriptures to the dervish, who simply shrugged them off unanswered. One night the young man was sitting in his room thinking that surely he would get nowhere with this teacher who seemed so unknowledgeable regarding his questions.
As he thought this the dervish appeared and said in a whisper, with great conviction, “I am the answer to your questions.”
Now these stories look just like stories – mythological, fantasies, allegorical, or at the most symbolic. It is not so. They are factual. If you are ready, immediately, from the higher plane messages and messages start coming to you. They have been waiting a long time for somebody to become a receptive center. When this happens don’t deny them. When this happens become vulnerable. One thing – open your heart, trust. And the second thing – don’t feel proud. If you can do these two things, God starts functioning through you. You become like a flute, a hollow bamboo. He starts singing through you.
But once the pride enters, the song stops. Once you start feeling superior the song starts faltering. It has happened to many people. They had come in contact with the superior world, the higher world, the supraphysical world, and then they started feeling proud: sooner or later that contact was lost again; they became ordinary.
But then they become great pretenders because they cannot accept this, that now the contact is lost. I have seen a few people who really came to have miraculous powers, but then they became proud. Then the powers were lost, and then they became just ordinary magicians, because they cannot accept the idea that they cannot do it. They used to do it, it had happened once.
This is what has happened to Satya Sai Baba. He had come in contact. The first things that he did were not from him, but now everything is from him. The first things had just happened, but he got proud, special, a miracle-monger. Now whatsoever he is doing is just pretension; now he has to keep his prestige. Now he is even lower than an ordinary magician because at least the ordinary magician accepts that he is doing just tricks.
But this seems logical. Once you can do something and then you cannot do it, what to do then? You substitute it with something. You start learning something and doing something, somehow to manage your status that you have created around you, your image that you have created around you.
Whenever something happens to you – and it is going to happen to many, because Patanjali have made available many techniques to you; if you go on deeply in them, many things are going to become available to you – the first thing is remain available; the second thing is don’t get proud about it. Take it as a matter of fact; never exhibit it.
And if it is forced on you, then ask the forces that you should be made just a shadow, that you should not be in any way aware of what is happening through you. Because if you are aware there is every possibility you may fall. You may start accumulating the ego – I can do this, I can do that – and you start slipping lower.
Tags: Patanjali Yoga Sutra 43 Become A Medium
