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BIHAR YOGAS Yoga Publications Trust, Munger, Bihar, India Ajna Chakra With kind regards, 4 and prem Ajna Chakra Rishi Nityabodhananda Yoga Publications Trust, Munger, Bihar, India © Bihar School of Yoga 2009 Allrights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Yoga Publications Lrust. ‘The terms Satyananda Yoga and Bihar Yoga? are registered trademarks owned by International Yoga Fellowship Movement (IYEN). The use of the same in this book is with permission and should notin any wey be taken asaffecting the validity of the marks y Yoga Publications Trust mn 2009 Reprinted 2010 ISBN: 978-81-86336-80-9 Publisherand distributor: Yoga Publications Trust, Ganga Darshan, Munger, Bihar, India. Website: www.biharyoga.net www.rikhiapeeth.net Printed at Thomson Press (India) Limited, New Delhi, 110001 Dedication In humility we offer this dedication to Swami Sivananda Saraswati, who initiated Swami Satyananda Saraswati into the secrets of yoga. Contents Prologue Int 1 2. 3. 4. 6. 7. oe 9. 5. troduction . Science is Catching Up . Science and Religion . Philosophical Background ‘The Guru Chakra Kundalini Yoga in Brief . Ajna Chakra in the Tantras Psycho-Physiological Aspects Psychic and Mystic Concepts Yoga Practices for Awakening Ajna Chakra Appendix S at Chakra Nirupanam Bibliography Glossary uti Prologue Karmas are what we have done, do and will do, and life is an endless series of karmas. We move through life acting out our karmas in the hope that life will improve. Life is never perfect and our hopes are for the future. We collect ideas to relieve our plight and embark on a path in the hope that we can cither solve our problems or escape into a new domain free from the trammels of present day life. Just look at what we are doing, endlessly making more and more plans for the future to relieve our plight. Even when we have the best available of everything, still we make plans to escape from the agony of life. The agony is within and there is a root cause. The great thirteenth century Sufi poet, Rumi, calls it the lament: the lament of the reed flute plucked from the riverbed of reeds; it laments with the agony of being separated from its source, and the player of this reed flute also laments with his separation from his source. And what is this source from which we come? Well it seems we don’t know, or rather we have forgotten. According to our great traditions and teachings, we were once part of that source and it was a perfect seamless consciousness. According to Sufi traditions it is pure love. The love that is so pure that there are no barriers or distinctions between the lover and the beloved. It is all one; and just as the drop in the ocean is a part of the ocean and at the same time is the whole ocean, in the same way our origins are that drop, a part of ix the whole, and this is the ecstatic state of being. It is pure, it is boundless, it is unchanging and it is beyond description, yet its expression is an inspiration to ecstasy, a transport to transcendental bliss. We know that the path is from the particular to the general, trom worldly actions to inner truth, but where is this path? Is it just in the mantra and the meditation? Is it just in the karma yoga and the kirtan? After these things don’t we remain with the same understandings and identifications as before? We read and we know everything, yet we have learnt that hope in external efforts is bound to end with dis- appointment. The successful man flying first class to Los Angeles is driven by the will to escape his longing to reunite and the subsistence farmer is driven by the same longing. We suppress our original lament. The lament is the sorrowful tune doled out in our hearts, for we have separated from our source just like the reed flute that plays its mournful tune. Every church, synagogue, mosque, gurudwara and temple has but one altar, an altar to that one perfection, and everyone born into this world of hope takes a position or stand either acknowledging or denying its validity. Yet who has come close to it through an intellectual analysis? This draws us into a debate on faith and conviction. Faith surely holds the upper hand, the hand of experienced knowledge, knowledge gained not by intellectual conclusion but by a truth, a vision or an experience. Then we, the knower of that experience, know what is true. When a truth is so obviously definite, then faith is born and a conviction is also. Seeing the truth, or seeing the dawning of an idea which is so obviously and definitely truc because it has been seen in the form of spiritual experience, is seeing through the eyc of intuition, ajna chakra. Introduction remember an old man from Austria who lost his father during early childhood. He attended the funeral ceremony which was a most solemn occasion, and he was so pained by the sadness of the occasion that he never visited his father’s grave again. The old man had fought in the Austrian army in the First World War and stayed in his mother country until Hiver’s army forced him out in 1939, when he went to England. He fought with the British army and at the end of the Second World War migrated to Australia where he finally settled down to become firmly established in that country. In 1965, sixty yearsafter the death ofhis father, he made the pilgrimage back to his motherland. The pangs of his conscience were strongly telling him to visit his father’s grave so that he could pay his respects to the memory of his dead father. After some enquiries with relatives he found the cemetery, but alas, the records were incomplete and no trace of the whereabouts of his father’s grave could be found in the files. His country had been ravaged by two world wars and little indeed was left from the pre-First World War era. So he set out with strong determination to systematically examine each gravestone of the huge cemetery. He started his quest in the morning and by late afternoon, in spite of his persistent efforts, he had no success. Dejected, fatigued and exhausted he sat down, and his body fell so that it was supported by his arms with his hands covering his face. 1 Ina flash he was not an old man any more, but a young boy walking behind his father’s coffin. He could see his brothers, the inscription on the coftin, the coffin bearers and all the other mourners which made up the procession. This young boy followed in the procession until it came to a hole in the ground. Then, as ifeoming out of a dream, he returned to waking consciousness and there he was, looking down at the gravestone which bore the inscription of his father. We can understand that this experience had exploded from the unconscious mind, but the eye which had witnessed the experience and coordinated all the movements in the physical body was his third eye or ajna chakra. Itake up this task of rewriting Ajna Chakra (first published in 1973) as an offering to my guru, Swami Satyananda Saraswati. Originally, around 1972, he told me to write an article and armed with some one-sided paper, a pencil and some books on kundalini yoga I just wrote down whatever I could and gave him the result. At the time he said, “I asked you to write an article and you have written a book!” Ata first reading of my old work Lam quite astounded at the quality of my effort then and I can only attribute this to the high level of enthusiasm I carried in my early years as a swami, the result of living with the greatest man I have ever met. Ajna chakra is most significant amongst the whole gamut of chakras and nadis for those taking to the path of kundalini yoga. Kundalini shakti rises and cnergizes those parts of the personality we develop, and it is through this intuitive third eye that we can perceive the wisdom ofrenouncing fame, name, wealth and other worldly and passionate pursuits. Knowledge of the external world is gained through the senses; however, it is through our sixth sense, namely ajna chakra, that other knowledge is gained. There are so many things we know to be true, yet there is no evidence for it, we just know it. We take to the path of yoga without much knowledge and in search of this knowledge we come across many traditions of spirituality, which are in essence yoga. Yoga may mean union: a unification of the individual with the 2