(Guruji contributed this early essay, adapted from a lecture given in Mumbai, to the October 1981 issue of Yoga Magazine, published by the Bihar School of Yoga in India.)
The science of siddhīs, or psychic powers, has been known throughout the world for thousands of years, for as long as Tantra has existed. One can derive these powers from the practice of particular techniques or gain them through direct contact with a guru. When the guru blesses the disciple by placing his or her hands on the disciple’s head or back, then the transformation begins to take place.
When this transformation is occurring within you, your vision expands into a new dimension. For example, you may be able to see someone coming into the room who is not physically present. It isn’t a ghost or some spirit entity, nor are you hallucinating. Rather, a definitive change has taken place in the physiology of your physical body, and in your conscious body, which enables you to have this experience.
It’s the same as when you have the thought of a spouse or child who is away or abroad. Usually you can only imagine them—but what if your thoughts suddenly took gross, material form, and you could actually see this person sitting right beside you? How would you react? Would you be able to bear the experience?
Possibly not, because you wouldn’t understand it. You would have so much fear that you could easily make yourself crazy. Fear brings imbalance to the mind and emotions; when there is too much imbalance, it can also bring some sickness to the body. But still, these reactions are not substantial. They are just superficial experiences, like the thoughts that come and go in your mind as you are sitting and listening to me.
Many people come to me when they lose a beloved member of their family—a father, mother, wife, daughter or son. They say, “Guruji, please let me see them just one more time.”
I tell them, “They are dead and gone. You must try not to think about them.”
But they continue to plead, “Please, just once more!”
So I say, “If I let you see, will you be able to handle the experience?”
They respond, “Oh, yes!”
“Okay, then first do one thing,” I say. “Tomorrow at midnight, go into the cremation ground and bring back the branch of some plant, a piece of mud or a stone. If you will do just this much, I will show you this experience.”
The very thought of doing such a thing fills them with terrible fright. And that’s the end of the request.
You see, the mind and its promptings, urges and impulses, whether instinctive or human-made, are so strong that you must learn how to bear them. This is what’s called siddhi. Developing your mental power, your emotional power, or even making your body healthy—these are all siddhīs.
What you may have heard about siddhīs is perhaps not too exact. In fact, it’s probably not the right concept at all. You have most likely been given either too high a concept of siddhīs or too low. Neither one is right. Siddha means to fulfill, to perfect, as when it is said in everyday life, “You have to make your action siddha.” When you perfect and complete something, that is siddhi.
Suppose you have a disease, such as diabetes. For you to cure this disease would be to obtain a siddhi; the perfection of a completely healthy state. How do we obtain this state, this little siddhi? We practice asana, prāṇāyāma, mudra, bandha, concentration, mantra japa and the purification techniques of hatha yoga such as nētī, kunjal and śaṅkhaprakṣālana. These little siddhīs are not what you understand as miracles; they are the result of perfecting one’s practice.
The best method of attaining perfection is through regularity. Therefore, even if you practice śīrṣāsana for only one and a half minutes, or śaśankāsana for three minutes or just sing kīrtans every evening, you should do it with absolute regularity. You can fix the time to fit into your work and family obligations, but then that time should be kept every day.
You should not get up today at 4 a.m. during brahmamuhūrta and then tomorrow at 9 a.m. and another day at midnight. This type of irregularity will just not work.
The first niyama in yoga is to be niyamit, regular. It is the greatest saṃyama, achievement. Be regular in all your activities, not just your sadhana. Be regular in bathing, eating and sleeping. When you are irregular, your body will behave in the same manner.
Regularity works in the same way as crystallization. When you put a drop of water in a freezer, after 15 days it will have grown in size. Similarly, with regularity over time, you will notice many little changes in yourself—perhaps after one year. You will behave better with your spouse and children and be more effective with your boss and subordinates. You won’t try to hurt others physically or harbor bitter feelings mentally. These are all little siddhīs that will occur when you practice regularity.
There is one simple prāṇāyāma that is very important and useful, especially for businesspeople who have a lot of responsibility. This is bhrāmarī prāṇāyāma, in which you plug your ears, shut your lips, separate your teeth, and make the sound of ōm, opening the mouth. The sound becomes like the humming of a bee.
After doing bhrāmarī prāṇāyāma 10 or 11 times, you will find that you experience less pain in the body than you felt prior to the practice. Nor will you feel as angry or as insecure as you did before.
Why? Because this little technique—simply inhaling deeply, then producing the sound of ōm with the outgoing breath—creates vibrations within your body that change the mental patterns of the brain.
The brain has two hemispheres, and they are always generating energy that flows in particular directions. If you breathe deeply and produce the sound of ōm in a certain way, then the movement of this energy changes. And that affects everything else happening in your body, from your thoughts right up to the secretions of your glands.
If some secretions are deficient, they will be increased. If they are in excess, they are decreased. Everything becomes balanced.
What happens on the emotional level is that any agitation, fatigue, fear or insecurity is calmed, and your thoughts become clear. Old, long-forgotten memories become fresh again—and I don’t mean memories of death, violence or unpleasant things, but things that you will enjoy remembering.
This is another of those small but important siddhīs—not one of the great, miraculous phenomena that we always hear about.
Of course, many people insist upon practicing Tantra and yoga with the sole aim of achieving the great siddhīs. But even with such simple techniques as bhrāmarī prāṇāyāma, the big siddhīs will also come.
When we begin to engage in sadhana—mantra japa, concentration, dhyana or prāṇāyāma—we awaken the many categories of power that reside within us. For we are powerhouses—we are full of energies, which are awakened and begin to function when we practice sadhana.
These energies are conducted through the nāḍīs, the system of psychic nerve channels that run throughout our bodies. The rishis and munis tell us that the body contains 72,000 nāḍīs. There are ten main ones and among these, three are most important.
They correspond to the sympathetic, parasympathetic and central nervous systems of modern physiology, but in Tantra they are called the iḍā, piṅgalā and suṣumṇā.
These nerve channels do not flow in a perfectly straight path or have any direct connections to the brain. Their junctions are in various places along the spinal cord. In Tantra, these junctions are called chakras.
There are thousands of chakras in many locations throughout the body, but only seven are widely known—the Mūlādhāra, Svādhiṣṭhāna, Maṇipūra, Anāhata, Viśuddhi, Ājñā and Sahasrāra. Residing within them are the hidden faculties of the human body.
There is no power comparable to the power of the mind.
Our ancestors tell us that this power of powers can summon the entire universe. It can create thousands of universes. It can usher you into the state of śūnya, emptiness.
If you can hone your thoughts until they are keen and sharp, they will be more powerful than a thousand suns. But to increase your power of thought, you must do mantra japa.
During mantra japa you don’t focus on your thoughts—you just watch the mantra continuously. If you fix your attention on your thoughts, the mantra will get left behind.
In this way, you gradually become more conscious, and your thoughts more focused.
And once your thoughts become more positive, accurate and sensitive, that’s when you can order your mind to think in a certain manner and it will, indeed, think in that way.
You can tell your mind to move an object without touching it, and it will move it. By the way, you may have heard this referred to as telekinesis by Russian and American scientists, but it is in fact also a part of Indian culture that has existed for thousands of years. In Tantra, we call it indrajāl.
But when it comes from abroad, with a complicated scientific name, it somehow sounds more respectable. Indrajāl is on display everywhere in our Indian markets and bazaars, where circus-wālās and jādū-wālās (magicians) perform even greater feats than those of the Western adepts, even apparently cutting off someone’s head and then rejoining it as an amusement thrill.
But if you go to other countries and announce, “I can do indrajāl!” no one will pay you the slightest attention. Even in India, if you approach intellectual people and scientists and tell them you can perform indrajāl, they’ll just tell you to get lost. But if you say you know telekinesis—well, then everyone will gather ’round. Why? Because today’s mentality is like that.
Recently I heard that there are people in Europe and America who can bend spoons just by concentrating their thought-power. But really, that’s not such a big thing. Compare it to the power by which a person’s head can be severed and then rejoined—and the person is still alive!
And how do people swallow swords without injuring themselves? Their throat remains intact after the sword goes down. Does it really go down? How does it not harm their throat or intestines? Perhaps it isn’t a sword at all? And in that case, what is the power that can make everybody see a sword being swallowed?
Our perceptions can be altered. We can’t always be certain that what we’re seeing is true. Suppose I have a red flower. It may remain red, but I can make everybody see it as blue even though it has not changed color. In Tantric terminology, this ability is called najarband.
Acupuncture has also been performed in India throughout history. We can read about it in the scriptures. Acupuncture went from India to China, and now they are sending it back to teach us. But if you went into one of our villages and they offered to give you acupuncture, you’d be afraid and wouldn’t want it.
Just as here in India, only one or two decades ago, people were afraid to learn the arts of yoga and Tantra. Tantra is such a magnificent science, but most people have not properly understood it—they have only heard the criticisms and exaggerations. They haven’t bothered to imbibe the vast knowledge that Tantra comprises—of life, death, consciousness; of ātmā and Paramātman, the self and the Supreme Self.
But it’s high time that we began to appreciate and understand the greatness of our own culture, our own science, our own traditions.
Even if we don’t want to accept it, it is nevertheless our own country that has preserved all this great knowledge. We may not have preserved the knowledge of how to kill or hurt others (which is being revived so plentifully in the world today), but we have certainly preserved the knowledge of how to know ourselves—of how to experience tranquility and realize God.
For the people of India, this has been the very goal of life—to awaken the spirituality that lies within us all.
In no other country do people think like this.
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