The journey of total health

DAAJI speaks about the role of the heart in healing, and the important aspects of a healthy life. He explains the concept of total health and how we can attain it through yoga.

The words “healing” and “health” are connected. We heal not just the body, but also the emotions that scar our hearts. You can remove the scars from your skin, but the scars in your heart are very difficult to remove. In Heartfulness, we all know that the removal and the healing of our samskaras, of our inner conditioning, are very difficult.

For example, how to remove mis-understanding? What is behind the misunderstanding others, or understanding others correctly? Understanding happens only when we proceed with right thinking. And what precedes right thinking is right attitude. Do you really want to understand another person? Listen carefully. That’s where the heart comes into the picture. Our next evolution as human beings is all about this – whoever uses the heart will survive, and the rest will not. Nature works in a very different way, where the subtlest, the finest survive, and there is no way you will be able to survive in the future if you don’t use the heart.

What is the role of the heart? Now, science also acknowledges it and there are some great books on this topic. One is The Heart’s Code by Paul Pearsall, and another is The HeartMath Solution by Doc Childre and Howard Martin. When you have a problem at an emotional level, because somebody misunderstands you, you will remember it all your life. But if you let go from the heart, if you forgive that person, you will have no problem. So we have to learn this art of using the heart, being empathetic and more forgiving. Then the evolution of consciousness will happen.

Let’s take the example of sleep. Deep sleep is also a type of consciousness where Delta waves are measured. Now, if you don’t cultivate yama (the removal of unwanted tendencies) and niyama (the cultivation of noble habits), the first two limbs of yoga, you will destroy your inner hygiene. Would you go to a restaurant where there are a lot of flies and mosquitoes, where the kitchens are not hygienic and the person serving you puts his fingers in the water bottle and expects you to drink from it? You would avoid such places. Our inner hygiene is just as important, and it is hijacked by our weaknesses. Take the yama of asteya: if you try to steal something from someone, be it their money, their partner, or their ideas, you will not have inner hygiene. Also, if you cultivate the niyama of santosh, contentment, it will help to maintain your inner hygiene.

Lacking inner hygiene, you will not be able to sleep. Lacking inner hygiene, you will not enter the state of samadhi. Lacking inner hygiene, you will not have viveka, buddhi, the discriminating faculty. And if you cannot discriminate, you cannot differentiate what is right from wrong, what is cause and effect, what is good and bad for yourself. These things will not work without inner hygiene.

How to make your heart and mind conscient? It’s only through meditation. Close your eyes and start with reflection. If meditating on God is too far for you, begin with reflection and try to center yourself. The Sanskrit language has a beautiful word, swasthya, meaning health. But it’s not mere health. Swa-sthya means one who is settled within, in the higher self, in the soul, in the center of their being. Such individuals, despite a headache or fever, remain settled within themselves. They are not irritated or dejected, just because they are inconvenienced by fever or headache. They’re settled within. There can be tornadoes, hurricanes all around, but they remain centered. They’re safe.

So we have to learn this art of
using the heart, being empathetic
and more forgiving.

Our attention is too much on the periphery, too much on the body. If you pay too much attention to your bodily health you’re sure to become sick, you somehow attract what you don’t like. People obsessed with physical health always attract diseases. AIMS has done research on sattvic, rajasic and tamasic gunas, and I would like to refer to it because these trigunas are fascinating subjects. Just as the three subatomic particles (proton, electron and neutron) constitute the entire universe, the three gunas are a spectrum in which consciousness plays out. Your consciousness will be filtered accordingly. For example, a person dominant in tamas is generally agitated, irritable, and angry; the consciousness of a person dominant in rajas generally gravitates towards what is pleasant, they love to relax. But each guna has a purpose; for example, if tamas is not activated at night, you won’t sleep.

The right guna needs to be activated at the time required. If you say, “I’m so tired, and need to rest,” and you want to develop the sattvic guna at that moment, it will not work. It is also not something that you can order – it is either who you are or not. How can you instantly mutate from a sattvic state to a tamasic state, or tamasic to sattvic? It’s very challenging. That’s why yoga comes into the picture, where you can develop the mastery of switching gears. This switching gears has nothing to do with yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, etc.; it is all about shifting from one level of consciousness to another level of consciousness, and that can only happen when you have control over your heart and mind. Heartfulness goes beyond the mind. As long as we remain within the realms of mind, we’re bogged down by knowledge and logic. Knowledge is good, but it’s not enough. Take knowledge of God, for example. We may say, “God is there,” but this is superficial knowledge. Who told you so? “My mother told me so,” or “My father told me so,” or “My shastra speaks about it.”

But when you do experience God, through spirituality, then it’s a different matter altogether. And is it enough to experience God once in a while? It’s like visiting a very rich friend and enjoying their hospitality for three months. You have the experience of what richness can offer, but would you then not wish to become rich yourself? And so we move from knowledge to a higher level of experience, and then to becoming. Becoming is also not the final stage, according to the yoga sastras. From becoming we move to a state of being, and being is also too much of a burden, so we move to a state of non-being. This is the journey of total health, where even bliss becomes a burden. We’re talking of freeing ourselves from disease. You may think that means having bliss, joy, and laughter, but bliss is also a kind of a disease according to yoga. We must transcend all these things. People have misunderstood two words, dhyana and meditation. According to the Oxford Dictionary, meditation is to focus your mind on one object. But God is not an object, and meditation is all about God. You have to transcend your mind. Let the mind be left behind, though the mind has a very special role to play.

It is all about shifting from one level
of consciousness to another level of
consciousness, and that can only
happen when you have control over
your heart and mind.

The mind is not our enemy, it can be our best friend, but eventually it will not carry the burden of bliss. In our shastras, we often talk about sahasra dal kamal – the thousand-petaled lotus above the top of the head in the middle. Knowing the location will not help you, you have to experience it, but it is not the ultimate, it’s only where you feel the ultimate bliss, sat-chit-anand. Anand becomes too heavy for the spiritual system. Dhyana takes us not only beyond the mind, but also beyond bliss.

Dhyana takes us not only
beyond the mind, but also
beyond bliss.

You renounce bliss. It’s easy to renounce what you don’t like, but renouncing sahasra dal kamal and going beyond is a different matter altogether. Heartfulness offers such a journey, from the heart chakra to the atma chakra to the fire, water, and air chakras, and many chakras are there beyond these in an experiential way.

How would you measure the consciousness of a person who is in the turiya state? The turiya state is when you are in deep sleep state but are fully aware. Scientific measurements are there through EEG, and when you see the delta waves, you will conclude the person is in a deep sleep state. How will you know that the person is aware? You have to ask questions to that person. And then, the fifth level of consciousness is turiyatit, where a state of deep sleep with awareness remains even with open eyes. Turiya is where you attain the deep sleep state with awareness with closed eyes. In deep sleep you’re not aware at all. I hope, I wish, I pray that one day science will be able to measure this frontier instrumentally. Deep in my heart, I feel that it cannot be measured, but let’s see how science turns out.

It will be wonderful if, instead of measuring through machines, one measures such possibilities through oneself. These are individualistic. Medicine, whether it is Ayurveda or allopathy or any other field of medicine, works on a large scale. If you give a pill for a headache, it should work on most human beings. But when you give a method in yoga, depending upon that individual’s mindset – whether it is rajoguna or tamoguna or satoguna – it changes from person to person.

When we all meditate together with Transmission, we will never have the same experiences as each other; everyone will have a unique experience. And for one person, the same Transmission will not work in the same way at different times. Each moment is unique. Transmission plays a very specific role with our consciousness.

Excerpts from a talk given at the international Heartfulness conference, “An Integrative Approach to Health and Well-being,” at Kanha Shanti Vanam, December 2022. The full talk can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NURlOlwyEK8&t=7248s from 1:35:30.

Illustrations by JASMEE MUDGAL