In "Wine of the Mystic - The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam", Self-Realization Fellowship, 1994, Paramahansa Yogananda writes, "By drawing inspiration from the lives of great men, we shall rise above all narrow confinement of habit bound thought and custom into the firmament of free thought and universal understanding. And by contacting ever new joy on the altar of meditation we shall lose all grossness and feel the Omnipresent spirit. With utter surrender to the will of the lord our souls will ever expand like a sphere of bliss in the boundless kingdoms of Omnipresence."
Shedding the gross for the subtler we move within and closer to realizing our true nature. Annie Besant in her talks on "The Laws of the Higher Life", the Theosophical Publishing House, 1903, draws two distinct divisions to people and their brains.
"The coarser vibrations of the lower world and those adapted to it are one. The other is those who are in the front of evolution and of a subtler nature. The more highly evolved brain that is sensitive and readily responsive to subtle vibrations is that of the spiritual genius - spiritual, artistic, literary."
"Then the normal brain under undue stress and emotion becoming sensitive and tense, is the brain of the religious mystic and seer."
"While the former is careless of ordinary affairs, the latter with its "intense desire to reach a higher life overstrains the nerves hence rendering it sensitive to answer vibrations from the subtler planes of being. Then visions and abnormal happenings will occur. The superphysical consciousness finds at least for the brief moment a vehicle sufficiently sensitive to receive and answer to its impulses. The neuropathic brain affords the conditions necessary for the vision that belongs to the superphysical world, to impress itself on the physical consciousness."
I guess we fell for these too. But Agathiyar, just as oil is distilled from the seed, brought forth the understanding giving us the experience. He helped us navigate safely to the banks and exposed the numerous traps lying at the riverbed. This path indeed is akin to walking on a razor. One truly needs a physical guru by his side, a Siddha in the subtle form or awaken his Atma that then looks over his shoulder, while treading this path.
Here Annie Besant says, "We are dealing with vehicles in the ordinary stage of evolution, unfit for subtle vibrations." The medium could place himself in danger. The unfit brain, in straining itself to answer to the higher could go cuckoo. She also cautions us if we want to engage in yoga with an impure diet and body,
"You must begin to purify the body before you attempt to practice any yoga worthy of the name. For real yoga is as dangerous to an impure and undisciplined body as a match to a cask of gunpowder."
Annie Besant asks us to look towards the East for answers to "how this danger has been understood and guarded against and avoided."
As Yogananda wrote, Annie too echoes the same, "The self gathers around it upadhi upon upadhi, vehicle after vehicle, gradually shaping its own instruments. "Here we see a consciousness that shapes bodies according to its needs, gradually refining them and bringing them under the control of the higher."
This higher consciousness that shapes bodies fit for its purpose here is verily the Atma.
"The brain has to be changed, refined, improved, its connecting links fashioned and manufactured for the purposes of the expression of the higher consciousness..... Now making the mind steady, holding quiet the powers of the mind, the mind ceases to vibrate, and it becomes still - able to answer the vibrations coming from above."
Annie Besant writes in "Avatara-s", The Theosophical Publishing House, 2002,
"... inasmuch as the body is an instrument we have to use, a certain treatment of the body is necessary so that we may turn our footsteps in the direction of the Path. The body alone will never take us to the heights we aspire to, yet to neglect it will make it impossible for us to attempt those heights at all. ... The body needs to be refined, to be improved, to be moulded into such a form and made of such constituents as may best fit it to be the instrument on the physical plane for man's highest purposes."
"... the purification of the dense body then, consists in a process of deliberate selection of the particles permitted to compose it; the man will take into it the way of food the purest constituents he can obtain, rejecting the impure and the gross."
So now if you have arrived here and want to be a vehicle for the divine purpose, it is of utmost importance that you adopt a vegetarian diet. Eventually this too shall drop as one partakes the ambrosia and the breath within. But what about the times I had consumed meat before, one might ask.
She allays our fears.
"... by natural change the particles built into it in the days of his careless living will gradually pass away, at least within seven years - although the process may be considerably hastened."
Agathiyar told Jnana Jothiamma that she had to face pain as her body that had consume meat for the past 60 odd years has to be purified and drained off the toxins that interfere with the internal transformation. She had to go through a grueling cleansing process where for instance she vomited 32 times in a day. She told me one had to shed seven layers of skin too. Though she very much sought this pure state, her body could not take the strain and she eventually gave up to come back and take up the course in another birth.