Just as I picked up a soiled book or rather was handed the book "Arutperunjothi Agaval/ Thiruvarutprakasa Vallalar" an English rendering by Swami Saravanananda, published by Ramalinga Mission, Madras, 1989, by the old man manning the bookstall outside Satya Gnana Sabai in Vadalur who did not state a price for it on my first visit in 2003, I picked up a soiled book titled "The Little Soul and the Sun" by Neale Donald Walsch at Pay Less Books store many years back for a bargain price. Both books are a gem and priceless.
God tells a Little Soul "Let your Light so shine that everyone will know how special you are", and went on to ask, "What part of special do you want to be?" He explains, "Being special has a lot of parts to it" and lists out the specialties one by one to the Little Soul.
- It is special to be kind,
- it is special to be gentle,
- it is special to be creative,
- it is special to be patient,
- It is special to be helpful,
- it is special to be sharing,
- it is special to be friendly,
- it is special to be considerate,
- it is special to be forgiving.
But the Friendly Soul tells the Little Soul that in having to do that unkind thing it would have to slow down its vibration and become very heavy.
Agathiyar and Ramalinga Adigal came on Thaipusam day and said the same too that we are one Soul that ventured to realize itself through taking numerous births and simultaneously having a myriad of experiences. When we do something bad we tend to be pulled back to the earth becoming grosser in nature. We become tied down further to worldly matters and the nature of the grosser elements that form them. A man seeking spiritual elevation and emancipation would first have to begin to work on positive merits and virtues to free himself from the grip of the gross and slowly bring his vibration to a state of purity, subtleness, and fineness. 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 are 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."
Here she 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. Annie Besant too 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."
"The self gathers around it upadhi upon upadhi, vehicle after vehicle, gradually shaping its own instruments."
He shapes a physical body that works into bringing his activities alive, he shapes an astral body expressing his emotions to others, and he shapes a mental body, to communicate his thoughts with others.
"Here we see a consciousness that shapes bodies according to its needs, gradually refining them and bringing them under the control of the higher."
Annie Besant explains further.
"The brain has to be changed, refined, improved, its connecting links fashioned and manufactured for the purposes of the expression of the higher consciousness."
"Here, in the jungle, they meditated making the brain tense and refined by the concentration of the mind, and restraint of lower faculties, fixed in rapt attention on the higher, with the consciousness working from above playing on the physical brain and tuning it to respond safely to the higher vibrations. Then it strove to draw the lower upwards (as Tavayogi says of our efforts that are only till the first two initial stages, Muladhara and Svadisthana) until it answered no longer to the stimuli of the outer world. This is a state of yoga - complete withdrawal of the consciousness from the Indriyas."
"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."
From Asudha degam or the impure, he moves to become Sudha degam or pure. Soon the vibration in him becomes subtler in nature as he takes on the other forms, the Pranava degam, Gnana degam, and Oli degam. Annie Besant wrote 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."For those intending to do so, she allays the fear and regret at having sent in gross impure food, telling us that,
"... 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 in consoling Gnana Jothiamma and asking her to bear the pain and suffering told her that the cleansing had to be expedited and that her meat intake of the past sixty years that went on to compose her body had to be expelled out. 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. She told me that I would not possibly endure the process. One wonders if this is the reason the Saints went into hiding some as many as twelve years before reappearing in society, having undergone a massive transformation. It is said that their bodies would undergo severe changes and would be hideous to look at during this period of transformation, thus to avoid being ridiculed by the society they stayed away.
Lord Murugan did ask us to open up our hearts to them. He told us that he can only give if we are prepared to receive. Agathiyar too has asked us to open up to the energies prevailing around us and intensified by their arousal in us. Agathiyar like Lord Murugan asked that we surrender unconditionally to them.
Annie Besant wrote,
Never does the spiritual teacher withhold knowledge because he grudges the giving. He is hampered in the giving by the want of receptivity in those to whom his message is addressed. It is not the withholding of the teacher but the closing of the heart of the hearer; not the hesitation of the teacher but the want of the ear that hears; not the dearth of teachers but the dearth of pupils who are willing and ready to be taught.
They are waiting, waiting, waiting with tireless patience in order to find someone willing to be taught, and when one human heart opens itself out and says, "O Lord teach me", then the teaching comes down in a stream of divine energy and floods the heart. Unlock the heart and throw away the key and you will find yourselves flooded with a wisdom which is ever waiting to come in.
Agathiyar says that the door has been unlocked, the door latch unfastened. It is now up to us to open the door and walk out a free man.