Masters of Death

Meditationtime Forum Post

Date:  Posted 6 years before Mar 04, 2017

MiBeloved 6 years ago

This morning during the exercises there were some comments made by Swami Rama who was showing me the ins and outs of the Agnisara practice which is supposed to give a yogi the upper hand at the time of death of the body. The idea is that when it gets close to death, within hours or days, the life force becomes more loosely connected to the energy mechanisms in the gross body. At that time, the yogi can take steps to kill the body by forcing the life force out of it.

Usually the life force wants to hang around a diseased, damaged or very old body until the very last cell in that body dies, but a yogi is supposed to make a decision at a certain point to remove the life force and not to allow it to stall for time.

If the life force is permitted to do death in its own way, then the subtle body of the yogi will be run down, short of energy, exhausted as it will be, and then the yogi will depart from the body and go down to a lower astral plane. From there he might get lost and might even forget everything about yoga and yogi teachers, just as when a person finds himself or herself in some parallel world in the dream state and realizes later that he or she totally forgot his or her social identity and got involved in that world as if there was no other place.

In talking about creating a path way for kundalini to take at the time of death, Swami Rama attacked it from a round-about way. This is what he said, “After birth, one’s kundalini gets possessed of the need for food and especially through the sucking impulse it gets a greedy attitude about breast milk. Some of our mothers had difficulty weaning us from that because we were greedy about it and protested by crying and behaving badly when they tried to transfer us to other foods.

“Then again as toddlers we got attached to sweet foods and our parents either deprived us of it or went along with our needs and supplied our every whim.

“But then again in the teen years, after sexual desire becomes evident, we wanted to have sex, even immorally, even if we did not understand what would happen if there was a pregnancy or if there were emotional complications for our parents and that of our partner. And then we rebelled and did things which our parents prohibited or discouraged. We did not care about our parents. Then our main concern was to satisfy the sex urges which were in fact, just the path way that kundalini was taking through the lower part of the body.

“And then again some of us got married and then we became obsessed with having sex in a private room called a bedroom but we also wanted some status, like our house, our job, our salary and so on, but there again these were just avenues of expression of kundalini.

“But for a yogi all of these aspects of social life are diversions from the real issue which is how to master the departure from the body at death. From the time a yogi gets a body from a woman’s reproductive system, that yogi should be working day and night to find out how to master leaving the body, because birth really is only the flip side of death. The two of them go together like Siamese twins.

“The yogi must whittle out a passage and cause kundalini to get used to that route and then use that at the time of death. But it has to be done when the body is healthy, not just at the last minute, like some Indians who when they have a terminal diseases go to a Tirtha pilgrimage like Varanasi or Vrindaavan and pretend that they are going to master death and attain salvation.”