Can a person whose body is full of toxins meditate well or do you think that the cleaning practices should be taught first?
There are many sources of toxins. By impure food and over- medication you develop toxins in your body. You also develop them through lack of exercise, wrong thinking and sometimes due to the natural hormonal order in the body. Therefore, before meditation you must practise hatha yoga shatkarmas, the sixfold purification of the body. You must clean the nose, the alimentary canal, the large intestines and the lungs. Like this, you must purify the whole body. Then you must correct your diet and practise asana and pranayama. You must also rectify your way of thinking.
Some people emphasize diet. It is okay but not final. In my opinion it is thought that should be rectified. By a wrong thought a heart attack can take place. You know it very well. By a wrong thought a nervous breakdown or cancer can also take place. You should not underestimate the quality of your thinking. Thinking, feeling and emotion should never be underestimated. More than half of your family problems are due to your mind. Ninety percent of all the diseases in the world are born of your mind. Therefore, toxins can also be produced by the process of thinking.
Anxiety is no good; hatred is no good; anger is no good; jealousy is no good; passion is no good. They should be there in you but not very much. Your experiences in meditation are influenced by the quality of your thought. If you do not want your thoughts or mind to influence your meditation, then you must first control your mind and then meditate.
In the Koran, the Bible, the Vedas and many other books it is said that saints went into the mountains and fasted for forty days. These saints used to go into seclusion where there was nobody. Why? Because there are so many sources of toxins that can develop in the body. What do you think about gasoline? Does it not produce toxins? What do you think about noise? Does it not produce toxins? Therefore, we should try to balance the production of toxins in the body from time to time through the practice of periodical hatha yoga practices. When you try to meditate, you are also removing toxins from the body.
What is the origin of madness according to yoga and what practices should a mad person do?
When your mind is restless, it splits into many parts. It is scattered and dissipated. That is one cause of madness according to yoga. A man who does not practise meditation, yoga or concentration has a mind which is not stable and constant. It is restless due to sense impressions. His mind is tossed hither and thither through the storms of passions, ambitions and desires.
Normal desires one can have; normal passions, frustrations and disappointments are natural to man. Sometimes he has strong desires and passions, and due to these his mind is not able to cope with reality. His mind creates many patterns at different times. These patterns of mind are so restless and so explosive that they sap his entire energy. The nervous system is not able to meet with his demands and there is mental breakdown. This is one important cause of madness according to yoga.
Secondly, when your belief and your life are opposing each other, then you become mad. For example, everybody in Europe is Christian. They believe in the Bible and the sayings of the saints who preach that certain things are sin. For more than nineteen hundred years they have been taught, ‘This is sin, this is sin, this is sin!’ Now what are you taught in the schools and colleges? Freudian psychology tells you exactly the opposite of what you have been taught for nineteen hundred years.
So now there is an absolute antagonism between belief and external knowledge. What religion calls ‘sin’, science calls ‘healthy’. Science will say, ‘No, it is good for your health, don’t suppress it.’ Your religion says, ‘No, it is bad, suppress it.’ Therefore, an average European is split into two. That is called schizophrenia. This is what is happening to the whole modern culture everywhere.
When the two parts of the mind are talking opposite languages and opposite philosophies, then there is madness. When you meditate by force, then you become abnormal. Your mind is running after the sensual pleasures and your mind is also trying to meditate. So you split your mind into two. One part of the mind is fantasizing and fantasizing while the other part of the mind is trying to meditate. You know what will happen. If a strong man pulls my right hand and another strong man pulls my left hand, I will be split into two! Therefore, this is the second cause of madness.
Thirdly, the hormones from the pituitary gland must be properly balanced. There has to be a check. There is a time, according to the maturity of the body, for the hormonal secretions. If your son or daughter does not develop sex hormones up to the age of twenty-three, they are going to go mad, definitely, and if your child at the age of ten develops sex hormones, he is also going to go mad because sex hormones are the wild hormones. They are like wild tigers, wild boars, wild buffaloes. They change everything in your body. Therefore, they should be allowed to trickle into the body according to the capacity of the body. So, in yoga it is said that if you don’t have a healthy pineal gland you will be abnormal.
Another cause of madness is imbalance between the pranic force and the mental force. In the physical body there are two energies, the life force and the mental force, and both have to be balanced properly. If the life force is predominant and the mental force is subservient, there will be madness and this madness will be a wild madness. For example, you will be a criminal, you will murder someone or you will be a terrorist. If the mental power is predominant and the pranic power is subservient, then psychic madness will occur. Therefore, there has to be a balance between the mental and pranic forces through meditation, pranayama, asana, etc.
What are the benefits and uses of pranayama and how do we maintain prana?
According to the hatha yoga books, there are various areas of energy in the body. These energies are known as five types of prana or life energy. They help you to digest food, maintain circulation and body weight, nourish the foetus and maintain the constant life process in the body, but due to overuse and misuse the life force is sometimes wasted. Through the practice of pranayama you charge these pranic areas.
Take the example of the battery in your automobile. When it gets discharged you get it charged again, but if the dynamo is working properly, why should it get discharged? Pranic spots in different parts of the body sometimes become exhausted and discharged. As a result of that, there is exhaustion, depression, bad digestion and bad circulation. You have no strength to walk or to work; you cannot even think properly. If you begin to think a little more, your heart begins to palpitate. You cannot even handle bad news. If anybody insults you, you get nervous; if your child becomes sick, you get anxious. So it is necessary to maintain a balance and constantly charge these pranic areas.
The five types of prana are known as prana, apana, udana, samana and vyana, and these five must be charged from time to time. This is significant. When that has been done pranayama will charge your brain with extra energy and help you to meditate. You know, when you worry and become anxious you use maximum prana. When you run your household, you do not need that much prana and when you meditate, you need minimum prana.
For example, you have a plug point through which a microphone is connected. If you get a bigger installation, say 5 horsepower of energy and plug it there, in half an hour the wire will become hot and all the fuses will blow. This is what is happening to most of us. We are using maximum pranic energy when we are dealing with fears, anxieties and passions.
You do not know what the thinking process is. The thinking process is not only a psychological process. It is a product of the pranic force. If there is no life, there cannot be a psychological process. Have you ever heard of a dead man thinking? No, you can only think if you have prana. So there is no exclusively psychological process. It is a pranic process. For each and every thought you think, you are utilizing the battery.
When you use a tape recorder, every second the battery is going down. You will have to change or recharge it later. The same thing is happening to all of us. Your battery gets discharged all the time. You are using prana while you are thinking, worrying, becoming disappointed, frustrated, happy or angry. You are using prana all the time. When do you not use prana? When you are in samadhi, then you do not use prana. When you have attained nirvana, the state of void, then you do not use prana. You can exist without prana for hundreds of years. When you are meditating you use little prana. When you are in your Self and you don’t think about time and space, you don’t think about your name and body, just your self, you only use a little bit of prana and this will last for many hundreds of years. But this is not realistic. We are living in the world and we therefore have to use prana. We are not saints; we are amidst so many difficulties, so we have to use prana. Now, how to replenish the lost stock of prana? That is done through pranayama.
23 November 1982, Santo Domingo