Is it that every creature has different bodies or only those beings who are developed by spiritual activities?
All beings have these bodies, animals also, all creatures. As you grow in spiritual life and evolve, these bodies become manifest and clear. In other creatures, these bodies are in a dormant state, because those beings are evolving slowly. The main substance of evolution in the first stage is life. In creatures like mosquitoes, flies and birds it is the life which is evolving.
Life needs an expression, so they have one sense and two, three, four and five senses. There are creatures which have only one sense or two senses. So how is their life expressed through the senses? First comes life and then the body. At a later stage, the development in the body takes place. You have two legs and only the wings, that is all. Then you have two hind legs, two forelegs like a horse, a cat, a lion or a tiger. That is known as the evolution of the body.
With the evolution of the body, you have the evolution of the motor organs. The five sense organs are the ears, eyes, nose, tongue and the skin. This is the first stage of evolution. With evolution, you have the five motor organs: speech, hands, feet, the urinary and excretory organs.
You have five sense organs and five motor organs, and then comes the mind. Man has been undergoing the third stage of evolution. We have completed the first, second and third stages of evolution and therefore we are human beings because we operate with the mind. The mind controls all the senses and the body.
The next evolution is the evolution of intuition. It seems man has stepped into that stage now. Intuition is the ultimate point of evolution for the being. Therefore, all the bodies are present in a rudimentary, seed or dormant state, even the mineral. It will take millions and billions of years before these bodies eventually manifest.
We have a mental body but we cannot transmit it, although we could do it. The mental body can leave this body and go anywhere, but it is not developed. The evolution takes place very gradually. Through the practices of yoga or kundalini yoga, this evolution is accelerated. Then you can experience all the ten bodies, or all the bodies or maybe more that we do not know about.
What is antar mouna? In connection with reincarnation, if there is such a thing, where does the self go?
Antar mouna is a technique of yoga to deal with the natural problems of the mind. By the practices of antar mouna you are able to manage spiritual life without coming in confrontation with your mind. Therefore, antar mouna cannot be compared with the higher stages that you go to in spiritual life. The practices of antar mouna take you to a certain distance and when you are able to overcome your mind, meditation begins.
Who is Self? At least not the mind. The Self is the seer of the mind. The mind is not the seer. There is the seer of the mind as well. When you have experiences in meditation the seer of those experiences is known as atman. Atman is awareness. It is not the lower awareness; it is the higher awareness. It is nothing to do with the body or name. Atman is part of a universal reality.
There is a universal soul. You can call it by any name but it has no name. In the Upanishads they call him Brahman. I would like to call him Universal Spirit. Atman is individuality of the Universal Spirit. Just like you have the ocean and in the ocean you have a drop. There is no difference between the drop and the ocean. It has the same quality, it has the same taste, it has the same density. In the same way, the Universal Spirit and the individual spirit are essentially the same but there is one difference.
When this universal spirit is felt by me, it becomes individual spirit. The individual spirit in man or in everything has threefold attributes. The Upanishads call it Sat-Chit-Ananda. Sat means existence, Chit means awareness, ananda means absolute. These are the three attributes of the spirit in the individual and in the cosmos.
A lot of discussion has taken place in India on atma and Brahman for the last 30 to 40,000 years. Even now we discuss the individual spirit and the Universal Spirit. How is the spirit born? What is the basis of spirit? What are its activities? There are many questions, but ultimately an answer has not been found. Why?
The mind is finite, the Universal Spirit is infinite. How can the finite mind calculate or assess the infinite? The mind through which I am investigating the Universal Spirit is a very limited mind. It is not even one-pointed. It is full of impurities, foolishness and mistakes. All the knowledge faculties of the mind are full of errors. The quality of perception is erroneous. That mind sees one thing and feels another thing. Therefore, if you have to investigate the Universal Spirit, the mind has to undergo transformation.
You cannot see your face in a dirty mirror, you have to clean it. So, the mind has to be transformed and when the mind is transformed, it becomes the spirit. Then who is to know whom? Who is to investigate whom? I am the seer and I am the seen. How can the knower know himself? So this is the great puzzle, but the way is experience. Investigation will not lead us any- where because the investigator is either a little mind or a nobody.
There is a moment when the limitations of the mind drop and the ego is disintegrated. The mind becomes homogeneous, infinite, and it becomes one with the Spirit. Then self-experience takes place. What is that experience? Those who did not have it cannot say it, and those who have had it also cannot say it. So it is better to keep quiet.
14 May 1980, Copenhagen, Denmark