Pancha Boothas - The possibility of the five elements

Whether you want to know pleasure or you want to know bliss, for both your system has to become willing. If you want to know pleasure, your mind should come to a certain state of willingness and your physical body should be in a certain level of sensitivity. If you want to know the bliss of being one with something larger than yourself, once again your body has to cooperate. Whether it is the individual human body or the larger cosmic body, essentially, they are made of five elements – earth, water, fire, air and space. In this, the first four elements are the active participants – space is the catalytic force. It is in the lap of this boundless space that these four elements play the game. So, the pancha bhutas are the five elements of nature.

What you call “myself” is just a mischief of these five elements. If you want to realize the full potential of this mechanism that you call a human being or if you want to transcend this one and become one with the larger, cosmic mechanism, you need their cooperation. Unless you have a certain amount of mastery over these five elements you can neither know the pleasure of the individual self nor the blissfulness of the cosmic being.

The fundamental sadhana in yoga to gain mastery over these five elements or to purify the elements in the system in such a way that they cooperate, is referred to as bhuta shuddi. If these five elements don’t cooperate, you can struggle as much as you want, nothing happens. Only with their cooperation, from the basic aspects to the highest aspect, your life becomes a possibility. This human system is like a doorway. A door has two aspects to it – if you are always facing closed doors, for you doors mean that which stops you. If doors are opening up for you, then for you a door means a possibility of entering into something. In either case, it is the same door; which side of the door you are on decides everything about your life, even in terms of time and space. Whether you experience this body as a great possibility or a great barrier simply depends on the extent these five elements are cooperating.

India is a land which has seen that kind of sadhana, focus, understanding and mastery for a very long time. For the five elements in nature, there are five temples, which are all geographically located within the Deccan Plateau – four in Tamil Nadu, and one in Andhra Pradesh. These temples were created not for worship, but for sadhana. People moved from one temple to the other to do sadhana on each of the five elements. At one temple, they did sadhana on earth, then, they went to the next temple to do sadhana on water, and so on ( Pancha Bootha Stalas of South India). Unfortunately, this connection is not there anymore because the sadhana atmosphere has been taken away. This understanding and mastery is generally missing, but the temples still exist. Some of them have maintained that vibrance and quality, while some of them have become weak.

In Yoga, every sadhana has something to do with organizing these five elements in such a way that you can reap the best out of the individual being and the cosmic nature because both are just a play of these five elements. Whether this individual physical body becomes a stepping stone for your ultimate possibility or a hurdle towards that essentially depends on how you are able to deal with these five elements. What you are right now is just a little bit of earth, water, air and temperature. All the ingredients are out there in the garden; it just takes a little divine touch to make these four things into a throbbing human being.

Sitting here, if you are aware of how the water, air, earth and fire in your body are functioning, suddenly you live your life with so much ease, people start thinking you are superhuman. But this is not about being superhuman – this is about realizing that being human is super. Being human is super if only you learn to use your humanity and this human mechanism as a possibility, not as a barrier.

Wellness - The Yogic Way !

Fundamentally, the word health itself comes from the root word “whole”. What we call, ‘feeling healthy’, is that we have a sense of wholeness within us. If we are free of diseases medically, that is not health. If we feel like a complete human being in our body, mind and spirit, that is when we are really healthy. There are any number of people who are medically healthy, but not healthy in the real sense because they do not experience a sense of wellness within themselves.

If one has to experience this sense of wholeness and oneness, it’s important that one’s body, mind, and above all, one’s energy functions in a certain level of intensity within themselves. Now, physically, as per medical terms, one may be healthy, but energies may be lethargic. One doesn’t know why things don’t happen in life the way they should, both inside and outside; this is simply because one is not taking care of the well-being of his energy.

For every physical or psychological situation that you go through in life, there is an energy basis, which in turn has a chemical basis. In a way, modern allopathic medicines have become just chemistry. For every problem that arises in your body, you are just trying to take in some medicine, a chemical, and come to some kind of balance. If you use one chemical to bring down one aspect, or enhance another, there is also a side effect to this. For this side-effect, there is an antidote; for the antidote there is another antidote, it’s an endless chain. Whatever is happening on the chemistry level in your body is only controlled by the way your energies function. Because a man has got excess acids within him, you ingest some alkaline medicine into him. But why does he have excessive acids? Because of the way his mind, his body, and above all, his energy, functions.

So, in yoga, when we say “health,” we don’t look at the body; we don’t look at the mind; we only look at the energy – the way it is. If your energy body is in proper balance and full flow, your physical body and mental body will be in perfect health. There is no question about it. Keeping the energy body in full flow is not about doing any kind of healing or things like that. This is about going to the foundations of your energy system and activating it in a proper way, building a foundational yogic practice that establishes your energy in such a way that your body and mind are naturally fine.

When it comes to health, no human being gets to live in perfect conditions. The pressures of life, the food that we eat, the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, all these can affect us in many ways. The more our activities are in the world, the more we’re exposed to many things that can throw our chemistry off balance and create health problems. But if the energy in our system is properly cultivated and kept active, these things will not have an effect. The physical body and the mental body will be in perfect health; there is no question about it.

See life functions in many ways. Let us say you don’t know anything about electricity. You do not know what electricity is. This hall is dark. If I tell you to just press this button and the whole hall will be flooded with light, will you believe me? No. Now I just do it, and light appears. You will call it a miracle, isn’t it? Simply because you don’t understand how electricity works. Similarly, life happens in many different ways. You have limited yourself to just the physical, the logical – physical in experience, logical in thinking.

Right now, medical sciences are limited to just knowing the physical body. If anything happens beyond that, you think it’s a miracle. I just call it another kind of science, that’s all. It is another kind of science. Life functions in so many ways. You have just limited yourself to the physical and the logical. This life energy in you created your whole body – these bones, this flesh, this heart, this kidney and everything. Do you think it cannot create health? If your energies are kept in full flow and proper balance, it is capable of much more than just health.

Yoga - an Ultimate Expression

When we say "yoga," probably for many of you it means some physical postures: twisting yourself into some impossible postures. That is not what we are referring to as yoga.

Yoga means to be in perfect tune. Your body, mind and spirit and the existence are in absolute harmony. When you fine-tune yourself to such a point where everything functions so beautifully within you, naturally the best of your abilities will just flow out of you. When you’re happy, your energies always function better. Do you see that when you’re happy you have endless energy? Even if you don’t eat, if you don’t sleep, it doesn’t matter; you can go on and on. Have you noticed this? So just a little happiness is liberating you from your normal limitations of energy and capability.

Now, yoga is the science of activating your inner energies in such a way that your body, mind and emotions function at their highest peak. When your body and mind function in a completely different state of relaxation and a certain level of blissfulness, you can be released from so many things that most people are suffering from. Right now, you come and sit in your office, and you have a nagging headache. Your headache isn’t a major disease, but it takes away your whole capability for that day. Just that throbbing takes away everything. With the practice of yoga, your body and mind will be kept at their highest possible peak.

There are also other dimensions to yoga. When you activate your energies, you can function in a different way. As you are sitting here right now, you consider yourself to be a person. You are identified with many things, but what you call as "myself" is just a certain amount of energy. Do you know, modern science is telling you that the whole existence is just energy manifesting itself in different ways? If this is so, then you’re also just a little bit of energy functioning in a particular way. As far as science is concerned, this same energy which you call as "myself" can be here as a rock, lie there as mud, stand up as a tree, bark as a dog, or sit here as you. Everything is the same energy, but functioning at different levels of capability.

Similarly among human beings, though we’re all made of the same energy, we still don’t function at the same level of capability. What you call capability or talent, what you call your ability to do things in the world, your creativity, is just a certain way your energy functions. This energy, in one plant it functions to create rose flowers, in another plant it functions to create jasmine, but it’s all the same energy manifesting itself. If you gain a little bit of mastery over your own energies, you will see, things that you never imagined possible, you will do simply and naturally. This is the experience of any number of people who have started doing these practices. It is the inner technology of creating situations the way you want them.

With the same mud that we build such huge buildings, initially people were building little huts. They thought that’s all they could do with it. With the same earth, haven’t we built computers? What you call a computer is dug out of the earth. We thought we could only dig mud and make pots or bricks out of it. Now we dig the earth and make computers, cars, and even spacecrafts out of it. It is the same energy; we have just started using it for higher and higher possibilities. Similarly, our inner energies are like that. There is a whole technology as to how to use this energy for higher possibilities. Every human being must explore and know this. Otherwise, life becomes very limited and accidental; you get to do only what you’re exposed to. Once you start activating your inner energies, your capabilities happen in a different sphere altogether.

Yoga is a tool to find ultimate expression to life.

Become the master of your own Destiny !

For every individual his life is important. When his life is important, his wellbeing is also important. This is so for every individual, whoever he is. So people invest a lot of time on their wellbeing. You may find someone has invested a good 25 years to become an engineer, to earn a living. He has invested half his life to build his family, but how much time has he invested for his inner well-being?

Today, everyone is busy managing and fixing the outside situation. It doesn’t matter how much you fix them, you can never fix them one hundred percent. Nobody can. Affluent societies in the world are a living example for this. They fixed the outside sufficiently, but look at the people’s condition. For example in United States, the outside is sufficiently fixed but a significant percentage of the people are on anti-depressants, they have to take medication just to remain sane on a daily basis! That is not wellbeing. So if we want real wellbeing, we should take care of the inner environment also.

As there is a physical science to create external wellbeing, there is a whole inner dimension of science – the yogic science to create inner wellbeing through which you can become the master of your own destiny. You can go through life untouched, you can play with life whichever way you want, and still life cannot leave a scratch upon you. That is the mirracle that yoga can manifest in everyone's life. So now Welcome to this new opening of Yogis of BIT Blog !! Welcome to Yoga Club of BIT !!