Swadhyay: A ray of light in to the well

I read "The Autobiography of a Yogi" by Paramhansa Yogananda, for the first time, around 2006 when I was at the National Academy of Direct Taxes. At that time, it looked more like fiction to me. I read it again after doing my first vipassana camp in 2012 and it carried an altogether different meaning to me. 

Many spiritually realized masters, who have by their own experience understood the nature of reality, try to express the same by writing books or speaking it out. However, the same does not appeal to the rational mind. The rational mind is trapped in its own biases. For a long, scientists were quite convinced that plants have no emotion. Then a lot of experiments were conducted by scientists like J C Bose and other scientists and they demonstrated that if we have the intention to uproot a plant, sitting at quite a good distance, the plant starts emitting stress photons that can be captured by the photometer. Further experiments on plants demonstrated that if we water the plant daily, it develops a bond with us and if we meet an accident thousands of kilometers away from the plant, it starts emitting stress photons. Many such experiments have been referred to by the author Lynne Mctaggart in her book "The Field". 

When we read these books, they give us a ray of hope to peep out of the mental well, we are trapped in. Most of us are so obsessed with our well that we mentally reject all these writings and do now allow the ray of light any access to our well. Few get curious and try to assign their own meaning to reality to justify living in the well. But, if we are a little curious and open to knowing the reality, these books help us quite a lot.

 I read the book "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor. She is a brain scientist and had a stroke of the left brain. Being a brain scientist, she tried to make sense of the experience she had. Reading about her experiences opened me to a different world altogether. The world of neurology. How the left and the right brain function differently and how relative our worldview is. 

Books like "The Search in Secret India" by Paul Brunton take us to an altogether different dimension of possibilities. Paul Brunton was a British agnostic who came to India to explore the true nature of the saints living in India. He neither believed nor disbelieved, which is the right attitude for exploration. He met different yogis in the Himalayas and penned down the experiences with truthfulness. He saw with his eyes the dead bird being made alive and many more such experiences. 

I am not at all saying that we start believing in magic. I am just saying that these experiences open our minds to the existence of new possibilities. We realize the limitations of our thoughts and knowledge. The moment we understand how limited our thoughts are, we commence our exploration into new possibilities. We start making efforts to come out of our well.

Dr. Robert Svoboda came to India to do his Ayurvedic course. While staying in India, he met Swami Vimalananda who shared many of his experiences which have been penned down by Dr. Svoboda in his book "Aghora" which comes in 3 parts. The books take us through altogether different dimensions of reality. 

All these books help our rational minds to realize the limitations of logic. If our quest to understand reality is strong, these books prepare us to take the first step to come out of the well. They offer us a ray of hope. They act as the link between the reason and logic, we are preoccupied with, and the wider reality that we neither understand nor acknowledge. We take the first step of acknowledging such possibilities and the rational mind becomes receptive and curious to understand the scientific explanation of these experiences.