POWER OF THE UNIVERSE LIES WITHIN YOU

I must have been in class VI or VII, a boy of just eleven or twelve. I was returning from the school, about one and a half kilometers away from my home, in the town of Keonjhar, Odisha. It was just in front of the children’s park, hardly two hundred meters away from home, that I saw a herd of cows being goaded back to their respective homes by a cowherd coming in the opposite direction. Those days, it was the practice even in small towns of Odisha to hire a boy or an adult who would go in the morning to collect all the cows and calves from a few residents of a particular locality, guide them to nearby a field where good grass and green leaves would be available for them to eat, and bring them back in the evening to their owners. I was casually walking past the herd that afternoon when a cow with large horns suddenly started charging towards me. It was very sudden and scary and actually shocked me quite a bit. By that age, because of my pious upbringing at home (both Mom and Dad being very religious and pious individuals) I had started having strong belief in God. But at the same time, school education had also developed in me a scientific mind that questioned everything in this world and always tried to find a logical answer to each and every problem facing me as an individual and perhaps the world at large. I thought to myself that if God was in charge of the world, and if there were about thirty-three crores Gods (three hundred and thirty million Gods, as believed in Hindu philosophy) and if the world population was about three hundred and fifty crores at that time (year 1972 or 1973), then each God from heaven must have been looking after the welfare and controlling every movement of around ten individuals on Earth - which was okay because God, being very powerful, can of course control ten people on Earth! It baffled me; I had not done anything wrong to the cow, nor had I done any misdeed on that particular day at school. So why then did the cow come charging at me? I moved away from its horns in the nick of the time and saved myself from any serious physical injury. But why on Earth did God want to assault me through this cow? This was perhaps the earliest memory I have of my continuous research on interaction between mortal man and invisible God. The second incident happened while I was walking on the bridge over the River Levin, near the town of Ulverstone, Tasmania, during one beautiful morning of February 2001. I had gone to present a technical paper as part of my PhD work at a two day international conference on Earth Sciences. While walking over the bridge, I had a subtle flash of feeling inside me, a kind of urge to jump into the flowing river beneath the bridge! I was not hundred percent fit those days in terms of my own mental health condition and was under medical treatment. Too much of anxiety driven stress on whether I could complete my PhD within the stipulated period had already caused depression in me and the fear of loss of face, due to the likely failure, had created a subconscious urge to escape! The third incident occurred sometime in mid-2004. I was at a week-long spiritual training workshop at Jorhat, Assam, conducted by one of the teachers under Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, the founder and head of Art of Living Foundation in India. It was the penultimate day of the course, popularly known as the Foundation Course. Being very true to what I was being asked to do, I was following each instruction carefully, following what the recorded voice of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, coming from a tape recorder run by his disciple, Mr. Samir Jolly, was saying. The participants were being trained on a specific but most important part of the course: Sudarshan Kriya. I had been thoroughly enjoying the training course over the last few days and was very attentive to the detailed procedures given to perform the Sudarshan Kriya and actually did it in a meticulous manner without any prejudice. After nearly twenty-five or thirty minutes of the exercise, a simple yogic breathing exercise, when the routine was in the waning phase, so to say, I felt a sensation of complete nothingness - something that amounted to a clear case of loss of my own existence as I knew it so far. I felt as if ‘I’, in the normal sense of the term, lost its meaning, my existence, and that I was sort of in communion with the entire Cosmic Universe, within an energy field, under its influence and yet nowhere as a separate entity. This feeling lasted for a few minutes. The teacher on that day, Mr. Samir Jolly, when queried by me on what this feeling could be, explained curtly, ‘It could be a feeling of Samadhi!’ I had never gone through such an experience ever before, but literature says Samadhi refers to a blissful state where the yogi is absorbed into the One. This incredible feeling has never been replicated in the last ten years of my life. Perhaps that’s because I have never been able to sit down, concentrate and truly and sincerely practice Sudarshan Kriya. While being engrossed in my mundane daily routine, I have never focused on a deliberate journey along this specialized spiritual path to attain Samadhi, but the feeling which I experienced for a few minutes that day remains within me as vivid as I experienced it. It was an exalted feeling wherein ordinary emotions associated with vibrations of mental thought processes were completely gone and my separate existence was merged with the all-pervasive God, if we have some meaning for it!