Mastery Over The Five Elements

Now the sutras.

Once you are beyond the mind body, for the first time you become aware that you are not the mind but the witness. Below the mind you remain identified with it. Once you know that thoughts, mental images, ideas, they are just objects, floating clouds in your consciousness; you are separate from them - immediately.

"The power of contacting the state of consciousness which is outside the mental body and therefore inconceivable is called mahavideha." 

You become beyond body. mahavideha means one who is beyond body, one who is no longer confined to any body, one who knows that he is not the body, gross or subtle, one who knows that he is infinite, with no boundaries. Mahavideha means one who has come to feel that he has no boundaries. All boundaries are confinements, imprisonments; and he can break them, drop them, and can become one with the infinite sky.

This moment of realizing oneself as the infinite is the moment:

"Through this power the covering of light is destroyed." 

Then the covering is dropped which has been hiding your light. You are like a light which is being hidden under layers and layers. By and by each and every cover has to be taken away. More light will penetrate out of it.

Manumaya kosha, the mental body, once dropped, you become meditation, you become a no-mind. All effort here is how to go beyond the manumaya kosha - how to become aware that I am not the thinking process.

This is one of the most potential sutras of Patanjali, and very significant for future science. One day or other, science is going to discover the meaning of this sutra. Science is already on the path towards it. This sutra says that all the elements in the world, the pancha mahabhutas - the earth, the air, the fire, etc. - they come out of nothing, and they go again into nothingness to rest. Everything comes out of nothing and when tired goes back and rests into nothingness.

Now science, particularly physicists, agree with it, that matter has come out of nothing.

The deeper they have gone into matter, the more they have discovered that there is nothing like the material. The deeper they go, matter becomes more and more elusive and finally it slips out of their fingers. Nothing remains, just emptiness, just pure space. Out of pure space everything is born. Looks very illogical, but life is illogical. The whole of modern science has become illogical because if you persist in your logic you cannot move into reality. If you move into reality you have to drop the logic. And of course when there is a choice between logic and the reality, how can you choose the logic? You have to drop the logic.

Just fifty + years before,.when scientists came to realize that quanta, electric particles, behave in a very ridiculous way - behave like a Zen Master -> unbelievable, absurd....

  Double-Slit Experiment

Sometimes they look like waves and sometimes they look like particles. Now before that it was a tacit understanding that something can be either a particle or a wave. One and the same thing cannot be both together, simultaneously. A particle and a Wave? It means something can be a point and a line together, at the same time. Impossible. Euclid will not agree. Aristotle will simply deny; you have gone mad. A point is a point, and a line is many points in a row, so how can one point be a line also at the same time remaining a point? Looks absurd. And Euclid and Aristotle prevailed. Just fifty years before, their whole edifice collapsed because scientists came to know that the quantum, the electric particle, behaves in both ways - simultaneously.

Logicians raised arguments, and they said, "This is not possible." Physicists said, "What can we do? It is not a question of possibility or impossibility. It is so! We cannot do anything. If the quantum is not going to follow Aristotle, what can we do? And if the quantum behaves in a non-Euclidean way and does not follow the geometry of Euclid, what can we do? It is behaving that way, and we have to listen to the behavior of the real and the reality." This is one of the very critical moments in the history of human consciousness.

Then it has always been believed that something can come only out of something. Simple and natural, obviously so. How can something come out of nothing? Then matter disappeared, and the scientists have to conclude that everything is born out of nothing, and everything again disappears into nothing. Now they are talking about black holes.

Black holes are holes of tremendous nothingness. I have to call it "tremendous" nothingness because that nothingness is not just absence. It is full of energy, but the energy is of nothingness. There is nothing to find, but there is energy. Now they say there exist black holes in existence. They are parallel to stars. Stars are positive, and parallel to each star there is a black hole. The star is, the black hole is not. And each star when burned, exhausted, becomes a black hole. And each black hole, when rested, becomes a star.

Matter, no-matter goes on changing. Matter becomes no-matter; no-matter becomes matter. Life becomes death; death becomes life. Love becomes hate; hate becomes love.

Polarities continuously change.

This sutra says, "Performing samyama on their gross, constant, subtle, all-pervading, and functional state brings mastery over the panchabhutas - the five elements."

Patanjali is saying that if you have come to understand your true nature of witnessing, and then if you concentrate, you bring samyama on any matter, you can make it appear or disappear. You can help things to materialize - because they come out of nothingness. And you can help things to dematerialize.

Now that yet remains to be seen by physicists whether it is possible or not. It is happening that matter changes and becomes no-matter, no-matter changes, becomes matter. They have come to feel many absurd things these fifty + years. It is one of the most potential ages ever, where so many things have exploded that it has become almost impossible to confine them in a system. How to make a system? It was very easy just fifty years before to create a self-contained system. Now impossible. The reality has poked its nose in from everywhere and destroyed all doctrinaires, systems, dogmas. The reality has proved to be too much.

Scientists say it is happening. Patanjali says it can be made to happen. If it is happening, then why can it not be made to happen? Just watch. You heat water; at a hundred degrees it becomes vapor. It has always been happening, before fire was ever discovered. The sun rays were evaporating water from the seas and rivers and clouds were forming and water was coming back again into the rivers, again evaporating. Then man discovered fire, and then he started heating water, evaporating it.

Whatsoever is happening, ways and means can be found to make it happen. If it is already happening, then it is not against reality. Then you have just to know how to make it happen. If matter becomes no-matter, no-matter becomes matter, if things change polarities, things disappear into nothingness and things appear out of nothingness - if this is already happening - then Patanjali says ways and means can be found through which it can be made to happen. And this he says is the way: if you have come to recognize your being, beyond the five seeds, you become capable of materializing things or dematerializing things.

It still remains for the scientific workers to find out whether it is possible or not, but it seems plausible. There seems to be no logical problem in it.

And then come the eight siddhis, eight powers, of yogis. The first is anima, and then there is laghima and garima, etc. The eight powers of the yogi are that they can make their body disappear, or they can make their body so small, so small, that it becomes almost invisible, or they can make their bodies so big, as big as they want. It is under their control to make the body small, big, or disappear completely, or to appear in many places simultaneously.

Looks impossible, but things that look impossible by and by become possible. It was impossible for man to fly; nobody ever believed. The Wright brothers were thought to be mad, insane.

When they first invented their first aeroplane, they were so afraid to tell people - that if they come to know they will be caught and hospitalized. The first flight was done completely unknown to anybody - just these two brothers. And they invented their first aeroplane hiding in a basement, so nobody comes to know what they are doing.

Everybody had believed that they had gone completely mad - who has ever flown? Their first air flight was only six seconds - only of sixty seconds - but it tremendously changed the whole of history, the whole of humanity. It became possible. Nobody had ever thought that the atom could be split. It was split, and now man can never be the same again.

Many things have happened which were always thought to be impossible. We have reached to the moon. It was the symbol of impossibility. In all the languages of the world there are expressions like, "Don't long for the moon." That means don't long for the impossible. Now we have to change those expressions. And in fact once we have reached the moon, now nothing bars the path. Now everything has become available; it is only a question of time.

Einstein has said that if we can invent a vehicle which moves with the speed of light, then a person can go on travelling and he will never age. If he goes on that spaceship which moves with the speed of light when he is thirty years old and comes back after thirty years, he will remain of thirty years. His friends and brothers will be thirty years older, a few of them will be already dead, but the person will remain of thirty years. What nonsense are you talking? Einstein says time and its effect disappear when one is moving with the speed of light. A man can go on infinite space travel and can come back after five hundred years. All the people here will be gone, nobody will recognize him, and he will not recognize anybody, but he will remain of the same age. You are aging because of the speed of the earth. If the speed is as much as light, which is really tremendous, then you will not age at all.

Patanjali says that if you have moved beyond all the five bodies, you have gone beyond all five elements. Now you are in a state from where you can control anything you wish.

Just by the idea that you want to become small, you will become small; if you want to become big, you w ill become big; if you want to disappear, you can disappear.

It is not necessarily so, that yogis should do it. Buddhas have never been known to do it. Patanjali himself has not been known to do it. What Patanjali is saying: he is revealing all the possibilities.

In fact, a man who has attained to his uttermost being, for what will he think to become small? For what? He can't be so foolish. For what? For what would he like to become like an elephant? What is the point in it? And why should he want to disappear? He cannot be interested in amusing people, their curiosities. He is not a magician. He is not interested in people applauding him. For what? In fact the moment a person reaches to the highest peak of his being, all desires disappear. Siddhis appear when desires disappear. This is the dilemma: powers come when you don't want to use them. In fact they come only when the person has disappeared who always wanted to have them.

So Patanjali is not saying that yogis will do such things. They have never been known to do such things. And the few people who try to do them are not yogis. And the few people who do them, in fact cannot do them; they are only tricksters.

Now Satya Sai Baba type people go on materializing Swiss-made watches. These are all tricks, and nobody should be enchanted by these trick4. Whatsoever Satya Sai Baba has been doing can be done by thousands of magicians all over the world, very easily, but you never go to magicians and touch their feet because you know that they are doing tricks. But if somebody who is thought to be religious is doing the same trick, then you think it is a miracle.

This part of Patanjali's YOGA SUTRAS is to make you aware that these things become possible but they are never actualized because the person who would want it, who would have always liked to go on an ego trip through these powers, is there no more.

Miraculous powers happen to you when you are not interested in them. This is the economy of existence. If you desire, you remain impotent; if you don't desire, you become infinitely potent. This I call the law of banking: if you don't have money, no bank is going to give you; if you have money, every bank is ready to give you. When you don't need, all is available; when you are needy, nothing is available.

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