Inner Purity (A Technique from Vigyan Bhairav Tantra)

Inner Purity

(A Technique from Vigyan Bhairav Tantra)

– Anant Sri

In this technique from Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Bhagwan Shiva says that with the help of a needle, prick any part of your body, full of immortality, and enter delicately into this event of pricking with dignity and awareness, and attain to your purity.

We normally know that our body is full of blood, bones and muscles and all sorts of things that fill us with disgust. So, to begin with we have to change our thinking regarding our body and know that our body is full of immortality. There is our consciousness pervading all over the body, that is not confined to the body alone for its nature is limitless and immortal. Over this substratum of consciousness does all the changes of the body-mind instrument take place. Initially this will remain as a thought but when we begin to live with it, we get glimpses of the reality.

Here Shiva is making use of the experience of pain for turning within. This technique makes you more live towards your body, it makes you more sensitive. This is an experiment of centering, by making use of the energy of pain. Pain is something we are familiar with and come across now and then in our day to day life. Whether slight or intense, but we do go through the experience of pain in life quite often.

The technique is to use this experience of pain and turn within and then leaving the activity on the periphery, we glide within as witness to the happening. And with this, we realize that the experience was at the body level, where as we are different from it, and a detachment is thus automatically created.

If you are having some pain in your body, you can right away go into the experience, or else you can just prick a needle anywhere on the body to create pain and then enter into the experience, making sure that the needle is sterilized.

Strange that experience of pricking is at the level of the body, but it goes in the background, and you begin to experience your immortality, your consciousness within.

This is the consciousness that Krishna is talking about in the Gita that it is immortal; nothing external or internal can harm it. It is indestructible.

To go into this experience, you have to increase your sensitivity towards the body. In pain we experience our body more. Make use of its energy to turn within. Let the pain remain outside and if you wish, you can treat it but ensure that it is accepted with dignity. Do not make it an issue to create havoc, that we normally do, we become irritable that why did it happen, who is to be blamed, and all types of indecency is seen in our behavior.  We must wakefully be with it delicately and in a dignified manner and know that this energy cooperates in making us centered and with this centering, we experience bliss, that is the nature of consciousness. The experience of consciousness is the experience of bliss and during the process, if you have entered immortality, creating a distance with your body, then your pain may disappear suddenly.

Try to disassociate from your body, try to break your identification with your body. Whatever happens to the body, you think it is happening to you, whereas whatever happens is on the circumference and you are the centre, intact and unaffected, a witness to all activities.

In this technique, Shiva has given a dignity to the body. Normally people treat the body with disrespect and look down upon it and then it is difficult to disassociate with it. It is only with dignity and respect that you can create a detachment with the body.  And then if you treat your body with dignity and respect, then only you can treat any other body with respect. When you know that your body is full of consciousness, you know that other’s body is also full of consciousness, and you realize the universe as your own extended body. And as you realize the oneness of consciousness pervading the entire universe, then non-violence and compassion happen by themselves, there is no need to practice them. The whole universe is अमृतमय, but it expresses as two levels, one breaks, it dissolves whereas the other is indestructible. From the pedestal of transitory, you jump to the experience of indestructible, the experience of absolute and eternal. If you go into the condemnation of the pedestal, if that itself is not understood properly, then where is the question of taking a leap from there. Those who try to take a leap without the pedestal, fall and fail for they get deluded.

Drop all your struggles with pain. Become dignified, in peace with yourself and then you can experience the pain more clearly and be with it, and you shall find a distance between you and the happening and witnessing will be natural without any practice of witnessing.

As long as, that does not become your experience, till then always remember you are more than the body, know that things are happening to body, not to you and continue to be with this thought and soon you shall see the truth. Some day suddenly you see that one moment comes and you get a glimpse of the immortality. This technique is a device to break your identification with your body. Pain is an easy tool because it is in pain that you want to detach yourself with the body.

While defining the technique, Shiva has said that attain to your inner purity. Inner purity is the experience of pure bliss, pure consciousness. Purity is divine, an experience of consciousness, changeless and limitless.  Our identification with the changing brings impurity and our non-identification results in purity. Here we are not talking of purity from the angle of morality but from the point of spirituality. Limits bring in impurity whereas limitlessness is inner purity that finds expression as good health.

Health finds its expression on the body mind but it not a part of the body mind. Health is an attribute of consciousness, just as beauty that is an attribute of consciousness that reflects through our body-mind. Pain and health can co-exist for one is felt at the body level where as the other belongs to consciousness level. Since the body level is in transition and changes are bound to take place, therefore pain may also not stay for long. Change your focus from the body to the consciousness and body pain may go, but that should not be your aim.