Obsessive-compulsive spirituality by Dr Ramesh Bijlani

The spiritual path attracts all kinds of people, each  endowed with some peculiar psychological strengths and weaknesses.  The Bhagavad Gita 7:16  (see Four types of Divine seekers) speaks of four types of spiritual aspirants: those who seek refuge  from worldly troubles, those who seek intellectual satisfaction in spiritual knowledge, those who wish to use the Divine strength to fulfill worldly ambitions and above all, those who synthesize devotion and knowledge and seek union with the Divine without expecting anything in return.  In this context, Dr Ramesh Bijlani, who is currently affiliated with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Delhi, has written a perspicacious article detailing some pitfalls that can be observed in young, over-eager spiritual aspirants.  This rest of this article is excerpted from his blog.

Sleep disorders : somnambulism and somniloquy

In this article, we discuss sleep disorders such as somnambulism and somniloquy from an occult perspective.   There are supposed to be five concentric sheaths in our consciousness and during sleep, the subtle sheaths eject themselves from the gross physical sheath to travel in their corresponding subtle realms, as was discussed in an earlier article on Explaining out-of-body and near-death experiences.  Some sleep disorders can be attributed to the irregularity in the manner in which these sheaths interact with each other during sleep.

Sri Aurobindo on synchronicity

The eminent Swiss psychologist Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity to describe what he called “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events“.  A disciple of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Nirodbaran, once experienced this type of uncanny acausal coincidence.  In this brief post, we read Sri Aurobindo’s explanation of synchronicity.  Synchronous events occur because, unbeknownst to us, we are eternally in communion with the people around us through the inner sheaths of our consciousness, and sometimes those hidden perceptions float to the surface, making us respond in some striking fortuitous manner which our plodding reasoning mind would not have otherwise exhibited.

Raising a child prodigy

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married couple in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a whizkid.  In today’s hyper-competitive world, harried parents are incessantly searching for and investing in innovative methods to secure the ultimate edge for their bewildered toddler.   In the mad rush to turn the child into the next Einstein, one area which seems to have been overlooked is the time before childbirth.   Few seem to have asked the question : can the pre-natal period be exploited to pre-select a genius?  The answer is yes, and it can be done without exorbitantly priced genetic engineering; all you need is just conscious  aspiration and prayer.   Read on…