Dreams have been a mystery and a puzzle to people of all ages throughout time. The wonderment of dreams has been apparent in history, philosophy and now even in science. This leads us to assume that the dream state is not unlike the waking state, for especially in this technological age of communication, we live more in our mind than in our physical body. Millions are computer literate and deal in concepts far beyond the normal state anyone would have found himself in one hundred years ago. The mind never sleeps—only the physical body experiences this indulgence—and the physical brain perceives and records what passes through the mind, but the astral brain perceives and records…oh-so-much more! Therefore, keeping this in mind, there is a continuity of consciousness twenty-four hours a day, but not all of it is perceived or recorded by the physical brain, either through the day or through the night. This is why it is difficult to remember all the details of one’s life and experience, even as short a time as forty-eight hours ago. It is only the important things, those which make the strongest impression within the physical brain’s memory patterns, that are remembered. ¶In the inner worlds, inner universe, there is a life not unlike this one that we experience as a jīva, but far more complete, intricate, logical and much more advanced. Within this world, the Antarloka, there are great schools where students gather to learn of a more productive future that they can participate in creating when they incarnate. Here they mix and mingle with other souls whose physical bodies are sleeping and whom they will work and cooperate with during their next cycle of birth. It is a well-planned-out universe, both the outer universe and the inner universe. The value of sleep for the person on the path is to gain the ability to bypass the lower dream state and soar deeper within to these inner-plane schools. This is done by the repetition of mantras, japa yoga, just before sleep, after relaxing the body through haṭha yoga and diaphragmatic breathing. ¶It is almost traditional in many cultures to try to remember one’s dreams, and dreamologists will even interpret them for you. This all borders close to the realm of superstition and is far less desirable for spiritual growth than other more pragmatic types of practices. A beginner on the path, or even one in the intermediate phase, should endeavor to forget dreams and strengthen the fibers of the mind and psyche through daily sādhana. There is actually a time, on the yoga mārga, after the charyā and kriyā mārgas have been well mastered and passed through, that the remembrance of one’s dreams is beneficial and fruitful, but this would only be between the guru and the śishya. ¶When japa is well performed and the sincere desire is maintained to transcend the forces of the physical body and enter into the astral schools of learning, the aspirant would have dreamless nights. A deep sleep would prevail. There may be a few seconds of dreaming just before awakening, to which one should not pay any attention, as the astral body quickly reenters the physical. But a deep, dreamless sleep is in itself an indicator that the purusha is totally detached from the physical forces and totally intact and functioning in the Devaloka. Himalayan Academy is an academy in the Devaloka in which ṛishis of the Nandinātha Sampradāya teach, help and guide tens of thousands of devotees of God Śiva who have been influenced by the words and teachings of our sampradāya. ¶We want to forget bad dreams as quickly as possible, lest by remembering them through the conscious mind we impress them in the immediate subconscious and make them manifest in daily life. To think about a bad dream is to create. To forget it is to avoid creating. Therefore, if you have the slightest worry about dreams and are not directly under a guru’s guidance on a daily basis, it is best to let them slide by and consider them unimportant and not a part of you, as you would consider a television program to be. ¶Really bad nightmare kinds of dreams are not natural to the sleeper’s mind. Therefore, we must assume that they are produced by outside influences, such as what the neighbors are going through in the next apartment, the apartment above or the apartment below, or what a dear friend or relative may be experiencing in daily life. Subjective as they are, the frustrated, confused, even threatening, dreams of this nature are taken to be one’s creation or one’s own problem. However, this is more than often not true. A child may be tormented by nightmares and wake up screaming, and the solution would be to have it sleep in another room, away from the next-door apartment where the husband and wife are battling, entertaining hateful thoughts. These kinds of quarrels permeate the inner atmosphere one hundred yards around, as far as the loudest voice could be heard if there were no walls. This is why those on the path seek the quiet of a forest, a life away from the city, in order to perform sādhana in their spiritual pursuit. Dreams of capture and chase are not products of one’s own mind. They are definitely outside influences. §
When we are in a dream, it seems so real to us. When we wake up, we reflect on it as a dream, which is usually thought of as unreal. Similarly, Indian philosophers enjoy saying that we are in this life and it seems real until we wake up, through spiritual enlightenment, to a greater reality. If we postulate that dreams are real, we must then acknowledge that what we remember of them is our uninhibited states of consciousness, experience, unencumbered by society, local and national customs or inhibitions planted into the mind by parents at a young age. Knowing this will let us know who we really are, underneath the façade, encumbered by society, suppressed by beliefs and attitudes of the waking state. We are free in our dreams. No one is looking at us. Society, family and friends are not judging us. ¶Āyurveda physicians state that those of the kapha dosha, which is water and earth, often dream of water. One who is of the pitta dosha, fire nature, dreams of fire. A vāta, or air nature, dreams of air. But they also say that it may be best to forget your dreams, because they might be produced by indigestion or constipation. And these may be dreams you would not want to remember. Nevertheless, if dreams depict who we really are, it may be beneficial for those under the guidance of a satguru to write them down each morning upon arising and put them at his holy feet at the end of each month. This would be strictly a guru-śishya training relationship and for a specified period of time, not more than four months. It might be scary, even disheartening, for you to do this for yourself. And satgurus would recommend that you forget your dreams upon awakening, for if remembered they may bring that reality into the awakened reality and produce experiences you would not want to experience. ¶One more thing comes to mind—this is that occasionally I have experienced being absolutely aware, fully conscious of the physical body, eyes closed, while simultaneously seeing through the eyes of the inner body and communicating through thought with astral people in my room. Sometimes when the maṭhavāsis have been late to feed me because I was napping but fully conscious, the guardian devas would come before me with delicious food, nicely prepared, and with their astral hands spoon it into my mouth, and I could actually smell and taste it. When the astral meal is over, I am not physically hungry anymore. During the height of the Sri Lanka civil war crisis, when thousands of my devotees there were being killed day after day, several times during the day I deliberately took naps, off and on. Just before these sleeps and just before awakening in the morning, I would meet with those who had been killed and bless them one at a time as they came before me. I was totally conscious as my astral hand would put the blessing, the mark of vibhūti, Śiva’s sacred ash, upon their forehead. Then they would go on into the Śivaloka. This type of physical-astral experience is definitely not a dream; nor is it a superconscious vision. It is an actual, intense human happening involving this world and its astral double, coexisting in communicative activity. Unlike dreams, which are quickly forgotten, these physical-astral experiences, not unlike superconscious visions, leave an indelible mark in the physical brain and are more vivid months and even years later than when they were experienced. ¶For three or four years in the late fifties, I researched the death experience and its astral interface with this apparent reality. The dream world was explored, and the astral interface with waking consciousness within it. We discovered that there are many thousands of astral lovers who regularly visit women to satisfy their sexual desires. These women are single, either not married yet, or divorced, or married, but their husbands were not able to satisfy them. It was also discovered that because of this psychic phenomenon, women who have had unhappy marriages are more attracted than men to spiritualism, as it was called in those days. Such astral male lovers are called gandharvas in the Vedas, and their female counterparts are the apsarās. These are definitely experiences, astral-physical-plane interface experiences, as real as happenings during the waking day. §
In the early 1980s, just before Sri Lanka’s civil war, I was invited by the government to travel through the country and visit all who were attached to our Śiva Yogaswāmī Paramparā during the past century. There were massive parades for miles and miles in villages we passed through, grand receptions, rides on great chariots and hundreds of garlands from those that came alive for the event. All during these times, knowing that war was imminent, I preached that Śiva’s devotees do not fear death, it is only a passing into another life. Later, at the height of the civil war, when my devotees were experiencing the transition and the killing and torture, it was perplexing to me to understand how people that were so high in consciousness and culture could go so low. ¶In many, many astral, conscious states, I visited the lowest chakras, protected by devonic helpers and unseen by those within them, and discovered for myself these regions before ever reading about them. Having never read a book from cover to cover in my life and, having been trained from very early years, sixteen or seventeen, to have the experience first and then somehow or other it would be verified by scripture later on, this was my path. I was told that to know what was coming up in the experiential pattern of spiritual unfoldment could be to put into the subconscious mind the experience and memories of it, which would not be the experience at all. This, I was taught, would build a spiritual pride that would detour one from the path to Self Realization. Very carefully I observed this, fully understanding the wisdom of the advice. It was amazing to me to have verified in obscure scriptures that the chakras, or talas, below the mūlādhāra were exactly as when I visited each of them, guided by mighty devas who had the power to go anywhere within the mind. Life has taught me that knowledge is best when it is experiential, not intellectually learned and then remembered. This I have endeavored to impress upon my devotees over the past five decades. ¶Hindus say there are kinds of dreams conjured from the needs of the individual, and then there is another kind that is sent by the Gods. I myself have appeared in dreams to people that have never seen me, seen my picture or even knew of my physical existence. Gods communicate by pictures. Therefore, certain kinds of dreams have meaning if they are sent by the Gods. Signs, symbols and body language to the Asian people have great meaning. For instance, folding your arms across the chest in the West may be just resting them; in the East it is a sign of disdain. Dreams from the Gods come to very religious people who live a disciplined life of sādhana, rising at four in the morning, and living Hindu Dharma to the best of their ability to understand it. They have attracted the attention of the Gods because they have penetrated the realms of the Gods. If they let down, then they would not have those kinds of visitations any longer. ¶The average lifetime is about eighty years in the United States. The average time someone sleeps is about one third of his life. Therefore, we are dreaming about twenty-seven years of our life. We assume that dreams only occur when the physical body is asleep. But what about the unproductive thoughts, the daydreams, thinking about unfounded fears, the uncontrolled states of waking mind, mental arguments, mental fears, the uncontrolled combative thoughts, fantasies—sexual, violent, tender, loving, worrisome, fretful, indecisive or gruesome? ¶If someone confesses his dreams he has at night, he should also confess his dreams during the day. The ancient scriptures say that dreams are like our waking thoughts in this way: if we dream and forget the dream, it is as though the dream had never happened. If you think a thought during the day and forget the thought, it’s as though the thought had never happened. It’s when we remember and speak out a dream or remember and speak out a thought that it has reality on this plane.§
Some dreams come from the person’s nature, vāta, pitta, kapha, and others from the emotional nature, some from subconscious fears, and some from just playing back experiences in daily life. But certain dreams are brought by the Gods. We might not call these dreams, by our way of defining them. And there are prophetic dreams. Prophetic dreams come from the superconscious mind, beyond the subconscious. It is a state of mind that sees into the future and into the past simultaneously, is able to read the ākāśic records. During intense periods of one’s life that will manifest in the future, be they good, bad or mixed, it is this state of mind within every human soul that is tapped, or that of its own volition infiltrates its wisdom in coming events upon the physical brain through what is called a prophetic dream. There is no mystery here. Sincere souls should be warned of impending dangers or good fortune that might disrupt their current mundane lifestyle. To be forewarned is to be forearmed. Like visions of the Gods and astral-physical interfaces, prophetic dreams, which are more like visions, are also remembered and cannot be forgotten. They are remembered day after day even more vividly than when they occurred. Let’s not be unaware that our own superconsciousness, our third eye, our dūrdarśana, our far-seeingness, can warn us of events. ¶If you dream that you are dying, in Hindu thought it means you are going to live. But if you dream your teeth are falling out, you are going to die. And we must know that this has been tried and tested and proved worthy over thousands of years of experience. I myself, being of a kapha dosha, dream of water. When the water is calm, I know that there will be no mental disturbances in the foreseeable future. But when there are dashing ocean waves, I know that within seventy-two hours, three days, there will be a mental disturbance with an aggression of mental force. This has been proven to my external, conscious mind time and time again. The ancient texts speak of giant floods that consume the world, as in typical dreams. The single most talked about dream in Indian lore is of flying. ¶If you remember a dream a month later, it is not an ordinary dream. It has meaning. Therefore, if you are prone to go to a dream analyst, and you want to get the right knowledge from his perception, present to him an astral-physical interface, a dream or a vision, at least thirty-one days after it has happened and which is still important to you and a part of your life. This is the best advice we can give for an honest appraisal. This is very good satguru advice. ¶The most prophetic dreams come in the early hours just before sunrise. The more subconscious-cleansing type dreams come before that time. But in my own experience, the really impressive dreams come just before waking up at three or four o’clock in the morning. It’s always a couple of hours before sunrise. Eleven or twelve o’clock? No! These are kind of witchy times, subconscious times, and dreams experienced then just fade away. ¶When you wake up during the night, discipline should be applied lest you just roll over in a semi-conscious state and return to the dream world, going back into a subconscious or lower astral area—which might be negative, might be positive, you don’t know. To avoid this, you should become fully awake. The ideal practice for seekers is to sit up when you wake up during the night. Sit and listen for a minute or two to the nāda-nāḍī śakti or go into the light within your head if you are able. Then, if you wish, consciously lie down and go back to sleep, just like you did when you went to bed in the first place. ¶If you then have difficulty returning to sleep, you can assume you have had sufficient rest for your physical body. In such a case, don’t force yourself to return to sleep, waiting for the alarm to ring, which is a kind of indulgence. Instead, get up. That means fully get out of bed, get dressed and do something useful. If you just roll over and go into the semiconscious dream world, you can go into subconscious areas, into the Pretaloka, and even have astral attacks from astral entities, and even into the talas below the mūlādhāra. This drains the physical and astral energies of their life and vigor. In my early training, both ways were tested, so the knowledge from actual experience is evident. Follow the formula: “Wake up, get up.” One of my sādhanas practiced in Sri Lanka in the late ’40s was to sleep for only two hours, wake up with the help of a small alarm clock, sit in the lotus posture and meditate as long as possible, reset the alarm for another two hours, and repeat until just before sunrise. ¶When people begin to meditate and are on the spiritual path, working with themselves—and this means that they do accomplish making a difference in their behavior, their beliefs, attitudes and daily actions—their dream life will reflect these results as well. For them, the dream karmas can be worked out. Karma is often qualified as a force that is sent out from us and returns to us, generally through other people. Nearly always, karma is related to the waking state. However, we do experience emotions in dreams. The world within is as solid as is the body in which we find ourself in the awakened state. We do experience in the inner worlds, while the physical body is asleep, forces going out from our thoughts, feelings and what we say and think, and these obviously are dream karmas, real karmas that will eventually manifest on the physical plane unless reexperienced and dissolved within the dream world itself. The reason why dream karmas can only be worked out by those who are performing sādhana and making actual changes in their lives is because they have effected a certain soul control over their mind, physical body and emotions, and this naturally carries over into the dream reality. §
We really should have another word for this dream reality, as the word dream has taken on connotations of something that only exists in one’s imagination. These kinds of dreams—when a person is in his astral body and can feel what he touches, emote to his experiences, think and talk—are not what is known as the dream state. This is an astral experience, similar to the death experience, but the astral body is still connected to the physical body. Dreams and death are brothers, with the exception that the silver cord is not broken, which is the psychic cord of actinodic energy, or the umbilical cord between the astral body and its physical duplicate, or of the physical body and its astral duplicate. Therefore, when one begins the regular practice of sādhana, meditation, mantras, correcting behavioral patterns in daily life, the astral body is able to disconnect from the physical body and an astral reality is experienced, which is not a dream when remembered, in the sense that dreams are usually denoted to be. ¶The English-language concepts of dreams—such as “when I wake up,” “when I was dreaming” or “I tried to remember my dream”—set the pattern for the psychology behind dreams in the Western context. We could say, “I realized I was consciously active as I reentered my physical body and tried to impress in my physical brain the creative work, activity, thoughts, feelings and experiences that happened throughout the night.” This would be affirming twenty-four-hour consciousness, of which the physical body plays a very small part in its apparent reality. ¶Because they are experienced, because they affect our waking life and because many of them are portents of the future: these are reasons Adi Sankara gave in saying that dreams are real in many respects. In the West, dreams are thought of as more or less unreal. In the East they are thought of as both real and unreal. The Sanskrit word for dream, svapna, is etymologically related to the Greek word hypnos and includes the content of dream and the form or process of dreaming. It is one of four avasthās, or states of consciousness, given in the Upanishads: jagrat, the waking state; svapna, the sleeping or dreaming state; sushupti, deep sleep; and turīya, the fourth state, also called samādhi. ¶We have spoken earlier about the twenty-four-hour consciousness of the mind and how even in the waking state an uncontrolled mind is dreaming and fantasizing, and we made the point that it is only the physical body that experiences the phenomenon of sleep. The astral body does not have to. It can remain awake and active twenty-four hours a day, because it is always functioning within the physical body during the physical body’s waking hours as well. We actually live in our astral body twenty-four hours a day. That is the true home of the soul, mind, emotions, seed karmas. The astral body, when fortunate enough to have a physical body, uses it at least half a day every day, when that body is not sleeping. ¶More and more subtle dimensions of consciousness are dealt with in sādhana. Ultimately, perhaps, one even begins to work with dreams in subtle ways. The Hindu idea that one would not steal or injure even in a dream seems to reinforce this subtlety. A dream that might not mean anything to an ordinary person, say an incident of stealing, might be thought important to an adept. Often religious people suppress their natural feelings in order to live up to religious concepts of virtue and ethics that they have not naturally worked into and earned by clearing up their past behavioral patterns through daily sādhana, self-inquiry and change in belief through belief therapy. This means totally eradicating one belief and replacing it with a new one that is more in line with the religious principles they have decided to mold into their life than were the older ones. Because of this suppression, the expression of the desires is released and experienced during dreams. Many people who have accomplished these repressions exceedingly well have repetitive dreams. Here the guru would take note of the dreams that were occurring to see if they were actually suppressed desires, feelings and emotions that had to be talked about in the light of day and changed, especially if they are recurring. The recurrence of the same or similar dream experience indicates that work needs to be done within the seeker, who has set for himself too high a standard during the waking state and is not performing enough sādhana and tapas to maintain that standard. Therefore, the letdown comes when no one is watching. During dreams he can do what he really wants to do. ¶The key here for the seeker is not to carry the dream into daily life and then start to do what he did in the dream in the physical world. This would only make more karmas and compound the situation, stop the sādhanas and open a door for perhaps endless other karmas or a complete life change, change of personality. The remedy is, if possible under the guidance of a guru, to perform certain sādhanas, tapas, penance, self-inquiry, even a penance for having the dream, while remembering the high standards of virtue and good conduct that should have been maintained during that sleep cycle. This explains the Hindu point of view that one should not steal even during dreams, commit adultery, harm anyone or act against dharma, the yamas and niyamas, in any way. §
In India there is the concept that dreams affect not only the dreamer himself but those around him as well. Partially this is because the concept of self is intertwined with everything else: family, community, village, cosmos. Thus, a dream by the guru would affect all of his monks. The dreams that a guru would dream would become the teachings of the guru to all śishyas. But because the śishyas were in tune with his inner mind, the knowledge would be imparted to them at the same time that the dreams were occurring. Therefore, they would very rapidly pick up on the teachings that developed out of the dreams. ¶Similarly, families, friends, loved ones and relations are all connected. To be connected to a guru would not disconnect you from your family, but only from the members of the family that were not connected to the same guru. They would, all of a sudden, be on the outside of the family looking in, because they would not be in the inner, dream, astral, inner-plane-school phenomenon that being connected to a guru provides. When entire families are of the same sampradāya and hold allegiance to the same paramparā, all goes well in the continuity of consciousness through the entire life cycle. ¶There is no reason to think that dreams are individually secret in the vibrations they create and that they do not affect the inner minds of those the person is connected to. But then again, this applies to people who are doing regular spiritual disciplines and are tapping inner resources and through these inner resources are tapping the higher dimensions of the mind and striving for higher consciousness. ¶The first thing a guru would do, or which you can do, if somebody tells about a dream, is to discern if he is an undisciplined person. If so, the dream obviously reflects his undisciplined nature. If he has been disciplined in the past and is now resting on his accomplishments and has let down on his disciplines, or if he is currently doing yoga at a certain time each day, this knowledge itself will show in the dream’s quality. ¶In India, dreams are also understood to be good and bad omens. The Atharva Veda’s appendix sixty-eight is all about the symbolism of dreams. Traditional good omens are dreaming that you have been killed, that your house has burned down. Indian dream analyzers actually interpret those dreams as positive. Dreaming that your teeth are falling out is bad. Being covered with oil is bad. Dreaming of a woman in a green or red sārī is bad, though dreaming of a woman in general is considered auspicious. If you dream that someone gave you an umbrella or that you are riding on a camel, that is good. It is only ignorance—which is the ability to ignore—to pass over an entire subject area of knowledge with a superficial reason or comment. These age-old traditions which have stood the test of time are obviously a systematic investigation by many learned people of what tens of thousands of men and women have experienced after having had dreams of these kinds and thus formulated these postulations. The Western rationalist would write them off simply as superstition. ¶The word superstition comes from the Latin superstitio, originally meaning “a standing still over.” Webster’s Dictionary defines superstition as “any belief or attitude based on fear or ignorance that is inconsistent with the known laws of science or with what is generally considered in the particular society as true and rational, especially such a belief in charms, omens, the supernatural, etc.” These simple words are very important because they have the power to block out from human consciousness vast amounts of mystical knowledge. The Hindu looks at time not in a twenty-four-hour day, but a cycle of lifetimes, of many lives, and from creation of the soul to its eventual fulfillment of merger in Śiva. The Westerner looks at time as a straight line. It has a beginning; it has an end. The line begins at birth and ends at death. Therefore, such a short line of consciousness cannot waste time in superstition, imagination. Whereas the Hindu believes that the knowledge acquired in one life should be carried over to the next life, the next and the next. It is an ever-building, ever-growing maturation of not only the soul but the many bodies it inhabits. ¶The theme that we are working with is the continuity of consciousness from birth to death—but even more, from the creation of the soul to its final merger into its creator, having fully matured into the image and likeness of the creator—and the experiential consciousness, twenty-four hours a day, as creating karmas. §
It is the one-life belief that creates the big distinction between waking and sleeping. It is the super misconception that the objective reality is real and the subjective reality is fantasy, unreal. Quite the contrary, the subjective reality is real and the objective reality is less real from the Hindu point of view. Both the subjective and objective realms are given reality by the previous saṁskāras impressed within the soul, and when done with and healed, those subjective and objective realities fade away. It is because of these saṁskāras that people do not merge with Śiva as Śiva, why the jīva does not become Śiva immediately. Experiences had and karmas made in a physical birth will require a physical birth to heal them. Experiences and karmas made in the dream world will require sleep experience to heal them. ¶One of the strong themes in Hindu dream thought is that of shared dreams. This means two people having the same dream and confirming it later by talking about it, two people communicating in a dream which reflects later in reality, or two people entering a dream together. Tibet’s gurus and disciples would dream the same dream consciously, being of such one-mindedness, with the purpose of creating something on the physical plane, and if they pooled their minds like that, they would be able, according to our tradition, to create something that never existed before. ¶Two people sharing the same dream and communicating within that dream is a definite astral-plane experience. People endeavoring to have the same dream is a systematic teaching of the Nandinātha Sampradāya, such as entering inner-plane schools where everyone is learning from great Nātha adepts. People having the same dream and then talking about it and saying “Yes, I had a dream like that at the same time” may be a prophetic message from the Gods and devas, a form of channeling. The intelligent souls living in the inner world want to communicate something to those in the outer world and can’t communicate it directly through a psychic, so they try to communicate it through dreams through numerous people. These are usually very prophetic dreams. Dreams of this kind should not be taken overly seriously if only two people have them, because one might be just agreeing with the other that he had also had it, compromising or looking for favors. If two people have had the same dream, they should look for a third person who has also had the same dream. This is the protective step to take. The inner-plane beings will project the same image and knowledge through five, ten, fifteen individuals, so there will always be a third person, or a fourth or a fifth. Then these prophetic kinds of dreams can really be taken seriously. With these kinds of projected dreams, there is no need to panic, because they are projected by the great overseers of this planet long before anything foreboding would happen, to give inhabitants a chance to understand and adjust the situation. They are not given in the framework of something happening in two or three days or a week or two. ¶Enlightenment gives experiential understanding of all states of mind, from the nothing which is the fullness of everything and the fullness which is the emptiness of nothing, into sound, color, combinations of colors and sounds, which is form. The forms that interrelate with forms make saṁskāras. The forms of the saṁskāras remembered separate and categorize the forms, and voilà, human life is created. Enlightenment means seeing the entire picture simultaneously, because when the light is turned on, everything in the room is seen. When the light is turned on in the mind, everything in the mind is seen. There are no mysteries, no dark areas, no gray areas. Unlike turning on the light in the room, which immediately produces shadows, enlightenment illumines everything in the mind from the inside out. There are no shadows, no mysteries. Yes, dreams are no mystery to the enlightened, but are seen no differently than the waking state. There is only one reality in form, which is the pure consciousness which is conscious of form, and this reality is what realizes itself as formless, timeless, spaceless. ¶An enlightened man does not dream or live differently, but simply sees his dreams and waking life differently. The unenlightened person has definitely a darkness, many gray areas in the struggle for enlightenment. Or, if he is not struggling for enlightenment, the blackness within is his reality. An occasional flash of light, which might come with a bright, unexpected idea, is like a word from the Divine, considered a word from the Divine. The unenlightened are blinded by their own good deeds, mixed deeds and bad deeds of the past, couped up in darkness and held there by their lethargy and inability to attempt a yoga, a union, with the Divine. As a single leaf from a tree can guard your eyes from the bright impact of sunlight when held between you and the sun, so can one single belief—and the religious ones are clung to most religiously—hold a believer in dark areas of the mind.§