Some Personal Experiences

Some Personal Experiences

I do hope you have enjoyed reading the book and it has given you ample food for thought. I would now like to share with you some of my personal spiritual experiences, which have shaped my life and led to this book.

I was born and raised in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. My father who was a freedom fighter was imprisoned in 1942 freedom movement in Delhi and then sent to Lucknow jail. In 1946 on his release from the jail he liked Lucknow so much that he decided to make it his home. Our first house was in Hazratgunj (center of Lucknow) and in 1960 we moved into a flat in Lalbagh near Hazratgunj. I went to a well-known missionary school called St. Francis High School. One of the things I hated about the school was its strict discipline (the headmaster was a terror) and wearing of tie. I still remember that the moment I was out of the gate of the school the tie was taken out and stuffed in the pockets of the shorts. Thus ruined, the tie had to be replaced periodically and this resulted in constant scolding from my mother. Somehow wearing the tie and speaking English symbolized to my young mind colonial control and this attitude might have come from the influence of my father. I therefore inculcated the habit of reading books in Hindi and became an avid reader of Indian folk tales.

On my thirteenth birthday in 1963 I was given a Hindi translation of the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi as a present. Reading this book completely changed my life. I became obsessed with it and read it continuously - in the process neglecting my studies and other activities. Gandhi's early years simply caught hold of my imagination and there arose a great desire to know about the religions of the world. How this leap took place I don’t remember but it must have been triggered by reading Bhagwat Gita since this was Gandhiji’s favorite book. I therefore embarked on the journey of reading all the religious books that I could get from the local library - Gita, Koran, Bible, Rig-Veda, Upanishads, Patanjali Yoga, Vivekchudamani, etc. As can be imagined, how much can you absorb at the age of 13 or 14, but the desire to read all these books was intense. Nevertheless reading of Patanjali Yoga Darshan created a tremendous impression on my teenage mind since it showed that one could gain superhuman powers by practicing Yoga!

Together with the reading came the desire to practice some of the things that Gandhiji did. Thus I became totally vegetarian, started eating mostly boiled food and also started meditating. Meditation was done as described in Shri Ramkrishna's biography. The meditation, which sometimes lasted for one to two hours, produced wonderful feelings and dreams. I remember starting an experiment of meditating on my heart and visualizing that it contained a small earthen lamp. This resulted in a tremendous feeling of love and good feelings for everybody. If I remember correctly this must have lasted for a month or so but I got frightened by the experience and hence stopped the heart meditation. I tried repeating the same meditation many years later but was never able to duplicate the experience of love.

I also remember that during this time (especially during school holidays) I went for long walks of eight to nine km. Most of my thinking has been done during long solitary walks and this habit has continued till today. Lucknow in early and middle 1960s was a beautiful city with lots of parks and my walks ended at cremation grounds near Dilkusha Gardens beyond the famous La Martinere School. Beautiful trees surrounded these grounds and since nobody would come there, it was very peaceful. I would often meditate sitting on the platform where the bodies were burnt. When my mother came to know about it much later on she scolded me to no end. I never felt any fear but just a sense of peacefulness.

After schooling in Lucknow, I entered Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur in 1967 as an undergraduate student to study mechanical engineering. IITs are the most prestigious engineering colleges in India and perhaps in the world. One gets into them after an extremely competitive entrance exam. Thus in early years of my IIT days I got quite involved in studying engineering and spirituality took a back seat. Somehow in the fourth year of my studies I got an intense desire to study the world literature. This could have been triggered by the humanities courses I took under an excellent professor. In those times IIT Kanpur had a first class library with a large literature section. Thus I read most of the books by great authors like Jane Austen, Knut Hamsun, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann etc.

I believe at the age of 19-20 years the brain is at its prime and so can absorb huge amounts of input information. Despite my intense literary readings I could still do reasonably well in my engineering and got good grades. However I felt that the best part of my IIT education was to study humanities subjects and my ability to write this book is a direct outcome of that education. There is a general tendency among students of professional courses to give a step-motherly treatment to humanities but I believe study of such subjects gives one a well-rounded education. Hence I feel that humanities subjects should form a compulsory part of curriculum in all professional colleges.

The meditation and intense reading produced wonderful and remarkable dreams. Some of the vivid ones I can remember were:

1. I am running in the courtyard of our house in our village and a bright beam of light descends from the sky and hits my right side. My face and shoulder are totally engulfed by it. There was no fear - just a feeling of well being.

2. In another dream I saw a fire breathing dragon which would have killed me. I immediately recited the name of Lord Shiva. He appeared and gave me a bow and arrow with which I killed the dragon.

I am sure both these dreams may have been influenced by some of the movies on holy people that I saw as a child.

3. One dream was really strange. I saw my younger brother and myself all alone in a desert. The skies suddenly opened up and a beam of bright white light bathed us both. But besides the light I also heard wonderful western classical music. Since at the age of 13 or 14, I had no access to western classical music, this dream was something very strange.

4. One dream was of an out of body experience where I am in the battlefront and "killed". However the "I" remained and it could go anywhere and pass through walls and obstacles.

5. Another dream showed that I am traveling in a spaceship and witness the formation of galaxies in an egg shaped envelope. This was really fantastic and psychedelic and could have come out of almost any science fiction movie.

6. In one dream I saw myself levitating by climbing on invisible steps. This dream came at the time when I was thinking deeply about gravity. A thought therefore came that probably gravity is quantized.

These types of dreams continued even later and there was a time (sometime in early 1970's) when I continuously had dreams of having discussions about the future of India with leaders like Mao, Trotsky, Lenin and above all with Gandhiji. There were many dreams with Gandhi. In one strange dream he even merged into my body!

The whole idea behind writing this is to tell the readers that these events did remain at the back of my mind and did help in preparing it for the work outlined in the present book. In fact it goes to show that once the mind gets prepared then it can tune into the relevant dimensional space and can start receiving knowledge.

Such knowledge did come out of the blue one day. I was doing my research for Ph.D. at University of Florida, Gainesville, USA in the area of thermal applications of solar energy. After lunch I was walking back from my home to the office through a thick pine grove when suddenly a thought came that gravity and human thought are somehow related. The idea (which occurred in later part of 1977) was so powerful that it caught hold of my mind for next 4-5 months and I could not concentrate on anything else. Since this idea came suddenly and so powerfully, I was convinced that it was true - otherwise it would not have come. Obviously I can be charged with delusional thinking (I have not been able to provide a foolproof relationship for it) but the idea seemed intuitively true that day and even today after almost 25 years later. I am sure my readings on gravity and attendance of lectures on cosmology at the University must have helped, but the idea came in a flash. Somehow I also felt that the pine groves acted as antennas for this thought! This single idea propelled me to start writing on mind/matter interaction.

In 1981 I came back to India from US to work on rural development in Maharashtra and somehow the work on thought, gravity and spirituality was again put on the back burner. Hence I did not do any serious study or write on them till 1991. In March 1991 I had gone to give regular lectures at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay when I slipped in the IIT Guest house and nearly fractured my spine. The pain was the most severe I had in my life. Fifteen days later I started writing on spirituality and have never looked back. Strange are the ways of Lord!

Thus what I have presented in this book is a distillation of all such experiences that I have had in my life till now.

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