The Rainbow Dharma
by Tan Swie Hian:

"In the wilderness, the voyager told the great white light, `I cannot look into you.'

The light immediately turned itself into eight rainbows."

Or are the above mentioned phenomena just another way of describing how the various regions of the brain communicate better as a result of meditation - which they do when you see the results of the scientific measurements and listen to people's experiences. Better contact with the emotions and between body and mind is achieved .

Tools for raising consciousness

The way Nyasa rouses the consciousness of various parts of the body and mind, and combines them with mantra (sound), yantra (potent diagrams) and symbols, has much in common with the way a chakra is made conscious or awoken.

The individual chakra can be touched in Nyasa in different ways. Many of them are used in Yoga Nidra. Here are some of them:

Through feeling the body's contact areas (in the classical yoga poses, for example);
• through tones and the finer inner sounds (this happens in Chakra Vajrohan, where tones are sung in each chakra, and through inner Nada Yoga, sound yoga - see the previous issue of Bindu - and to a certain degree by a particular form of Indian music);
• mentally through the mind, which has several dimensions, by naming the chakras, by placing their seed mantra there - and by the use of symbols;
• through the five elements, their respective symbols and diagrams;
• through animal symbolism (possibly a connection back to shamanism);
• through energy, where breathing exercises also play a vital role in cleansing the energy passages (Nadi). In Nyasa, you tune into the frequency of various energy passages by "placing" letters or mantras on the "lotus petals". These petals represent energy passages linked to each chakra;
• with "keys" in the form of diagrams (Yantras) and symbols that create a contact with the chakras deeper dimensions;
• through mandala (or deities) as a seat for (or representation of) the cosmic energy that flows through the chakra and keeps it open and clean;
• and by consciousness itself.

Where does this knowledge of these instruments and symbols come from, one might ask. We know that such things can appear in our dreams, and therefore one could answer, that perhaps they come from that other reality, the inner one. Yes, but they also come from the experiences of the yogis. Descriptions of these keys are nevertheless only signposts along the way, to be confirmed or rejected by one's own experience.

This has been about touching (Nyasa) and a little bit about awakening, but it is far from the whole story.

After a chakra has been cleansed and awoken through yoga methods and guidance, it begins to play a part in one's conscious life. With the awakening follow abilities and a greater sensitivity, a kind of sense beyond the purely physical.

Furthermore, some people can see when a chakra is active in another person. My first experience of this was when I saw a spiral shaped cone of bluish grey energy, that projected from the eyebrow center of a Danish yoga teacher I knew in my youth. Chakras in Yoga Nidra

According to Paramahansa Satyananda, Yoga Nidra actually begins with the experiencing of these chakras.

The chakras are also known in other cultures, as we have seen with the Hopis in the USA, but also by the alchemists in Europe and the Inuits of Greenland and Canada, to mention but a few of the more evident examples.

In the deep Yoga Nidra, we use eight of the major chakras to contact the various planes of consciousness.

Chakras are often spoken of in connection with Kundalini Yoga, a set of methods and meditations that can be used to harmonize and awaken the psychic energy. (The name Kundalini Yoga, however, is also used as the trade mark of a contemporary movement - although they only teach standard yoga).

Kriya Yoga is probably the most profound and effective form of Kundalini Yoga. In an awesome way it can strengthen the body's energy field, remove depressions, increase creativity and open you up for a first hand knowledge of the genuine mystical or spiritual aspects of life.

The chakras have corresponding areas in the brain. When they are relaxed and harmonized during Yoga Nidra, the release of unwanted states such as confusion and lack of concentration begins. People who awaken their chakras through yoga and meditation, open up to a previously unknown capacity for communication, insight and creativity. Consciousness The awakening of consciousness through Nyasa releases tensions and lethargy, thereby healing illnesses; but primarily, it brings you into contact with all parts of your being.

The guidance in Yoga Nidra through the different areas of the body and mind, does not only make the body more conscious and more relaxed and awake, but trains your ability to utilise the various regions of the brain, both those connected to the physical body and those connected to the chakras.

From the research carried out at The State University Hospital in Copenhagen in the Spring of 1997 - which is discussed in another article here in the magazine - it appears that different regions of the brain are activated according to the part of Yoga Nidra with which the mind is engaged (however, the section of Yoga Nidra dealing with the major chakras was not measured in this research). Relaxation or cleansing

I have been fortunate enough to learn a Yoga Nidra which is in close accordance with Nyasa as it is used in Tantra. Just to read or study the Tantric texts tells you little or nothing of how Nyasa can be used, as for example in Yoga Nidra.

In the text "Laxmi Tantra", which gives guidance in the Tantric rituals and sexual practises, Nyasa ends a sequence, of which breathing exercises and the cleansing of the five elements are a part. This practise is called Bhutasuddhi, cleansing of the body. Here Nyasa builds a bridge between inner and outer cleansing.

Does this mean that one cleanses the body and mind by mentally "placing" a mantra on a certain body part or merely by thinking of that part? The answer is yes, and furthermore by using a mudra (position of the fingers) or by mentally touching and thereby experiencing a part of the body, the body is brought to life and made conscious.

Micheline Flak teaches yoga in France. She also leads R.Y.E., (research into children's use of yoga in schools) which is described in Bindu no. 6. She made an experiment during Yoga Nidra, first with a group of yoga teachers on a seminar, and later in her daily teaching.

One section of Yoga Nidra involves going through all parts of the body, by thinking of them or feeling them as they are named in the guidance. You start with the thumb of the right hand, then the index finger and so on. In this way, you first experience the right side of the body, and then the left side. It is done in the beginning of Yoga Nidra and normally without interruption.

"When I had guided them through the right side of the body, mentally feeling or touching different parts of the body in the fixed order, I stopped and asked them to notice if there was a difference between the right and the left side of the body. Afterwards when we discussed it, the students were amazed by the difference experienced through such a simple exercise." (Micheline Flak)

The students remarked that they had felt that the side of the body they had just touched mentally was alive, light and at ease, while the other side, which they had not as yet gone through, was still in that normal, slightly heavy and tired state.

From my own teaching I received the following account from a female student, who is now a yoga teacher.

"Many years ago I took part in a three months course at Håå Course Center. We had placed ourselves comfortably on the floor and as usual we were looking forward to a guided Yoga Nidra with Swami Janakananda. And what a Yoga Nidra! For some reason or other he went through the right side of the body twice - and skipped the left side.

The effect was soon felt! We all experienced a sensation which could be described quite literally as being lopsided. It was a strange feeling of having `lots of vitality' in the right side, whereas it was difficult to get contact with the left. It passed, but I was reminded of how strong an effect Yoga Nidra really has." (Shanti) In contemporary western culture, the word relaxation is used for all sorts of things. The actual word or term relaxation is not commonly used in Sanskrit in India in connection with yoga and Tantra. There the field of "relaxation" comprises various techniques, which are called by different names, the word cleansing (suddhi) being one of them. But the results of these methods are the same as what we achieve through what we term relaxation. Relaxation means to remove tensions - the body and mind are cleansed of tensions.

That the body and mind actually form a whole is common knowledge today. It is expressed by the word psychosomatic. Tensions of the mind create tensions in the body and vice versa; removing a tension in the mind removes it in the body. In Nyasa, and therefore in Yoga Nidra, this happens without trying to relax. One experiences the body consciously, and that alone releases tensions. You make a resolution, Using a resolution in Yoga Nidra is good and effective. It would be foolish not to make one, when you can use it to influence the direction of your life.

You make only one resolution in order not to spread your energy and confuse your mind. If you use a number of resolutions or visualisations, you will probably achieve some results, but nothing deep and lasting.

For half an hour or longer, every day or once in a while, you can allow yourself to relax in the face of your usual thoughts and emotions and let them flow by. By momentarily not hooking on to everything that crops up in the mind, you remember who you are and doubts can not take root. In the relaxed state, your resolution works with an undiminished strength.

but...

For the relaxation itself to be effective, the relaxed state should not be induced by techniques or methods that are based on hypnosis - one should not use suggestions to get into an artificial and limited state.

When you experience Yoga Nidra, you will notice that you are never asked to relax, or to imagine that a particular part of the body relaxes - the word relaxation is not used at all during the guidance. That is not what Yoga Nidra is about.

Yoga Nidra consists of techniques that trigger a state where one's being is vitalised - the result is a stable and unbroken state of relaxation in the body and the entire brain while practicing Yoga Nidra. (See also the two articles by Robert Nilsson in this issue).

Nyasa (and thus Yoga Nidra) is fundamentally different to a lot of modern therapies, which are only based on hypnosis, even though they do not call it hypnosis, but use other names and trade marks - yes, sometimes even the word meditation.

"Do not waste your time trying to change people's mentality. After you, some Hitler might come and ruin everything anyway," Swami Satyananda once said to me, when I was ready to return to Europe to teach. He shocked me deeply by using such a potent picture - what did he mean by that?

What help is it to have everything explained to you by an authority before you have experienced it yourself? It is so easy to be influenced by someone who comes along with a powerful image and a "quick" solution and allow yourself be taken in and have the wool pulled over your eyes. People cannot be free, unless you teach them that through their own practice they can achieve real independence of influences and a transformation of body, mind and consciousness.

Swamiji meant, in other words, that rather than try to change people's outlook and habits, I should help them so that they themselves can acquire an overview, insight and wisdom.

Though that does not mean they should avoid being consistent and steadfast. Experience, insight and realization are the opposite to hypnosis. Hypnosis is like burning incense in a room that smells in order to hide the odour. The ability to experience, to make conscious, is like cleaning the room and airing it. Personally I do not want methods that program me, but ones that liberate me from old programs and expand my consciousness.

"Everything is hypnosis," you might say - and I can understand why you might think so. We are influenced by all kinds of things from cradle to grave. That is exactly why we need tools to occasionally empty the body and mind of the accumulation of impressions, habits and automatic thinking.

Liberation, after all, lies in using insight and awareness in order to see through one's influences. The wise person does not react against influences, he does not try to stop them, instead he experiences everything, and lets go of what he does not need. It is on this basis that meditation has come into being.

Myths, which we constantly create to avoid a direct experience of life, are very much a form of hypnosis. With hypnosis, notions of reality often take the place of reality itself. Throughout human history there have been countless examples of people wanting to know what they should think about reality, instead of experiencing it for themselves. So armoured, they can disagree with "the others", those who have (allowed themselves to be influenced in having) a different world view to themselves. Different interpretations of reality can then clash and, on a larger scale, create religious and political wars.

The individual whose expectations are not met by the promises of the latest mythology or therapy, often end up in a state of bitterness and frustration - and look for the cause outside themselves. Even the teacher who is available to help one out of limitations is sometimes accused. Regardless of how clever the teacher is, he cannot be held responsible for fulfilling the expectations of the students - provided that he or she has not helped to create the expectations. In the end it is the individual him/herself and society that are responsible for the expectations they have and no one else is answerable if they are not met.

Intolerance towards those who think differently does not arise amongst individuals who are aware and who experience instead of theorizing. My experience is personal and I realized that others do not necessarily need my experience and my interpretation - they have their own.

However we all have more or less the same kind of organs and nervous system, and more or less the same kind of mind. We have learned this through both modern science as well as the several thousand year old tradition and experience in yoga and Tantra - therefore one can unearth and preserve techniques and methods that work regardless of which attitude to life, which nationality, background and age one has. We must each make a choice...

Naturally we need to make a choice in relation to what we want to do with our lives, and therefore a choice of influences and of resolutions that we want to follow. The reverse would be to sit behind the steering wheel of a moving car without taking hold of it and steering. And the higher we set our goal, the easier other things fall into place by themselves.

"The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence also moves. All sorts of things occur to help which would not otherwise have happened. A whole stream of events flow from the decision, bringing all sorts of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no-one could have foreseen." (W.H. Murray, inspired by Goethe)

"What ever you can do, or dream you can; begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic. Begin it now." (Goethe)

What Goethe expresses here is not a postulate, but an observation which he wishes to convey, which makes him a mystic and not a priest repeating doctrine by rote. It is obvious that there must be a balance between influences (one's resolution in Yoga Nidra) and making conscious. The expression `to make conscious' does not mean in my language to analyse and judge, but touch, awareness, receptiveness, participation and - the placing of consciousness, Nyasa.

To feel or just to think of a place, is enough to bring life to it. To be aware of the possibilities in life that present themselves, to have the courage to accept them, is to live consciously.

"A great saint, a mahatma, a yogi, a prophet or a gyani lives on this earth like any other human being. He thinks, enjoys and eats like others. The great difference between a yogi and an ordinary man is that he has awakened a dormant faculty in man called awareness, whereas the ordinary man has not. He is always aware. He is called a drastha - a seer. He is the witnesser of events. Your aim on the path to realizing and awakening your dormant potential should be to gradually unfold this faculty of awareness within you. Become a seer…"

Yoga Nidra

To make conscious by thinking of certain places in a precisely determined sequence, or by feeling these areas, or by naming the places mentally, is probably the easiest, the original and perhaps therefore the most fruitful of all Nyasa practises - by experiencing warmth and cold, heaviness and lightness, pain and contentment, and whatever else Yoga Nidra consists of, like Chakras, certain symbols and landscapes that one remembers.

In the deep Yoga Nidra all the parts of your being, all your potentials, are touched, named and vitalised through Nyasa, and it is precisely this experience which creates well-being and clarity.

It is due to Paramhansa Satyananda's genius that we can use this effective method of Yoga Nidra today, and we must credit him for revealing Nyasa through the Yoga Nidra relaxation in a way through which everybody can benefit