19 June 2000

Conference

Washington D.C. (United States)

Talk Language: English | Transcript (English) – Draft

David Spiro: I’m a general practitioner and what’s here I think you call a family physician. And I’ve been, I work within the NHS, I’ve been doing this work for about ten years or so. So if I could just pick up on a few of the Dr. Patrick remarks about the type of patients that we see, and who we may think of benefiting from, complementary therapies. The most difficult part of my work is dealing with people with chronic illnesses, chronic distress whether it comes from physical or psychological or social problems, difficulties in life. Those are the patients that really pose the difficulties. And those are the people that maybe are going to benefit most from non-drug approaches.

I’ve been interested in Sahaja Yoga myself for about twenty years and that’s, I’m mainly going to be talking about the research which is being carried out specifically into Sahaja Yoga. But if you look through the literature about yoga and meditation in general, it’s surprising how many illnesses, how many different conditions you’ll find, where there aren’t published studies. Just to run through a partial list, there’s hypertension, coronary artery disease, heart failure, asthma, osteoarthritis, diabetes, epilepsy, migraine, anxiety, depression, stress, chemical dependency and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

So, I believe in the US now, you have more patients consulting complementary practitioners than consulting conventional doctors and I think we’re not far behind in Britain. So as I said, I myself have been interested in Sahaja Yoga for twenty years and there are quite a number of doctors who have been practicing for that sort of length of time. When I first came in, I was quite sceptical, I suppose about the benefits to health, about the benefits to myself. But what really intrigued me were my own, you know, experiences. If I could have the first slide please.

This is a diagrammatic representation of what we call the subtle system and this is mainly what Shri Mataji is going to talk about when she arrives. So I won’t discuss it in any detail but just to say that I myself have experiences which relate to this system. The other thing which struck me and various colleagues was how many people who have been practicing yoga would come up to us without any prompting and say that their health had benefited in various ways. So, I decided to undertake a questionnaire survey. I distributed questionnaires amongst the practitioners, just asking them to report in the first instance whether they felt their health had improved or not. And these are the results.

Basically those people with health index 4 or 5 reported that their health had improved. So the message of this slide is that in general, the longer the people had been practicing the meditation, the more that they felt that their health had improved. And the sorts of illnesses that people would describe were not on the whole major life-threatening conditions, but the sorts of things I have been talking about. Chronic musculoskeletal problems, mean rate, asthma, minor psychological illnesses. So, that’s the first study.

I’m now going to move on to talk about some research which has been carried out in the University of New Delhi. Over a number of years under the auspices of Professor Rai who as Dr. Katchek has already mentioned was here two years ago and gave a lecture. The first part of this research project was to look at the physiological effects of Sahaja Yoga meditation.

So the message of this slide is that as people meditate, galvanic skin resistance increases. And as people learn Sahaja Yoga over the course of 16 weeks, the baseline if you like also increases. Blood lactic acid concentrations decrease. Urinary VMA decreases. Systolic blood pressure decreases.

So to summarize the physiology we can say that it’s all consistent with the reduction in sympathetic nervous activity. Other observations were an increase in alpha activity on the EEG and in a separate study at McMaster University it was shown that beta endorphins rise whilst people are practicing Sahaja Yoga.

Moving on now to a number of clinical studies. First is hypertension. This is a study in which 15 hypertensive patients were followed up for 16 weeks. As you can see the diastolic blood pressure fell from an average of just over 109 to 86. I’m sorry. And the systolic blood pressure that fell from about 170 to 135. And this was despite a reduction in medication amongst the Sahaja Yoga group. So essentially, a group of uncontrolled hypertensives where their control was improved and yet their medication was reduced. In asthma, 9 patients again followed up for 16 weeks. This slide shows a significant improvement in lung function and there was also a reduction in the number of acute asthma attacks. Again, in most cases there was a reduction in the medication taken. Third study was on epilepsy. 10 patients followed up for 6 months and over that 6 months the average frequency of the attacks was reduced from over 4 to less than 1 attack a month. And 3 patients had stopped having attacks altogether.

So those were all fairly small and fairly short studies done in India a few years ago. They’ve all been replicated in Australia. There’s currently a research program underway at the University of New South Wales, and they are moving on to do larger and more rigorous studies.

So that is my presentation. We’re going to move on now. I’m going to ask Dr Ashish Pradhan to come. He is a clinical pharmacologist currently working for Bristol Myers Squibb in Montreal where he’s the project manager of health outcomes and economic evaluation. So Dr Pradhan. [Applause]

Dr Pradhan: A very succinct and brief presentation regarding the studies that have been conducted so far in Sahaja Yoga. What we are going to try to do over the next 10 minutes or so is to take a very quick, very brief overview of the subtle system to which he alluded and about which you shall be hearing in further detail and with a much more wonderful presentation from Shri Mataji herself.

But as a background to what we are going to see just now and what you are going to hear from her, perhaps it would be pretty useful just to know what the subtle system is about and what kind of role does it play in our body and what kind of effect would it have on the health outcomes vis-à-vis the model of Sahaja Yoga. We are also going to see very briefly some epidemiological evidence regarding some of the hypotheses. So what we can at the present moment certainly regard as hypotheses, regarding the etiology of certain things. The causal relationship or the causality assessment as we specifically would do in more rigorously controlled studies is certainly an issue where you deal with the whole paradigm of meditation and its effects on health. But what we have tried to do here is based on what Shri Mataji has been saying for the past 30 years, we have tried to get from the available medical literature whatever evidence may be available to see, if we can find evidence that kind of conforms to those hypotheses that Shri Mataji has been talking about for the past almost three decades. So we shall come to that in the latter half of the presentation.

So this is the overview of the presentation. We shall be taking a look at the subtle system. We shall be looking as to what is the etiology of disease according to the model of Sahaja Yoga. Then we shall be looking at the epidemiological evidence and we shall be concluding with some key messages.

So the subtle system is composed of what are called in Sanskrit as Nadi’s or channels of energy and they correspond basically with the autonomic nervous system. Then we have the centres which are called as chakras and they correspond with the nervous plexuses. Finally, we have within each one of us, situated at the base of the spine, the triangular bone, a residual dorment energy which is called as the Kundalini energy. So for the purposes of introduction these are the three most important components that we have to bear in mind.

The Nadi’s are predominantly again three in number. On the right side we have what is called as the Ida Nadi and this side governs our emotions and it corresponds to the right sympathetic nervous system. Then we have the left side on the Pingala Nadi- sorry I’m confused, the Pingala Nadi which corresponds to the right sympathetic nervous system, sorry that’s a Thai Gopin and that part governs our actions. And then finally we have the Susumna Nadi which is the parasympathetic, which corresponds to the parasympathetic nervous system and this governs our evolution.

The chakras are predominantly seven in number; we shall quickly run through them. At the bottom we have what is called as the Mooladhara Chakra which corresponds to the coccygeal plexus. We have the Swadisthana Chakra which corresponds with the aortic plexus. We have the Manipura Chakra which corresponds with the celiac plexus. We have the Anahata Chakra which corresponds with the cardiac plexus. We have the Vishuddhi Chakra which corresponds with the cervical plexus. The Agnya which corresponds with the optic chiasma and the Sahasrara Chakra which corresponds predominantly with the limbic system.

The Kundalini is basically as we just said is a dormant residual energy and it is the instrument of our Self-realization through its ascension and establishment of union or yoga. Yoga as Shri Mataji has said is basically the union. So when the union takes place, we say that the real yoga has occurred. So in other words what it basically alludes to is the fact that yoga in the classical sense has got nothing to do with physical postures or those kinds of calisthenics. But it is an innate internal happening and it is basically the occurrence of the union. And the Kundalini energy is the instrument through which this union can take place.

So what is Self-realization? It is the upward ascent, if one could define it, it is the upward ascent of the Kundalini energy through the certain centres and establishment of the union through the All-pervading Divine Power. It manifests, and this is extremely important, it manifests as the flow of a cool breeze which in Sahaja Yoga we call as vibrations, from the palms of the hands and from the top of the head.

Let us try to take a look as to what is the ethiology of disease in Sahaja Yoga. But basically we have to then define what is a health state, what is positive health according to Sahaja Yoga. So, it is basically we can simply characterize with three conditions. No blockages on the chakras or on those energy centres. A harmonious and steady flow of the cool breeze through the palms of your hands and from the top of the head and a state of complete balance within the subtle system. So when the internal system which is within us as Dr. Spiro alluded to and which we have just taken a brief look at, if all the elements within that system are in perfect harmony, are in perfect balance, then we say that that is positive health. So obviously disease would be a disturbance in this state of balance.

So primarily the cause of disease according to Sahaja Yoga is an imbalance in the subtle system, secondary to blockages in the chakra. This is a very simplistic kind of a mechanistic model of understanding disease through Sahaja Yoga.

Now if we have to understand what is the causal relationship between imbalances as we keep on repeating ourselves and disease manifestation? So if we have to understand that, then we have to understand, we have to look at just some of the hypotheses that Shri Mataji has been saying over the years and we are going to examine just three of those hypotheses for which we have found kind of evidence in the literature. These are not studies that Sahaja Yoga has conducted as compared to what Dr. Spiro alluded to. All of those were studies done by Sahaja Yogis. These are studies which are available in the literature and they were retrieved through the search of medical databases like Medline.

So basically the first hypothesis is excessive and inappropriate activity of the right sympathetic nervous system, which is your Pingala Nadi on the right-hand side, leads to a direct effect on the heart center. Let us just take this hypothesis as it is at the present moment and examine how it pans out. So, basically when we say excessive and inappropriate, it means that if a person is more likely by nature to get angry pretty quickly, or has increased hostility within him, or has a kind of a domineering nature because the right side governs our actions. Yes, we need to perform our actions. But actions have to be tempered with compassion, with the right quantum of the emotional input. Otherwise, it tends to go into a system of imbalance. Let us keep in mind that due to the constraints of time we cannot go into too many details but this is a simplistic notion of what excessive right-side activity would mean and its effect on the heart center.

Bearing that in mind, the first study was the ARIC study published by Williams et al in Circulation just a couple of weeks ago. The investigators were from Duke University and from Johns Hopkins University here. The design was a prospective study of 13,000 individuals for over five years for the association between anger trait and the risk of combined cardiovascular events and heart events. So called soft events were incidents of angina, non-fatal myocardial infarction as compared to heart events like acute MI and CHD or tardisic and triclobutamine [unsure].

Basically the patients filled out a questionnaire and kind of identified whether they had an anger trait, whether they were more likely to get angry relative to some other people that they know, that they did not lose their temper that fast and so on and so forth. Once their baseline was measured, this was a part of atherosclerosis risk in community study which was done all over the United States. The results, if we look at the odds ratios and I presume most of us are aware of what odds ratios are, it is the likelihood of the event in the, when you take a ratio of events occurring in a particular group which is an exposed group, which is a group of interest and the denominator is the controls. So if you look at the odds ratios, for high versus low anger, it is 2.2 and the 95% confidence interval which means statistically significance can be attributed to this study and they range from 1.36 to 3.5 which means, if you are a person who sees himself as getting angry pretty fast as relative to someone else, your chance of getting a fatal MI or a cardiac event is between 1 to 3 times as compared to someone else who does not apparently have that trait. For heart events in fact it was 2.6 with a confidence interval of 1.4 to 4.9.

The second study was done in Portugal by Coelho and colleagues and it was published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Risk last year. It was again a case-controlled study where cases of acute market infarction were compared to controls and what was found out is again cases of AMI versus controls, type A behaviour was found to be a significant predictor of acute market infarction, and it was also found out that they have significantly more depressive symptoms. So basically what this kind of goes to suggest is that within a psychosocial construct of an individual, there was some kind of an imbalance and anger is an emotion that is predominantly controlled by this center which is called as the Agnya Chakra and it has like we said in the first, as we started off by saying in the hypothesis, indirectly affects your heart.

Further evidence with this regard comes from this American study which was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology was conducted out of Willingburg Lake in California. Again it was a prospective cohort study, 2200 men over a 9-year formula and the odds ratios are men with hostility scores in the top quartile had an all-cause mortality of 2.3 with a 95% interval of 1.4 to 3.5. Cardiovascular mortality was 2.7 with a CI of 1 to 5.

And the last study in this category that we are going to see was published in the cycle journal of psychosomatic medicine by Gallagher and Conings. This was again a random sample cohort study and if you look at the odds ratios the predictive value of a low anger out score of ischemic heart disease events was 1.7. Again it was a statistically significant outcome. In this study what they did was again the patients had to fill in the question there like anger in, anger out, do I express myself when I am angry etc.

So basically these studies kind of show us that out there in the world of epidemiology we are now kind of beginning to find evidence which might lend support to the freedoms that imbalance within us especially mediated through mechanisms like anger or hostility, may have deleterious effects on cardiac events. Now all these studies that we have presented were done adjusting for traditional cardiovascular risk factors like smoking, hypertension, obesity, diabetes etc. So in a multiple regression model, for example, even if you adjust for those factors these factors like anger and hostility stand out as independent risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

The second is anxiety or insecurity predisposes women to an increased risk of breast cancer. Shri Mataji has been talking about this for a number of years and what we found in one study published in the journal of cancer, this study was done in the United Kingdom by Walter and Collins. So the randomized prospective of relaxation training or L arginine on response to primary chemotherapy. So this is not incidents of breast cancer, agreed. This is breast cancer patients who have been followed up over a certain period of time. And the primary outcome variable here is whether or not they are responding to breast cancer. And the results are quite fascinating. The HADS score which is the hospital anxiety and depression score both depression and anxiety were significant independent predictors to chemotherapy. So women who had very high scores of anxiety and depression had a higher likelihood of having recurrence secondary to chemotherapy or failing to respond adequately to chemotherapy.

The last hypothesis is we ,as Shri Mataji explains very beautifully that, after marriage because marriage is also the spiritual union between the husband and the wife both of them complement each other’s state of health. So if the wife is having some kind of problems it does reflect in the husband’s health and vice versa. So it’s an absolutely complementary relationship between the husband and the wife which also means that behaviour of one affects the behaviour of another. One would say why do you need a study to prove that? [Laughter]

But this study was carried out at the University of Utah under experimental conditions, agreed. And what they did was by Brown et al. it was a randomized controlled trial of 45 married husbands in a trial setting to assess whether the perception of spouse or dominance can predict blood pressure reactivity. And the primary outcome was systolic and diastolic blood pressure and we found that, sorry, the results stated that subjects interacting with the spouse perceived as dominant was associated with having a higher blood pressure like both the systolic as well as the diastolic components. So what are the key messages? Psychosocial factors are emerging as significant independent risk factors of disease.

Sahaja Yoga presents an excellent model for explaining the role of these risk factors in terms of a possible etiological role. For example, when we say that there is an existence of some kind of an internal imbalance. Sahaja Yoga therefore affords a critical alternative for management of these diseases through a simple and effortless program of correcting these internal imbalances. How that happens, how it all works out is something that you will find out when Shri Mataji is here and she will speak to you. But what we want to say here to these studies is that basically that there is this kind of an evidence out there, and though we know that these relationships might exist between these kinds of risk factors and heart outcomes, how do you cure? There is no pill that’s available, there is no methodology that can account, there is no procedure that you can undergo in order to have an effect on these kinds of outcomes. It basically calls for setting right your internal imbalances and maintaining a state of positive spiritual health, which then has an absolutely salutary effect on the physical health and this is where Sahaja Yoga can [unclear].

Our next speaker is Dr. Brian Wells. He is a psychiatrist for profession, he is a consultant psychiatrist who practices, specializes in addictive medicine. He is based in central London and has an international private practice. He has lectured at many international conferences and he accomplishes very widely. Dr. Brian Wells, thank you. [Applause]

Dr. Brian Wells: Good evening, my name is Brian Wells as Dr. Pradhan mentioned. I would like to thank Dr. George Patrick very much indeed for allowing us the opportunity to come here tonight, and also to thank you all very much for coming. I appreciate this. It’s well past the working hours even though Dr. Spiro and I are operating on UK time which is well past working hours. Congratulations for coming. I know that you are all eagerly awaiting for the arrival of Shri Mataji and I can assure you, you are not going to be disappointed when she comes.

We have heard a fair bit about some of the science around Sahaja Yoga and some may be feeling that this is still very rudimentary, and one of the reasons why we are eager to present this evening is because we want to actually demonstrate via properly methodologically sound research, that the teachings of Shri Mataji actually have a great deal to offer and that they are based on a scientific basis albeit presented in language that some of us may not be familiar with: some of the words like Kundalini, chakras, nadi’s, etc. may not be familiar to all of us. They certainly were familiar to me as an allopathic trained doctor who in the late 1970s found himself having to become abstinent from alcohol and drugs and go to 12 step meetings. I am sure you all know meetings like Alcoholics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous, etc.

And eventually in 1980 I managed to get clean, get sober, go to AA, did my 90 meetings in 90 days in a row. As you may know the 12 step fellowships have a leaning towards spirituality. They are not religious organizations. There is quite a lot of talk about power greater than oneself and the knowledge you understand. As I was progressing through my own recovery I found myself actually looking out for things that made spirituality more meaningful. And I tried going back to religion, I tried looking at different types of meditation, some of which I was very attracted to and some of which I wasn’t. It was a very personal issue.

Being someone who was interested in altered states, in chemical experiences, etc. what I needed was something that was experiential. I found if I sat in a lotus position or a yoga position, for me, it didn’t really do a whole lot. I was somebody who needed spectacular experiences. And in 1982 I met an Indian doctor who I was working with. I was a junior psychiatric doctor. I sat down and had lunch with him and asked him what he had been doing. He said he had been traveling in India, and he had met a meditation teacher. When he touched her feet, he was plunged into this state of oneness and pure joy and pure knowledge. He felt this cold wind rushing through him. And he was in a state of pure joy. To an ex-drug using psychiatrists, he was looking for some sort of spiritual direction, it sounded highly interesting. [Laughter]

I said, "Do you have to be Indian in order to experience this?" [Laughter] So you certainly had to be Indian in order to understand the terms he was using, like Kundalini and chakras… I have to say that in my own quest I wasn’t really a hippie. I never got to India. I would run out of money by the time I got to the airport. I never quite did the Indian trip, which a lot of other people have done. But I found myself interested. I liked this guy. He had something about him that was appealing. And I was certainly interested to try this out. I was trying out all sorts of other things. Why not this? He arranged for a couple of people to come round to the hospital where I was going. I had to be on duty that night. They stood behind me. They had a photograph of Shri Mataji and lit a candle. I looked at the photograph and they stood behind me and seemed to wave their arms around and mutter things which I now realize were Sanskrit. They were the same mattresses.

And I sat there waiting to be plunged into pure joy and knowledge and oneness and ecstasy. It didn’t quite happen. What I did feel, was this cold experience starting at the bottom of my legs, working its way up my legs and stopping at the base of my spine. I was convinced that there was a draft coming under the door. They said, "No, this is the sort of thing that people experience". People have different experiences, but people by and large do have some sort of physical or physiological experience. They then said, "Well, it started if you just meditate" and by meditation, I mean just looking at the photograph, using a candle and just achieving a state of thoughtlessness. This will just happen for you. You don’t have to do anything. It will just work itself out. They left me with the photograph and with the candle. I have to say I was a little disappointed. I was hoping for a thunderbolt to come through the window and enlighten me with oneness with God. That hadn’t happened. But after he’d gone, I did know that something had happened. It was something that was totally free. Nobody had asked me for any money. It was also something that I knew in my heart was perfectly safe. This was not going to harm me. There was no question I had to wear funny clothes or eat strange food or do anything that I felt uncomfortable with. The people who’d come around and see me, they were working. They’d come around after work. After a normal day, they were doing one. One was a computer expert and the other was his wife. There was nothing odd about them. They didn’t have weird beads on or anything. So I felt completely relaxed.

After they’d gone, I became aware of this. It was as though it was a bubble of air that was following me around. It was sitting on top of my head and following me around wherever I was. And I was also aware that my visual perception had changed slightly. I remember looking at the on-call room I was in. It had a white porcelain sink with a bar of green soap. It wasn’t my soap, I had to wear, but somebody left a bar of green soap. It slightly stood out. It was as though I’d taken a small dose of mescaline or something. I was aware that something odd, but something very good had happened. And I was on call in this busy hospital. I went to sleep and just slept. My pager didn’t go off. I wasn’t disturbed. I woke up the next morning and I felt very relaxed indeed. The next day, I had to run around London doing all sorts of things. What I found was really quite odd. This may sound a little cosmic. It may sound as though I need a little anti-psychotic medication. That’s fine. But this is what happened. Whenever I drove anywhere, the lights seemed to be green. I just flowed. [Laughter] I had to go on the underground on the subway system in London. I just seemed to walk in. There wasn’t a line to buy a ticket. I’d buy the ticket. The train would come in. The doors were open. I’d get on the train and go. Instead of waiting in line for more hassles that I was used to, I seemed to be in touch with some sort of synchronicity. Things were just flowing and things were effortless. I was very conscious that this was unusual. It was a strange experience for me, because I was used to having a hassle and having to fight my way through London and work hard to make things happen.

I think we’ll just pause for one second because Shri Mataji is here and the stage is a bit dark so she needs to lead the way over to the stage. So, I’m just going to stop and then when she’s seated, I’ll carry on for a second.

It seemed to flow, this cool business that was referred to earlier by the previous speakers. It just seemed to flow and it made me calm down. It worked very well actually in conjunction with my 12-step program. What I was impressed with was that there was no money involved. I didn’t have to do anything strange. I could carry on working as a doctor in a busy Western city. If I just practiced this meditation as was gently suggested to me, and did little things to help myself clear up such as put my feet in warm water in the evenings. That felt pretty strange sitting with my feet in a bucket of warm water with salt in it. But actually it made me feel a lot better. For me, what I really liked about it was that this was experiential. It wasn’t some academic process, it wasn’t something I had to sit and read, I didn’t have to learn Sanskrit, I didn’t have to do anything other than just experience what was being suggested. And I gradually began to meet Shri Mataji and go to meetings where there were large numbers of people. What really struck me about this, is that when there are large numbers of people who are all actually utilizing this energy, then the whole thing actually becomes a very powerful experience because there are energies involved that Shri Mataji will describe. When there are groups of people doing it together there is a collective accumulation of energy and the whole thing becomes extremely powerful. So I went to a large meeting quite early on and I came away after a couple of days of meditation and larking about and dance programs and theatre and things that were put on. It was very joyful. It wasn’t a sort of intense let’s all sit down and meditate for 24 hours, the sort of experiential stuff that I had kind of ventured into previously and encountered groups and this and that. It was all very joyful and the thing that struck me was that Shri Mataji herself is full of joy and she would be describing these very complex processes and there would be laughing and there would be a joyfulness and an innocence and an almost childlike state that folks seem to be in. As well as this extremely powerful experience of the meditation.

And what that meant for me was, when I sat down after one of these meetings, I just wasn’t thinking. I felt totally calm, completely relaxed. And when I did think, every thought I had was spot on. It was pure. I knew it was accurate. I knew that I exactly knew what was going on with my patients and I just had this confidence that when I was feeling like this, which wasn’t the whole time, it was after, it did involve doing some work to achieve this state, but when I was in that state, which was a wonderful calm state to be in, I knew that every thought I was having was some form of a pure knowledge. It was quite extraordinary.

This all happened to me about 18 years ago and since then things have evolved. I now use Sahaja Yoga as part of my practice. I work a lot with addicts, alcoholics. We find an awful lot of people get involved in Sahaja Yoga and their desire to use drugs, to smoke cigarettes, to drink alcohol simply melts away. We don’t do intensive counselling. We don’t give them detoxes. Some people need to go away and have detoxes and when they come back they find that the balance that was referred to earlier, the state of well-being that was referred to earlier and the flow of energy, particularly when it’s done collectively, just seems to lead people into a state of well-being and leads them into a pathway that seems to be in their own interest, which has been very much my own experience. So I found that my career has come together. Life makes much more sense. It absolutely complements everything I was heading towards anyway. It’s helped with things like one’s value system.

One suddenly discovers that driving around in fast cars and things doesn’t seem to matter quite so much when this is there ,as a way of spending one’s evening. So hassling around and wheeling and dealing with stuff just didn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense. So for me, and for a lot of the patients that I’ve treated subsequently, I’m in no doubt that Sahaja Yoga is based on a scientific basis and it does need to be researched and we need actually to get a lot more data than we’re able to present tonight. It’s an experiential process. It’s not academic. We actually feel physiological cells moving around. We actually feel ourself and we feel energy shifting around in our body and hopefully our technology will allow us to experience some of that this evening.

Sahaja Yoga is a complete formula both for prevention of illness, for the diagnosis of illness and for the treatment of illness. It’s also entirely free and there are other forms of meditation that aren’t. There are other forms of meditation and healing where people are making a lot of money out of traditional spiritual techniques. And for me, being free and being something that wasn’t forced on me, being something that’s natural, gentle and joyful is important. So ladies and gentlemen, I now like to introduce the teacher of Sahaja Yoga, the founder of Sahaja Yoga, the person who actually has evolved and developed this form of meditation. I know you’re all very pleased to welcome Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi who is here with us tonight. [Cut in the video]

[Talk starts at 44:25] Shri Mataji: I bow to all the seekers of truth. At the very outset, I would like to thank the National Institute of Health for inviting Me to speak to you people about Sahaja Yoga. Today, I’m going to tell you the secrets of medicine. So far whatever we have known in the medical colleges, or whatever we have known, there is something beyond it which we should know and utilize our knowledge for a great deal of advantage. ‘Sahaja’: ‘saha’ means ‘with and ‘ja’ is born. With you is born this right to become Self-realized. Yoga is the union with the Divine Power. We have heard about Divine Power in all the books and scriptures, but we have never experienced it. We don’t know if it really existed or not. But the time has come for us to experience that. Also in the medical science we know quite a lot about sympathetic nervous systems. But we don’t know much about parasympathetic and its control.

So, the secret I’m going to tell you is how to control your parasympathetic system. I need not tell you what is parasympathetic and how it works. But then it controls and it balances all the activity of the sympathetic.

If I say there is a power placed in our triangular bone which is called as sacrum, you may doubt it. But this triangular bone is called sacrum, it’s a sacred bone, that means the Greek new about it, that it’s a sacred bone. In this bone is placed in three and a half coils, that is also mathematical, three and a half coils, a power, which is made of many treads, and which is the one, what we call, is for our ascent, for our last breakthrough. After human awareness, if we had achieved everything in our evolution, there would have been not all these problems. So many problems exist as we know, on individual level, on collective level, on every type of level. Why these problems should be there if we are really fully aware, evolved? But we are not. There is something really that has to be happening, and for that our Creator Himself has placed this power in our triangular bone.

Now you need not take my talk as granted, but you should experiment, as honest people, you must experiment and see for yourself if there is this power or not, if it works or not, does it ascend or not? No giving some work; it’s absolutely scientific, absolutely scientific. And once you enter into that arena of secret science, then you’ll be amazed that there is so much to be known about ourselves. Now all the scriptures have said that you should know yourself. For us, it is some separate subject, not for doctors. It’s some sort of a religious subject that we should know ourselves. After all, we are in unity. Now of course we know that there is a doctor for one eye and a doctor for another eye. But this is, we are going towards the unity. Unity as a human being, unity as all the religions, all the world, how do we do that? Is there any way of connecting you to that area of Divine Power by which you all become one?

For example now, there’s a small little piece, doctor has fixed for Me here, and I am talking to you all. It never happened when I went to college, it was never so, but now it has happened. So the new future medical science has to understand what is parasympathetic, what is this Kundalini I am talking about, what is the function of this Kundalini, how it works. Now it is like a primule in a seed which sprouts, which sprouts and then it grows into a tree. Firstly, whatever is your seeking, if you have not known yourself, seeking is, may go on and is going on in this country as you know, like a mad race. All your seeking must come to an end, otherwise, it has no meaning, waste of life, waste of energy. How can it be that it can be finished is a very, very simple thing? Within you lies this power, whatever may be your colour, whatever may be your nationality, your religion or whatever, as long as you are a human being, this Kundalini is there, quite ready to be ascending. It ascends automatically, just like a seed has a primule which ascends. You don’t do anything. You don’t have to stand on your head, nothing of the kind. It is there. ‘Sahaj’ also means spontaneous. It works out spontaneously. You all have this power within you and only thing you have to experience this. This rises, this power rises, passes through six centres, I think they have shown them here, and pierces through your fontanel bone area, which you know what it is, I need not tell you. And then pierces through and becomes one with this All-pervading Power. As this instrument is connected, you also get connected. Without connection this has no meaning. In the same way we do have no meaning, we are going here, there, there, there, there. But we are not yet knowing the truth and the truth is that you are all going to be the Spirit.