My Maharishi – Reviving Ayurveda and The Big Bang

My Maharishi – Reviving Ayurveda and The Big Bang

Jai Guru Deva.

Welcome to my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles.

[00:00:55] Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Revives Ayurveda

I’d like to share with you another story of being with my Maharishi, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, my teacher for a quarter of a century or so. Some 25 years I spent in his presence and under his training.

On this occasion, it was in the 1980s, in the late 1980s, when Maharishi had made the rediscovery of Ayurveda. Ayur-veda, Ayur means, in Sanskrit, longevity. Longevity. Veda means knowledge, the longevity knowledge.

This is the knowledge of the Vedic approach to self healthcare, where you learn from a Vaidya, a Vaidya, the word itself means ‘of the Veda,’ Vaidya. But it specifically pertains to people who are physicians in natural law, who are able to understand and share with you your own psychophysiological balance profile.

What are the various balancing agents that make you up and make you individual? Why is it that some people can have all the fat-laden food they like and never gain weight? Why is it that certain people can have virtually no fat-laden food, and gain weight all the time, hardly eating any fat-laden food?

Why is it that some people feel hot all the time, and are constantly peeling away the layers to get back to their skimpiest t-shirt, even on a coolish winter day?

[00:02:46] Balancing Agents

Why is it that others in the same room consider that room to be cold, and are wearing sweaters and shivering away and keeping themselves wrapped up, and will never go anywhere, even in summertime, without a shawl or a blanket or a sweater, just in case somebody turns on a dreaded air conditioner to make the room cold?

What is it that makes the entire world, which is one thing, a world that is an utterly different world for one person, compared with its being, yet again, an utterly different world to the person sitting right next to them?

In Ayurveda, we understand this to be based on a psychophysiological profile. That is to say, what are the balancing agents that make up your individuality? There’s no world “out there,” there are simply responses to a given world.

Certain foods are absolute nectar to some people. The same exact foods could be toxic to another person. And so, like this, Ayurveda attempts to bring in together, under one body of knowledge an understanding of how to keep the body pure, fit, to purify and normalize it through techniques of purification and normalization of which meditation, Vedic Meditation, plays a pivotal role.

And how to keep our balance in different seasons, in summer and autumn, in winter and in spring, to be able to keep our physiological and psychological status at the ready, so that our body is a perfect frictionless vehicle for meeting the need of the time, for being the answer to evolution. All of this is Ayurveda.

[00:04:49] Three Masters of Ayurveda

And in 1980, Ayurveda had become unknown in the world. This may be an astonishing fact for many people to contemplate, since you can go to the local commercial supermarket, not even one that is health food oriented, and find toothpaste that says Ayurveda on it, or body butter that says Ayurveda, or potato chips that are Ayurvedic.

The word Ayurveda has entered the common parlance, even though most people who are the consumers of it have no idea what it really means.

In 1980 Maharishi had brought his meditation technique to the world to a sufficient level, millions had learned it, and he had trained thousands of teachers who could teach it to all of those new inquiries in the world, that he felt that a new layer of Vedic knowledge needed to be revived, one that had gone into the long-lost category.

And one of those bodies of knowledge was Ayurveda. There were others, but Ayurveda was the primary. And so he found the three remaining extant masters of Ayurveda in India. And there were only three left. Dr. Brihaspati Dev Triguna, B.D Triguna, and Dr. D.M. Dwivedi, and Dr. Balraj Maharishi.

[00:06:33] Masterful Pulse Diagnosis

Dr. Triguna had a practice at a clinic in New Delhi, and he was known to be something akin to a walking CAT scan. By simply placing three of his fingers, his index fingers, middle finger, and his ring finger on your wrist and feeling your radial pulse, Dr. Triguna could tell your entire medical history. He could tell anything that was going out of balance in your body, and he could tell what all of the various distinct body and psychology balancing agents were in your body.

And with such a degree of accuracy that even professional diagnosticians, medical practitioners, when they had their pulse read by him, Triguna knowing nothing else about them except they were sitting in front of him, would be astonished to report to their colleagues that only somebody who had known in detail, their medical history could possibly have said with such accuracy, all the things about them that Dr. Triguna had just said.

[00:07:48] Master of Minerals

Next was D.M. Dwivedi. Dr. Dwivedi was a master of minerals. What are the effects of a variety of minerals on the human body?

Everything from heavy metals all the way through to minor kinds of minerals that can be found in plants or in other natural substances that come from the earth, and how the human body’s interaction with all the variety of minerals was so important to understand and know, and to monitor, and he helped to create some of the best medicaments, medicines of the Ayurvedic pharmacopeia of medicines.

[00:08:36] Marker of the Plant World

Next to him was Balraj Maharishi. Balraj Maharishi was someone who had to be found because he lived his life in the thick forests of central India.

He was someone who, in order to be able to get him to come out, was quite a deal because a deputation of people had to approach him and convince him that, in order for Ayurveda to be able to continue being here and available to people generation after generation, his body of knowledge specifically was required. And that body of knowledge had to do with the plant world.

Dr. Balraj Maharishi had the reputation of being able to commune with the plants, communicate with the plants. And so, walking through a forest, the plants would be able to communicate with him, and he with them, about what their specific range of applicability was to the human physiology.

And he had this wonderful relationship with plants, and he was the master of the wildcrafting of herbs from some of the most remote parts of the forests of the Indian subcontinent. He was brought out, and came willingly.

[00:10:13] Amrit Kalash

And the three of them, B.D. Triguna, D.M. Trivedi, and Balraj Maharishi, assembled together and met with Maharishi and recreated a beautiful substance known as Amrit Kalash. Amrit means, ‘A’ means negation, ‘mrit’ means death, not death. Amrit, immortality, Kalash, container of nectar. Amrit Kalash.

And we can talk in other places about Amrit Kalash, a wonderful product that we recommend meditators make use of, and which is available, and we can make it available to people who’d like to enjoy its health-giving benefit.

The three of them collaborated to recreate this nectar of herbs that had not been created or brought together for, at that stage, many hundreds of years. It was the return of that health-giving tonic.

[00:11:23] Maharishi Nagar

So, there we were, Maharishi had decided that people who wish to be trained to be Ayurveda educators, who could understand all there was to learn about Ayurveda and to be able to go out to the world and explain it and explain all of its characteristics to, not just the meditating world, those who meditated already, but also to the world at large, even non meditators.

I had the great good fortune in 1986 of being able to be there in India. Now Maharshi had a new ashram. Ashram means a communal place where it’s an academy of learning that is headed up by a principal guru, teacher, and people come there and take courses of knowledge and learn and do lots of industrial-strength meditation.

And Maharishi had, in his long time away in Switzerland, arrangements had been made for the building of an Ashram just north of Delhi, in a place that is known today as Maharishi Nagar in the suburb of Noida in New Delhi, north of New Delhi.

[00:12:45] Learning from the Masters

And there was one particularly very brilliant Ayurvedic doctor who was a co-student of Balraj Maharishi, D.M. Dwivedi, and Brihaspati Dev Triguna, and his name was Raj Vaidya Rajuji. Rajuji, Raju is the family name, and -ji just means dear so we call him Rajuji out of respect.

Rajuji was, and is today, a master of English., And though those previous three great masters of Ayurveda from whom all of us, including Rajuji, were in the process of learning, though they have all long since dropped their bodies at very ancient, old ages each, Rajuji, who like me is still an ancient old age, is still in the body and well and teaching in India and is very close to us.

[00:13:51] Bright Lights

I want to set the scene now for the story I wish to tell. Maharishi sitting with, as always was his requirement, with video cameras rolling. And whenever you roll video, you have to have bright lighting because, without it, the shadows win the day and the lit surfaces end up looking like something that is rather garish.

And so Maharshi had this requirement that anytime he was lecturing, there had to be very bright lighting and the light bulbs, in those times, in the mid-1980s, that could provide that kind of light, were super-high-voltage light bulbs, I want to guess something on the order of 2000 Watts of light coming from each light bulb, and they were very, very bright, and, of course, they generated a huge amount of heat.

And this is an important thing for me to tell you because our story is going to pivot around an event that occurred to do with one of these high-voltage light bulbs.

[00:15:08] Where the Big Bang Comes From

The stage where Maharishi sat in India was well lit. Maharishi arrived, everyone stood, his deerskin was placed down. Maharishi sat on his deerskin, sitting to his right was Brihaspati Dev Triguna and Rajuji, sitting to his left was D.M. Dwivedi and Balraj Maharishi.

Rajuji was there to help translate from the local native languages of India, most of which were spoken by Triguna, by Dwivedi and by Balraj Maharishi. To the rest of us, most of whom were Americans or British, but many of whom were Europeans who spoke English. Rajuji translated into English beautifully, in case there were any misunderstandings, and Maharishi himself, was a master of the English language.

Brightly lit, videos running, Maharishi talking about the importance of, in Ayurveda, of the mind arriving regularly at the place, at the layer where Being is becoming, where the unmanifest is manifesting, where the issuing forth into the manifest world was occurring from the unmanifest, where the transcendent, the supersymmetric Unified Field was breaking its symmetry to zoom forth into relativity.

And as he was speaking, he said, “We think of it as not historically in a linear history, as once upon a time there was a Big Bang, but at the source of the creation issuing forth from the extant unmanifest Unified Field, which is there all the time, that our awareness needs to be stationed right at that place where The Big Bang comes from.”

[00:17:22] Where the Little Bang Comes From

And then he said, “Stationed right on that spot where silence is bursting forth into activity.” And then he said, “perpetual, Big Bang.” And right when he said the word, big bang, one of these 2000-watt light bulbs that was just above him exploded.

And when one of those light bulbs explodes, it sends shards of glass in every direction. And these little shards of glass are somewhere between white hot and red hot, and it made a noise that was akin to a shotgun being fired. Bam! Loud, the kind of bang that makes your ears ring.

And glass showered down and ricocheted all around Maharishi and landed on his clothing and on others who were on the stage. And, of course, everyone was on their feet, except Maharishi.

He just sat there quietly, brushing these red hot shards of glass off himself. And laughing and laughing because the big bang had occurred when he said, “Perpetual Big Bang.” Bang went the light bulb and the shards of glass going everywhere.

After a while, he was laughing away. Everyone else was dancing about trying to get these things off their clothes and making sure that they’d all been seen as to where they were, and people weren’t gonna step on them, because you had to remove your shoes when you were close to Maharishi or to any of these other masters. Shoes weren’t a part of the scene. And so, it would’ve been easy for people to step on glass.

[00:19:07] The Perpetual Big Bang

After everybody quieted down and sat, we realized Maharishi had never missed a beat and had continued talking. He said, “Perpetual Big Bang. Boom went the bang.”

He laughed. And because his point had been made and underscored by an environmental phenomenon, and then he simply continued talking while we were all trying to recover from this explosion that had occurred in the room.

Unfazed by it, completely unfazed, and not in the least bit concerned, gave the rest of his speech and didn’t stop for another two hours of talking.

To me, this was a very great sign of equanimity, evenness. That evenness that cannot be thrown off by just some event happening here or there.

One’s life is not governed by relativity. Though one is a super-acute perceiver of all of the phenomena that are occurring in the relative world, one’s identity is not derived from the relative world. One’s identity is derived from groundedness in that layer, which is the perpetual Big Bang. Living it and loving it.

Jai Guru Deva.