Clairvoyance and Yoga

 

By Richard Kieninger

 

All clairvoyance is a condition whereby the Ego’s mind is able to impress upon his brain’s consciousness his mental perceptions of another Ego’s mental vibrations. The Fourth Plane mental vibrations of every Ego are determined by his emotions and his character traits. A clairvoyant usually perceives these mental vibrations as colored auras of light around a person’s physical body or a spirit’s Astral Body. These are not lights seen with one’s physical eyes. On occasion, a clairvoyant may interpret others’ mental vibrations as musical tones or as odors. In any event, clairvoyance is a mind-to-mind detection of another’s essential nature and current state of mind but not of what he is thinking.

 

Clairvoyance is a natural ability for about ten percent of very young chil­dren. Probably this is because small children still tend to be relatively free from the anxieties that are the major blocks to adult clairvoyance. Many children report having intelligent, “invisible” playmates. These children also learn to perceive the true emotional state of people by learning through experience the meaning of the colors they “see” in people’s auras. In primitive societies, where it’s likely that several tribal elders are clairvoyant, such children receive verifica­tion of the auras they observe and report. In Western societies, clairvoyant children almost never receive concurrence about what they see; rather, they are told to not exaggerate and to stop giving rein to an overactive imagination. A child who experiences continual lack of congruence between his observations and what is accepted by others will abandon and suppress his clairvoyance out of his conclusion that it must be false or that it is too risky to continue pursuing. Severe penalties are exacted by most societies against an individual who dares to depart from the majority’s interpretation of reality. However, to adjust perfectly to a given society’s myths, legends, and erroneous beliefs is to base one’s actions and decisions upon unreal foundations. A person trying to make sane responses to life in accordance with a cultural philosophy that is founded on error has to be self-defeating.

 

A tremendous advantage to being an astral clairvoyant is that you can instantly perceive the character of living persons and of spirits and can detect the emotional states of those Egos at any moment. This means that you can see a spirit Ego with whom you are communicating and determine if that Ego is likely to be a trustworthy source of information. Communication of ideas is done telepathically; but if the clairvoyant is not skilled in telepathy, he needs only to speak normally and the spirit can understand. Because the discarnate Ego is accustomed to conversing mentally, he knows how to project his thoughts to the mind of the clairvoyant for a two-way conversation. Direct observance of re­sponses by both parties greatly assists understanding. As a clairvoyant, you can deal with a spirit on his level without any kind of hypnotic influence or control being involved on either side.

 

Because it is difficult to discern truth from falsity, many people spend their lives pursuing promising but erroneous philosophies and waste years try­ing to make those philosophies work. Unfortunately, in the search for truth and practical ideals, a person is most likely to encounter philosophies and religious concepts that are beautifully couched in divine terms but which actual experi­ence reveals to be without substance. Evil almost always conceals itself behind high-sounding and flowery phrases. The clairvoyant has the advantage of oper­ating his life on the basis of truth that he can learn directly from highly evolved Teachers, living or spirit, whom he can personally verify as legitimate and com­petent as opposed to nether spirits who seek to deceive.

 

The obvious question for someone interested in avoiding blind alleys and in gaining direct access to advanced Egos who know Truth is, “How can I learn to be a clairvoyant?” Most of the organizations that claim to be able to teach a person how to become clairvoyant are actually involved with techniques that can result in mediumship or, at best, develop the student to become a psychic or a sensitive. A psychic subliminally picks up impressions from a spirit and pro­cesses them as if they were his own ideas and thoughts. A sensitive essentially dowses other people’s and spirits’ energies, which he may even take on and feel within himself. Such schools promote various systems that are likely to develop hallucinations in the belief, by the teachers and students alike, that these signal a growing enlightenment and are precursor to contact with the Divine. Generally, the students are strongly encouraged to surrender to God, to be open channels and to still their wills. These practices will not result in clairvoyance, but they can open a student to spirit incursions. Clairvoyance requires the sharp aware­ness of both physical and astral realities simultaneously. It does not result from lessening the will in floaty, twilight consciousness but rather by impressing one’s will upon the brain more effectively. This feat is accomplished with relatively little effort when the precondition of refined character has been fulfilled.

 

The surest, safest way to clairvoyance is to evolve one’s character to a high level of ethical morality by way of virtuous living. Every character trait that one develops to a highly positive level produces a vibration which is perceived as a clear, bright, pastel color in the Ego’s astral aura. But, more importantly, high character results in a natural breakthrough to the perception of the higher planes of existence. Human beings are designed to progress smoothly to awareness of etheric and astral realities while still incarnate when they become vibrationally more en rapport with those refined levels.

 

Hatha yoga (meaning “union through courage”) offers a technique which can lead to clairvoyant experiences, but it involves many years of discipline and can be fraught with extreme risks to one’s sanity. Should a yogi be successful in his quest, his essentially premature breakthrough into perception of the Astral Plane plunges the yogi into lower spirit realms where first he encounters the Dweller at the Threshold. This is a malevolent human spirit who is so terrifying that about half of all yogis who achieve the desired breakthrough become vic­tims of spirit possession resulting in insanity. The problem here is that this kind of breakthrough is based on a forced imbalance of energies within the yogi’s body and not upon character uplift; thus, his entrance into the astral world is not at a refined level. The yogi knows that he will be expected to elbow his way past the Dweller by holding to thoughts of the Divine, but the Dweller has far greater mental powers, and the least faltering of the yogi into fear will be his undoing. Many of the yoga teachers involve their students in religious services and prayer, but Hatha Yoga does not necessarily teach the disciplines for uplifting character. Therefore, the yogi who happens to attain his prized glimpses of the astral world will not find himself en rapport with evolved Egos and saints; so his impressions of the astral are not very positive.

 

There is a distinction to be made between astral clairvoyance and etheric clairvoyance. Auras of the Vital Bodies of plants, animals or living persons are seen via etheric clairvoyance. This is usually the first stage a person reaches m viewing the higher planes. It is particularly useful for professionals in the heal­ing arts to be able to observe the Vital Body (often called the subtle body) of an ailing patient to learn directly the source of his symptoms or of an impending disease that has not yet resulted in symptoms. It is possible to be an etheric clairvoyant without yet being able to observe spirits or see character auras, but all astral clairvoyants are also etheric clairvoyants. The meaning of the colors differ between the seeming colors of the etheric and astral auras. Beginning clairvoyants usually make errors in this respect. If a clairvoyant “sees” a green color, for instance, he must determine which aura it’s in before he can correctly interpret what it indicates.

 

Simply practicing the physical postures of yoga does not lead to negative involvements with nether spirits; however, certain breathing exercises, visualiza­tions, and contemplation of one’s plexi (centers of the autonomic nervous system located along the spinal cord) can imbalance the etheric energies of the Vital Body associated with the plexi, called chakras, and result in momentary projec­tion of one’s Egoic awareness of the Astral Plane onto one’s brain consciousness. Chakras appear to clairvoyants as slowly turning vortices of etheric light. They are formed by the entrance and emergence of atmospheric Prana.

 

There have been a number of myths associated with yoga which have no basis in fact, yet yoga tradition promotes them generation after generation even though no one has ever been able to achieve certain of the hoped-for aims of yoga. The principal myth is that a yogi can achieve extrasensory and spiritual powers by raising his Kundalini spirit fire through the series of seven chakras. Kundalini refers to a combination of bio-electric energy and etheric energy nor­mally found poised for expansion at the base of the human spinal cord. When any person is deep in concentration, a clairvoyant can see that person’s Kundalini as a light which has risen from the base of the spine to the top of the cranium, finally spraying out the top of the head. Yoga theory claims that as the Kundalini is raised through each successive chakra, a specific spiritual power becomes available to the yogi, but that simply doesn’t happen. In practice, the yogi contemplates a plexus to the point that the chakra associated with it “spins,” but this also produces an imbalance in the endocrine gland associated with that specific plexus. This can start out feeling good, but it eventually leads to a health crisis. A woman of my acquaintance upset her hormonal balance doing this yoga exercise, and it produced a malfunction in her adrenal glands. Doctors didn’t know how to reverse the effects of her contemplations, and she soon died. Edgar Cayce pointed out that when chakras are prematurely opened in Kundalini imbalance, spirit possession is possible.

 

Swami Rama warned that advanced forms of patterned breathing, which is a common yoga exercise, can cause a person to harm himself irreparably. It is also his opinion that yogis who happened to acquire spiritual powers did so via other parallel disciplines—not yoga itself. Swami Satchidananda observed that although ecstatic faintness gives a nice experience, the causative patterned breath­ing is not safe, and it doesn’t help anything; but it may put an end to all of one’s experience. Legitimate spiritual teachers all agree that attempts to gain spiritual powers must be preceded by selfless love and creative work, and that’s more valuable than achieving a superbly conditioned body and experiencing strange and wonderful sensations.

 

All too many unqualified, self-styled gurus set up shop after having read a few books on yoga and meditation, and these people tend to encourage their students to gain fast results by engaging excessively and overzealously in what are already dangerous techniques. Such leaders usually also demand total obe­dience and the turning off of their devotees’ minds. To practice yoga with the aim of achieving siddhis (powers) while residing anywhere other than in a life­long retreat from the practical world is to ask for serious trouble. The demands of a busy life and the demands of the deeply contemplative life are truly incom­patible. Students who have been inadvisably thrust into these conflicting modes usually end up with Kundalini imbalances that manifest in bizarre ways, but most commonly in a nervous breakdown of many years duration. Such practi­tioners may suddenly find themselves unintentionally locked into a rigid yoga posture for hours, or be filled with agonizing burning sensations, or be unable to speak or move for days at a time. Some yogis believe such conditions indicate spiritual progress when really that is not so. It is dangerous and unacceptable. What is tragic about all this is that so much of a practitioner’s time and effort is spent on pursuing an unrealizable dream. Moreover, yoga is an inappropriate discipline for the Westerner. There is no cultural background to support its practice in the West, and the devotee becomes a fish out of water socially and philosophically.

 

Undeniably, there are yogis who have learned how to take conscious control over their autonomic physiological functions like heartbeat and tempera­ture regulation. However, these feats are not accomplished by using yoga but rather by a form of auto-suggestion that acts much like a hypnotist being able to induce a deep trance state that reaches the point of control over his subject’s brain stem where the basic life-functions are regulated. Also, a yogi who can enter the mystic state did not acquire that power through yoga. And those yogis who are spirit healers gained such powers almost exclusively by becoming medi­ums. Hatha yoga is useful for developing and maintaining a supple body, but yoga practitioners grow old and die at the same rate as everyone else. There are and have been saints in India, but their personal powers and greatness were derived from love, virtue, and high intellect—not from yoga. By developing high character, a person can eventually come to truly function on higher planes of existence while still incarnate. Yogis work on their postures and kundalini ­raising and breathing exercises for decades in hopes of merely glimpsing the Astral Plane as sort of voyeurs. Even the yogis who escape the clutches of the Dweller at the Threshold rarely achieve such glimpses. Few yogis ever experi­ence clairvoyance after a lifetime of practicing yoga. If instead they had spent those wasted years in character development, they could have added signifi­cantly to their permanent spiritual development.

 

Another form of yoga, called tantra, attempts to achieve the same spiritual goals as Hatha yoga but through the stimulation of intense sexual energies in intercourse between a man and a woman. Yoga does not include women as being able to attain spiritual powers; but in Tantra yoga, a woman is tolerated as valuable in aiding a man in his yogic quest. One of the theories of yoga is that man’s testes house the secret to attaining powers, and that his sexual apparatus benefits from intense sexual arousal so long as semen is not ejaculated. This theory is central to justifying Tantric intercourse, but many a practiced devotee has actually learned to ejaculate sperm into his urinary bladder, and that does not qualify as conserving his creative energy (oojus) for theoretically gaining siddhis. Those Tantric yogis who are effective in completely preventing any kind of ejaculation gain a sustained state of high-energy agitation of feelings and exaggerated interest in sex. But this is counterproductive to serenity of spirit; and because of imbalances which then develop in the body’s creative energy, such yogis become emotionally strange. One of the more valuable aspects of achieving sexual orgasm is the resultant balancing of etheric life energies and bio-electrical energies in the body, thus providing a regenerative fount of mental creativity. Psychologists have proven that pleasure is literally nutritive to the body’s neurological structures, and that deprivation of pleasure can lead to emo­tional and mental illness as well as to violent, anti-social behaviors.

 

Most persons who became saints were balanced, loving people who did not abstain from sexual intercourse. There have been some saints who for vari­ous reasons were celibate, but to imitate their celibacy will not make you a saint. Ego is Mind. The way to Egoic advancement is through mentation, and that includes right thought (virtue) and right action (ethical living) which naturally follows. In India, Tantric cults pose a serious civic problem because of their practice of bizarre sexual perversions that are hard to rationalize as being spiri­tual in intent. Undeniably, sex can be beautiful and uplifting when engaged in with the correct attitude, but that does not require Tantra Yoga. Witchcraft teaches, among other things, that methods to stimulate an intense emotional state which will thrillingly enhance one’s demonic powers include killing an animal or a person or having violent, unloving sex. It’s not impossible that the Tantric cults have touched this negative aspect of sex, thus mistaking the electric highs they experience as being spiritual.

 

In any event, yogic methods for hopefully gaining clairvoyance merely produce glimpses of the astral world and are of little practical use and are not at a spiritually refined level. Also, there are ways of having views of the Astral Plane granted by nether spirits through awake mediumship typical of witchcraft. Extrasensory powers gained by alliance with demonic entities carry a high price because the person is not Egoically freed from such an alliance when he dies. On the other hand, a possessed, obsessed or chronically hypnotized person is Egoically free as soon as his brain dies.

 

Much of the lure of various yogic techniques for the Westerner is in yoga’s advertised promise to deliver enlightenment and powers. The people who want such benefits are usually unaware of the importance of proper motivation for gaining them. Selfish motivations block their attainment. But saints know that their knowledge and self-mastery must be diligently employed for the benefit of mankind, and they work tirelessly to help improve the world and to lovingly uplift everyone. Again, real spiritual progress depends upon personal uplift of character. Every gain in this area becomes permanently a part of the Ego and serves an individual forever.

 

 

 

Mystic Awareness