Table Of ContentDedication
In memory of my late husband Peter Sandhu, who would have been
delighted to see this book materialize out of my “mystical meanderings.”
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to many people who, knowingly or unknowingly, have been
involved in the production of this book. I would like to thank all students
and clients, past and present, who have been my greatest teachers; my
yoga tutor, Latvian poet Velta Snikere Wilson, for keeping the connection,
and whose patience and forbearance through the trials and tribulations of
exile have been an inspiration for over three decades; the many healers
who shared their knowledge with me at just the right moments, including
Dr. Ramakant Kenny, Dr. Vasant Lad, and Shrimati Shamala Chandran;
the many friends who encouraged me to write a book that addresses
their interests at an intelligent professional and academic level, for their
patience in awaiting its arrival and their support through difficult times,
among them Christine Meek, Carol Deans Shinwell, and Lady Ann Clyde;
my spiritual brothers and sisters in the Yogic, Buddhist, and Tantric
communities, particularly Dr. M. L. Gharote, Dharmacharyi Lokamitra,
and my dear friend Swami Sivadhara Saraswati, with whom wide-ranging
conversations and shared experiences, both spiritual and material, have
been a “gift.”
I would also like to thank my academic colleagues, especially Dr.
James E. Robinson, who first gave me the opportunity to write about the
Subtle Body and to teach it in a university master’s degree program. A
special thank you goes to Gyorgyi Byworth for bringing the resulting
study module to the attention of Dr. Ervin Laszlo, whom I’d like to thank
for enthusiastically recommending it to Inner Traditions Acquisitions
Editor Jon Graham, and to Jon for his foresight in seeing its potential as a
book; to my editor Laura Schlivek and the rest of the team at Inner
Traditions for overseeing its “rebirth.”
I would like to express my grateful thanks to Professor Olga
Louchakova, Dr. Arielle Warner, David Osborn, and the other authors
who generously permitted me to “borrow” from their books and articles; to
Jon Moult for the picture of his yoga class; to Bob Clyatt for his kindness
in permitting me to use the picture of his beautiful sculpture of Gandhi;
and last, but certainly not least, to Eric Franklin for his huge contribution,
hundreds of hours of dedicated work in producing the illustrations, the
chapter “Science, Philosophy, and the Subtle Body,” and his unflagging
help and support throughout.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction
PART ONE
Eastern Perspectives
ONE: The Spiritual Enterprise
TWO: The Cosmic Person
THREE: The Ladder of Being
FOUR: The Organs of the Soul
FIVE: The Yoga of the Subtle Body
SIX: The Subtle Body in Sufi Cosmology
SEVEN: The Bodies of Buddha
EIGHT: The Taoist Body of Inner Alchemy
NINE: East Meets West
PART TWO
Western Perspectives
TEN: Symbolism and the Subtle Body in the Ancient World
ELEVEN: The Forgotten Philosophy
TWELVE: The Alchemical Body
THIRTEEN: Theosophy, Anthroposophy, and the Subtle Bodies
FOURTEEN: Energy Healing and the New Age Body
FIFTEEN: Science, Philosophy, and the Subtle Body
SIXTEEN: Consciousness and the Subtle Body
SEVENTEEN: The Integral Body
EIGHTEEN: The Subtle Body and the Transformed Being in Society
Footnotes
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
About Inner Traditions
Books of Related Interest
Copyright
Preface
When I was six I had my first mystical experience. On my sixth birthday,
my mother got me up at dawn to take a photograph in the garden. It was
a typical summer morning in the highlands of Scotland, one of those days
that starts with swirling grey mist and later gives way to balmy sunshine.
As my mother was fiddling with the camera, which seemed to have
jammed, I became aware of how patient and calm I felt. This was unlike
me. I was a hyperactive child who did everything at high speed, so sitting
still was usually torture for me. Then the mist began to clear, and
suddenly from within the shrouds of grey, the Japanese cherry blossom
tree in the center of the garden appeared like a vision out of a dream; I
had an extraordinary sense of well-being, of connectedness, of being
merged with the tree in its “beingness” and with the whole world that
surrounded us.
I never forgot the feeling of that experience, although it only lasted
minutes, perhaps even seconds. It became the archetypal sacred “place”
to which I constantly returned whenever I needed peace, solace,
guidance, or knowledge. In the spiritual life, however, I discovered that
there are many ways of knowing.
The next significant experience came ten years later when I discovered
yoga. When I was fourteen a TB patch had been found on one of my
lungs, which explained the long and frequent bouts of bronchitis that had
occurred throughout my childhood and had left me with breathing
problems. I was still suffering from shortness of breath nearly two years
later when I went to a badminton club with a friend and had to sit out
some of the sets because I was so easily exhausted. At one point two
women sat down next to me. The chairs were quite close together so I
couldn’t help hearing their conversation. They were talking about yoga,
about which I had only the vaguest notion, but it seemed to have
something to do with breathing. Just as they were going to join their
friends in the next game, I found the courage to ask them if yoga could
help me with my breathing problem. They said they were very sure that it
could. However, as they were being called by their friends to start the
next game, I didn’t have time to ask how I could learn it.
Attempts to find a teacher or a class proved fruitless, so I searched the
local library and, fortunately, found a do-it-yourself book written by Ernest
Wood, also known by his Indian name, Shri Sattwikagraganya. Professor
Wood was a Sanskrit scholar, a translator, and prolific author of works on
yoga, with an interest in Buddhism and theosophy, who became the first
“guru” of many an isolated yoga student like myself half a century ago. I
say “fortunately” because he introduced me to the path of rāja yoga,
which, as John Collins points out in his book on mysticism, is the path of
the “spiritual warrior,” requiring discipline and determination.1 And
discipline and determination were exactly what I required over the next
year as I struggled with the roles of teacher and student. Still, thanks to
Professor Wood’s clear instructions, I succeeded in no small measure:
when I went for my next x-ray, the patch on the lung had disappeared,
and the breathing exercises I’d learned became an indispensable part of
the “spiritual toolkit” that helped to keep me in reasonable health
thereafter.
When I was twenty, I met my first husband at the newspaper where we
both worked. Fortunately for me, he was a “spiritual warrior” with
experience and knowledge of yoga, and much else, which exceeded my
own. Not only did he introduce me to meditation, but to many areas of
spirituality, religion, philosophy, psychology, and, while he was writing his
first novel, literature and creative writing. All of this not only opened a
completely new world to me but stood me in good stead later when I
worked in publishing as an editor, then eventually freelanced as a
specialist in yoga, psychology, healing, and comparative religion for some
of the leading London publishers at that time.
The other important skill I developed in this relationship came from the
yoga and meditation that we practiced together daily, for most of the nine
years we were together, whether we felt like it or not. If one of us was too
tired, the other would cajole or persuade, and we would practice together
even if it was late at night or early in the morning, or even if we were
already late for work. When I went for an interview for a place in a yoga
teacher training course, the tutor was so surprised that I had learned so
much about yoga without having had a teacher or ever having been to a
class that she was convinced that I had “remembered” from a past life. It
was during this period, too, that I had other experiences, some through
“grace,” others through effort, and many a contemplative “knowing” that
was mediated through dreams and meditative visions.
When I was twenty-one I had a serious accident. I fell down a whole
flight of concrete steps and landed on my coccyx, fracturing seven spinal
vertebrae and breaking my left arm on the way. As a result I was in pain
most of the time, but the daily discipline of yoga and meditation helped
me to survive, to work, to study, and eventually to teach. It was during
this period that I met another important “guru,” a very talented young
chiropractor, who not only helped me back to health but also gave me
many hours of his valuable time in discussing alternative medicine and
lending me books to read. I was so enthused by his enthusiasm that I
decided, after years of writing articles about healing and alternative
medicine, that I should learn to do it myself. But after four years of
studying and practicing different bodywork techniques I decided to take
one tutor’s advice and study homeopathy. She felt it would be far less
demanding on me as I got older, when all the injuries I had suffered might
reduce my stamina and make it difficult for me to work.
How farsighted that was. When I later went to India, met and married
my second husband, and had to commute long distances from my rural
mountain home to the intense heat and overcrowding of a major
metropolis to work, I was so glad to be able to use my healing knowledge
in difficult conditions in a way that didn’t cost me valuable energy and end
in “burnout.”
At the age of twenty-four I had my first experience of kundalinī. In fact,
my husband and I had the same experience at the same time. We were
meditating late one night when, without warning, I felt a sudden rush, like
a current of electricity, up my spine. I was “catapulted” into bright light,
like clear moonlight. His experience was identical except that he seemed
to be illuminated by sunlight. This was unnerving for both of us as there
was little known about “spiritual emergence” in the West at that time. But,
as always, when help was needed, it appeared. The next day we were
still quite wobbly when we went to a friend’s for dinner and were
introduced to her spiritual guide, who had been a monk in Burma. We
told him what had happened to us and he directed us through a simple
Buddhist technique that we practiced for the next week until normality
was restored and we lost the fear that it might happen again as
traumatically.
There is a saying in Yoga that “when the pupil is ready, the teacher will
appear,” but not always in the form we expect. My next important
“mystical” experience came in a dream some time during my early years
in India. During a particularly bad bout of gastric illness, I had a dream
that lasted three nights. On the first night, I was falling in space. It was
dark, and I could see nothing and feel nothing other than the sensation of
