Moses and Yoga

A talk given by Phiroz Mehta on an unknown date

Honour thy Father and thy Mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

Exodus, 20.12

Everyone understands the literal meaning of these words in the great commandment which Moses gave to his people. Moses was a great teacher. It is not so well known that he was a great yogi.

Let us look very briefly into one other possible way of looking at this commandment. “Honour thy Father and thy Mother.” The Father is God as Creator. Mother is Nature. God is the Sun — Energy. Mother is the Earth — Matter. Father is Eternity. Mother is Time. Father is prāṇa. Mother is the womb of the world — ākāśa. “Honour thy Father and thy Mother that thy days may be long.” Days — Consciousness, clear seeing of Truth, Enlightenment. “May be long upon the land.” This land is your own psycho-physical organism, your own living being. “Which the Lord thy God” (Yahweh-Elohim in the original text, which signifies the Absolute, the Incomprehensible, Unknown and Unknowable Deity, and Elahim, that Absolute and Unknown as grasped by Man in his supreme state of Enlightenment) “Which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” Not “has given”, finished with, once and for all, but gives you continuously from moment to moment, in the present tense. This is very significant indeed. This land — our individual being — starts off in the state of innocence and harmlessness, in harmony with the One Total Reality (Elohim). This innocence is the innocence of the child. It is an unawakened state, not knowing the conflict and sorrow involved in the ambivalence of the dualistic world.

Let us now briefly consider the cakras. We start at the base of the spine with what is the first cakra — the Mūlādhāra. That word means Root Support. It represents the element Earth. In the Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad there is a sentence “Earth is the footing of the Lord”, and in Isaiah, as well as in the Acts of the Apostles, you find “Heaven is My Throne, and Earth My Footstool.” Those who wrote such things were practical yogis, who had realised for themselves, and they put their knowledge in beautiful symbolic terms.

Mūlādhāra contains the unqualified, primordial energy, which serves either the functions of physical reproduction and rejuvenation or transmutes these forces into spiritual potentialities. Do remember that this energy spoken of is psychical energy. You must distinguish this from the actual physiological processes that take place in the body which give the bodily sexual impulses. Don’t get mixed up here, otherwise you will always find difficulty in understanding the meaning and significance of celibacy. This is the psychical counterpart of the physiological energy. The latent energy of this centre is called Kuṇḍalinī Śaktī. Kuṇḍalinī is the name of the Goddess who they say presides over all power. The female aspect — the negative aspect — of the whole Universe, including Man, is the active aspect, the aspect of power in operation. The male aspect has a different kind of dynamism altogether. It is a dynamism which functions in perfect stillness, which is a dynamic poise, not static. The effects of Kuṇḍalinī Śaktī can be either divine or demoniacal. The impure one is destroyed by Kuṇḍalinī Śaktī. Onlythe one who is utterly pure in mind and heart to start with, who lives a pure life, can utilise Kuṇḍalinī Śaktī, handle it with safety. Kuṇḍalinī may be regarded as, or at least analogously to, what we call in modern times “libido.” It is said to sleep coiled up like a serpent at the base of the spine. You know how Moses and Aaron and the priests of Pharaoh, his magicians, cast their rods and they turned into serpents, and those of Aaron and Moses ate up those of the priests, the magicians of Pharaoh. Unawakened, Kuṇḍalinī is absorbed into subconscious and bodily functions. Released, it finds perfect unfoldment and realisation finally in the cakra which is the seventh, known as the Sahasrāra, the thousand-petalled lotus, which corresponds to the brain itself, the cerebrum.

Continued in part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5

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