In “Aghora” you mentioned that Tantra purifies the elements within one. Can you practice Tantra to get well or to balance your Doshas?
Svoboda: You can. What’s important in Tantra is you have a clear idea of what result you want to get. Tantra is all about deciding what you want to achieve and achieving it.
It may have nothing to do with becoming enlightened; it may have something to do with “I want to become well and I can’t figure it out how to do it otherwise, so I’m going to invoke Lord Shiva and I’m going to have him transform me somehow”.
Then you figure out what kind procedure you want to do and you move ahead and you do it.
So often what happens is people start to purify the elements and they start to feel that they are becoming free from the limitations of the material world and then they get very excited and proceed directly in that direction and then their bodies fall apart. But they don’t care.
Some people start to do that and their bodies start to fall apart and they do not care and then that’s a problem.
As Vimalananda said: “It’s better to take things slowly”. So you can educate your body as to how it’s going to have to live with this connection to more intense energy.
He also used to say: “When you are walking on the road, remember that the road never gets tired, you will get tired but the road is never tired, the road is there, the road will always be there, if you want to come walk on it, the road is happy, if you don’t walk on it, the road is still happy.
The road did not ask you to walk on it, the road did not ask you to try to stand on your hands while you were walking on the road. Road it’s just there. It’s an impersonal force.”
So, the elements are impersonal, they don’t dislike you, but they also don’t necessarily like you. If you stick your finger into the electric socket, the electricity does not want to kill you, on the other hand it will kill you.
Because it’s: “Sorry that you put your hand in there but; its job is to move a bunch of electrons and you happen to be there and you stuck your finger in there, so sorry, but now you’re dead”. So it’s the same way with the 5 elements. You should realize that they are impersonal forces, and if you want them to work with you, you have to respect them.
Which is why in India they have gone to such an effort to personify so many things, to personify Ganesh, who is the personification of the Earth element, and to personify Agni in various forms like Narasimha or like the God Agni rides around on a ram or whatever. And so that in fact you can interact with them in a way that is familiar to you as a human and have them relate to you in a little more reasonable way than if you just try relating to them as cosmic powers.
Excerpted from a question-answer session in wildyogi.info
Dr Robert Svoboda
