Yoga Day Special
On a clear September day in 2011, I stood in the premises of the shrine at Panchvati in Dakshineshwar where Parmahansa Rama Krishnan attained enlightenment. I was among a group of people who had gone to the place with Yogi Ashwini, a one-of-kind yogi of our times. We left Kolkata very early in the morning to reach the place, about a 40-minute drive north of West Bengal’s capital city. The purpose of the visit was to do ‘surya sadhna’ around sunrise followed by ‘dhyan’ at this special place carrying the foot print of a great yogi that was Rama Krishna.
I stood behind Yogi Ashwini, who chanted the ‘Gayatri jaap’ followed by a few other mantras that are part of the 45-minute-long practice. Water is offered to the sun when it transitions from the pink colour to saffron, then a silent chant is done with eyes shut. We are not supposed to look at the sun after it turns orange and then yellow because it is bad for the eyes.
Before that, when I was looking at it, I constantly saw a beautiful blue in the middle of the sun, and the sight was fascinating. However, I wondered if there was something wrong with my vision to have seen a blue sun. Anyway, it was elevating, and I carried the memory of the image for very long.
An Astrophysicist’s Annoyance
About four years later, I was watching an interview of Neil de Grasse Tyson’s on an American television channel. The astrophysicist was asked about how common people perceived the fascinating cosmic world, about which he has been striving to educate them through his books, essays and television show(s), for decades. Tyson was scintillating, but said something which made me sit up. Among the most annoying things he had heard people say about the sun, he said, was that it was yellow/golden in colour. The sun is not yellow, it is blue, he emphasised.
Did I hear him right? In Dakshineshwar, I had doubted my eyes, now my ears. So, I did some reading and understood that I had seen and heard right. I was thrilled. Without any real knowledge of the cosmos or any effort, I had seen a major scientific truth with my bare eyes. This was nothing but an experience of what I have heard from Yogiji many times: knowledge can be acquired but ‘gyan’ can only be imparted by the guru. My experience with him and another yogi tells me that they are just a channel for the divine, and would not even know what flowed through them to whom and when.
Coming back to Tyson, he is an awesome specimen of knowledge, but by God, what all he has studied and done for four decades to be where he is. I felt exhausted reading about his scholarship and professional credentials on Wikipedia. While researching for this article two days ago, I came across an essay by him, “Colours of the Cosmos” in ‘Natural History Magazine’ (March 2002). The vast knowledge he has about diverse subjects is fascinating, but who has the brains to understand it? Not me, not now. The reference to the sun’s colour in the essay, however, interested me. Here is a clip that would explain, why.
“Glowing objects like stars come in three basic colours: red, green and blue….Interstellar gas clouds can take on practically any colour, depending upon which chemicals are present, and depending upon how you photograph them, whereas a star’s colour follows directly from its surface temperature. Cool stars are red. Tepid stars are white. Hot stars are blue. How about very, very hot places like the fifteen million degree centre of the Sun? Blue.”
Gyan Vs. Knowledge
And only now I know, 11 long years after seeing blue in the middle of the sun, that Tyson has been talking about the sun being perceived as yellow by common people as a symbol of their science illiteracy. Am I science literate to have seen the right colour? No, but I do know that anything can be revealed to you by a yogi. Yoga is the mother of all sciences, and a yogi is the ultimate scientist, in fact, eons ahead of a scientist. He can transfer the ‘knowledge’ in a flash to others.
Since that day at Dakshineshwar, I have done ‘surya sadhna’ hundreds of times alone, but I haven’t seen a blue sun. Not that I thought about it or desired it. I love all the normally visible colours of the sun. But let me share another fascinating fact: there were days I was determined to wake up at sunrise, but could not because of sleep starvation at night. So, lying in bed, I would just mutter a prayer as a way of preparing to go to the roof to watch the sun rise. In no time, I would be sleeping again. Still, I would see the sun and feel its rays touch me. I have also seen multiple suns at the same time, some, close and others, far. This, too, I read is a scientific fact. No, it was not mind play. It actually happened–just as real as the experience of seeing the true colour of the sun at Dakshineshwar. However, no astrophysicist is going to certify these experiences of mine.
By the way, I have been a moon and sun-lover all my conscious life. From watching the reflection of a full moon in the puddles of water in my home garden as a child to keeping awake on a moonlit night next to a roaring ocean at a private beach in Adyar, Chennai, in my twenties, and an open one in Navadweep/Nadia in West Bengal in my forties, I carry the imprint in my heart. The obsession with the rising and setting sun led me to find my favourite spots to watch it around Raisina Hills in Delhi, where my many offices as a journalist were. And, you can be sure that I have been to Kanyakumari, among the sun’s favourite ‘beds’. These were among the most reflective and wonderful times of my life. Yet, the one at Dakshineshwar was the most special for what it showed to me about the science of yoga and the magic of being in the presence of a yogi, precisely, Yogi Ashwini, not to forget the place where it happened, Parmahansa Ram Krishna’s.
(The author is a senior journalist, based in Delhi)
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