Shyamji Bhatnagar Transcript: Micro Chakras, Nada Yoga, and Inner Tuning

Shyamji Bhatnagar Interview

Summary

Shyamji Bhatnagar describes meeting his teacher as a child and receiving teachings on nasal breathing, mantra, tantra, and the subtle body. He explains his understanding of consciousness, chakras, micro chakras, and individualized practices for releasing energetic blocks.

Questions This Interview Explores

• How can a spiritual teacher or practice transform illness and personal suffering?
• What are the gross, subtle, and causal bodies?
• What is the difference between consciousness and awareness?
• What are chakras and micro chakras, and how do they become blocked?
• How can mantra, breathing, meditation, and inner tuning help open blocked energy centers?

Key takeaways

• Consciousness is described as eternal, while awareness changes according to what the senses perceive.
• The brain receives thoughts and feelings rather than producing them.
• The subtle body carries thoughts, feelings, and energetic patterns beyond the physical body.
• Micro chakras are presented as channels through which chakra energy enters the body.
• Early experiences and later life circumstances can create energetic blocks.
• Breath-based mantra, meditation, yoga, and inner tuning can be tailored to help release those blocks.
• Sacred sounds are said to affect the chakra petals when pronounced correctly.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done over 500 of them now. If this is new to you and you’d like to check out the archives, go to batgap.com and look under the Past Interviews menu, where you’ll see them all organized in several different ways.

This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So, if you appreciate it and would like to contribute, there is a PayPal button on every page of the site.

My guest today is Shyamji Bhatnagar. Welcome, Shyamji.

Shyamji: Thank you.

Rick: Shyamji was born in 1936, which would make you about 83 now, right?

Shyamji: Actually, 84.

Rick: Congratulations. I was born in ’49, so I just did the math. But I’m still 79. Now, what am I—69?

Anyway, you were raised in India. At age 12, you met your spiritual teacher in the Himalayas and spent several years under his guidance. I’ll read the short bio, but then I have a few questions just from the bio.

Your guru initiated you into the Shaivite tradition of tantra, imparting a rare oral tradition of sacred sounds, nada yoga, and breaths, svara yoga, as well as spiritual wisdom. The grace of your guru and the spiritual practices he imparted are the basis for Shri Shyamji Bhatnagar’s intuition and unique chanting of sounds and mantras. For millennia, this tradition was passed down from generation to generation through an oral tradition that preserved its purity.

So, my first question is, how did you end up meeting your guru at such a young age?

Shyamji: On May 12, 1948, five of us boys took a train and went down four or five kilometers to steal some lychee fruit. Of course, every half an hour or so there was a train coming back. I paid a couple of extra lychees, and I couldn’t run fast enough, so I missed the train.

Then, of course, I waited for the next train to come. I was sitting in the forest, eating. All of a sudden, I heard a voice, and I was just going in every direction trying to find the source of the voice. I couldn’t find it.

Finally, I saw a little hillock, with an old, old, old man sitting there. I walked toward him, and he called me by my first name. I thought, “You know, my father is a doctor in town, so maybe this is one of his patients or something.”

Then he said to me, “You will not believe me, but I was your teacher in your last life.” Inside, I laughed because I didn’t believe in those things at that time.

Then he said to me, “Mantra: Santa, Dr. Seva Ram.” I said, “Yes. You are the son of Dr. Ram Chand.” He went back seven generations. I noted them down quickly. The ones that I didn’t remember, when I came home, I asked my father, “Do you know these names?” He knew three more, and the last two he didn’t.

So he called his father to find out if he remembered any more. He remembered one more. So he took it for granted that this man really knew everything.

Rick: Yes, everything.

Shyamji: That was very impressive. Then I started to see him on a more regular basis by going to this temple in Dehradun. It’s called Tapkeshwar, where Maharishi…? He would periodically come and give me some instructions that I was supposed to follow. That’s how it started. I studied with him for about four years.

Rick: What sort of things did you learn when you were studying with him?

Shyamji: You see, I had a congenital lung disease, and I was mostly in pain. There was another thing: he gave me a small pill, a little black pill. I don’t know what it was. I took it, and my pain subsided for maybe an hour or two. That was another miracle, because I had never experienced a couple of hours of my life without pain.

He taught me how to breathe in and how to chant mantras by breathing in through the nose. Everybody I had ever heard chanting mantras or singing breathed through the mouth. When I started to breathe through the nose and chant, it created some extraordinary effect that I had never experienced before. That was the basis of my spirituality, should I say.

He taught me how to breathe in and how to chant mantras by breathing in through the nose. Everybody I had ever heard chanting mantras or singing breathed through the mouth. When I started to breathe through the nose and chant, it created some extraordinary effect that I had never experienced before. That was the basis of my spirituality, should I say.

Rick: So I presume that your lungs got better.

Shyamji: My lungs progressively got better, yes.

Rick: Because you’ve been singing all your life, using your voice.

Shyamji: I call it chanting, because chanting is breathing through the nose. Singing is breathing through the mouth. So there is a difference between the two.

👁️ Visions of chakras

Rick: On the one hand, I read in your book that you had a vision of the chakras while meditating in the Himalayas. But then, in your bio, it talks about how the tradition and the knowledge you gained from your guru were passed down through generations through an oral tradition.

So I presume what we’re concluding here is that you learned a lot from your guru—the traditional knowledge that had been passed down for generations—but then you cognized even more than that a little bit later in your life.

Shyamji: Theoretically, I learned everything from my teacher. But over the years, I came to know about the chakras from experience.

One day, I went to the cave where Shri Ram’s guru had resided and had done his spiritual work. I was sitting there meditating, and that’s exactly when, in 1966, I had my vision. It was an extraordinary event, just an extraordinary day.

Rick: So you’re just sitting there meditating, and all of a sudden you had this profound vision?

Shyamji: Lights started to appear, just disks of light spinning. I had no way to contact my guru to verify it, because I didn’t even know where to look for him.

Rick: But you managed to figure out retroactively what it was.

Shyamji: Yes.

Rick: I suppose you spent years even after that studying and learning and filling in all the details, right?

Shyamji: What happened is that a year later, in New York, I had the vision of the microchakras. That came through automatic writing. For five hours, I was just writing and writing. Then I fell asleep on the yellow pad on which I was writing.

When I got up, I didn’t even know that I had written it: the story of 147 microchakras. How it came and why it came, I still don’t know.

Rick: Interesting. Well, let’s fill in some gaps here. Most of the people listening to this will have heard of chakras and have some idea of what they are. But it would be good to get a definition, because maybe not everybody has that knowledge. And even if they do, I’m sure you could fill in some more information for us.

Shyamji: Yes. First of all, we have to understand our physical body, in which we live. Once I asked a professor of anatomy, “You tell us that the body is made up of hundreds of trillions of cells.” He said, “Yes.”

I said, “Do these cells have a feeling?” He said, “No.” I asked, “Do these cells have any thoughts?” He said, “No.” I said, “How can we think and feel?” He said, “That’s a philosophical question. I am not trained to answer it.”

That gave me the idea of why, in our tantric tradition, we believe that we have three bodies. The physical body is just one of the three bodies.

I look at the physical body as an envelope. Inside the envelope, there is a letter; that is our subtle body. Our right hemisphere of the brain is receiving the messages from our subtle body, which turn into feelings. The message in that letter is coming from the causal body. It is called karana sharira in Sanskrit. The subtle body is called sukshma sharira, which literally means “subtle body.”

The Brain as Receiver of Thought

So every thought that we have is coming to us from the causal body, and the recipient of that is the left hemisphere of the brain. In the absence of knowing that we have these two other bodies, we accuse the brain of thinking and feeling. The brain is the recipient, not the producer. A thought comes and the neurons fire; a feeling comes and the neurons fire.

Rick: There’s a big debate about this these days in science. I think it was Science magazine that posted an article about the biggest problems in science that remain unsolved. Number two is, “How does the brain produce consciousness?” And number one is, “What is the universe made of?”

Of course, people who are not materialists are saying, “The brain doesn’t produce consciousness. The brain is like a radio; it receives consciousness.”

Shyamji: Actually, there are two words in the English language that need a little better understanding. One is “awareness,” and one is “consciousness.”

Awareness fluctuates. For example, right now I am able to see you on the screen, but I can’t see what is behind me. So I am not aware of what is behind me. I am aware, through my senses, of the reality I experience.

Consciousness, on the contrary, always is. It always was, and it always shall be. Consciousness is that on the authority of which the universes come and go. Breath comes in and goes; consciousness doesn’t go anywhere. Even if the universe goes into a black hole, consciousness does not.

Consciousness always is. It always was, and it always shall be.

Rick: Right. So we could say that consciousness is the ultimate reality, or the fundamental reality—indestructible, eternal, and all that.

Shyamji: It exists right now, is omnipresent, and always has been.

Rick: And awareness, as we’re defining it, is what we happen to be aware of at the time, and that obviously fluctuates. Would you say it’s true that we are aware of things by virtue of consciousness? That consciousness is the light by which we experience things, or are aware of things?

Shyamji: Can anything exist without consciousness?

Rick: Right. Okay, good. Well, that’s a good definition.

Microchakras and inner tuning

You’ve mentioned three bodies: gross, subtle, and causal. It’s interesting. I sometimes have discussions or debates with people about reincarnation, for instance, and they say, “How could that be? Your body dies, you’re dead, you’re done. How could something possibly go into another body?”

Then you have to bring in the idea that we have a subtle body, and the subtle body is different from the gross body. When the gross body dies, the subtle body doesn’t die, and then that eventually gets into another body. Somehow, this is perplexing to some people.

So let’s talk a little bit about the idea of three bodies, what they are, and so on.

Shyamji: One definition of the subtle body I already explained to you is that every feeling you have ever had, whether it is love or even ego, is not in the physical tissue. Physical tissue does not have any ego. Ego is a feeling. It comes, it arises, and it subsides. You can use it, and you can surrender it. You can use it; you can surrender it.

The subtle body affects our nervous system from the back. That’s the argument I had with my publisher when I presented the cover of the book and showed the chakras affecting us from the back.

He said to me, “Every other book shows the chakras in the front.” I said, “Think why.”

Rick: Because it’s more interesting?

Shyamji: Exactly. The chakras are affecting our spine, the plexuses, the nerve ganglia. They are the ones that receive the light from the chakras.

Rick: So I’ll just ask dumb questions here and give you an opportunity to explain in greater detail. Someone might ask, “What is the subtle body made of?” We know our gross body is made of various chemicals and substances, but what is the subtle body made of?

Shyamji: What is the subtle body made up of? What is truth made up of? What is love made up of?

Rick: Good question. Could we say there’s such a thing as subtle matter, that these things are made of subtle matter?

Shyamji: According to Einstein, matter doesn’t even exist.

Rick: Well, yeah.

Shyamji: Because we are in the material body. We live in the material body, so we think materially. But scientifically speaking, matter does not exist. In fact, I had a quotation from Einstein: “Matter does not exist.” He says, “We have been wrong all along. All that exists is energy.” But we can’t perceive the energy. Therefore, the energy has to lower itself to become perceptible to our senses.

That’s when the yogis decided, “Why trouble the Mother? God has the energy to come down from her status to be perceptible to us. We can raise our standards, our senses, so we can perceive the Mother Goddess.” The reason I say Mother Goddess is because energy is translated as goddess in Indian literature. That’s why they worship the Goddess.

Rick: Okay, so we won’t go off on Einstein too much right now. But he did say E equals MC squared, and the M stands for matter in there.

Shyamji: But that was in the beginning. That’s why he said, “We have been wrong all along.”

Rick: Oh, I see. So later on he said that. Okay, good. All right. So we have a rough idea of what chakras are. You have a good idea of them, and the rest of us have a rough idea of the different energy centers in the body, from the base of the spine to the top of the head. Everyone has heard talks about the heart chakra, the second chakra, and everything. But probably you are the only person I’ve ever heard of who talks about micro chakras. So, what are micro chakras?

Shyamji: I can give you only an analogy with the sun. Sunrays travel, and they enter our body and nurture everything. For example, if you are sitting in the basement of a building, outside there is sunlight, but you are not receiving the sunlight. Why? Because there are blocks everywhere that are blocking the rays of the sun.

Chakras as Spinning Fields of Light

Similarly, the chakras are spinning. They are pure light spinning, and they are of different uses, by the way. They are spinning and spinning, and the light can come to our back. But the light is traveling through rays. Those rays are called micro chakras, meaning the light of the chakras has to enter our body from the back.

However, if those micro chakras are blocked—and there are 147 of them—then you don’t receive that particular light. Consequently, whatever that light is related to is what is called micro-chakra psychology. You can read about them. At least 98 are mentioned in the book. I would have liked to mention another 49, but the book was getting too big.

Rick: Okay, so you’re saying that light in the ordinary sense comes in through our eyes, but in a subtler sense it comes in through our micro chakras in the back. Is that right?

Shyamji: Yes. The central chakras are light; light travels through the micro chakras, and they enter our body.

Rick: Okay.

Shyamji: The seventh-chakra light will enter from the top of the head, and the first-chakra light will enter from the coccyx.

Rick: So even in a dark place, like a yogi meditating in a cave where there’s no sunlight, light could be coming in through his micro chakras because it’s a subtler form of light that’s not the same as the visible light?

Shyamji: No.

Rick: Okay, okay, good. And so I would presume that almost everybody has blocked micro chakras, probably in different proportions. Some of them are open, some of them are closed, and it’s a unique signature for every person. Is that correct?

Shyamji: That is correct.

Rick: Okay. And what are the symptoms of them being blocked? Or what are the symptoms of particular ones being blocked? As an addition to this question, each of the chakras has a number of micro chakras. I also heard you say that each of the micro chakras has micro-micro chakras, and it sort of goes all the way down.

Shyamji: I can feel them, but intellectually I can understand that there are simpler and subtler micro chakras.

Rick: But practically, we just go down.

Shyamji: Yeah, exactly. I can feel them. I can already feel the micro chakras. I can feel 49 micro chakras on the right side of your spine. I can feel 49 in the left channel. I do that whenever somebody comes for a two-hour-long consultation.

That’s what I do. I make a chart of their micro chakras and give them a copy of it, so that they can look at it in the book and see why this micro chakra became blocked and how they can open it. I give them instructions. I must have given consultations more than 50,000 times in my life, and I know people who have dramatically changed because their blocked micro chakras became open.

Rick: So when you do the consultation, do you go into a sort of meditative state, or some kind of state that enables you to cognize on a subtle level what’s going on with the micro chakras?

Shyamji: Yes, partly that, and partly the client has to be relaxed. I have developed what is called inner-tuning massage. It is a 15-minute treatment on the head, shoulders, neck, and face, which prepares people to be so relaxed that, in my own meditative state, I can feel the micro chakras along the spine.

Rick: Okay.

Shyamji: And then I make a chart.

Rick: So two things have to be present: you have to be in a meditative state, and they have to be relaxed. Then there can be an attunement.

Shyamji: Exactly.

Rick: Okay, good. So I got it: inner tuning.

And I presume that all kinds of things could block your micro chakras, like certain things that happened in your upbringing or in your childhood. Or maybe you took drugs at a certain point, or alcohol, or had traumatic experiences. You were a soldier in Afghanistan or something, and you had a lot of stress. Is that correct? All sorts of life experiences, things we consume, and experiences we have—all of these would create blocks?

Shyamji: Well, the way to understand that is that there are three channels that intersect all seven chakras. For convenience, I call them the right channel, the central channel, and the left channel. Right-channel energy descends from birth to the first three years of life.

Rick: And these are the Ida, Pingala, and Sushumna that you’re referring to?

Shyamji: The three channels are in the Sushumna.

Rick: Okay.

Shyamji: Yes, you’ve got it. Ida and Pingala are the leading channels. They provide prana to the channels. There are five different types of prana. Maybe later on I’ll talk about apana, which is the most important one to purify, so that the rest of the three bodies can properly function and become closer to one another.

There are seven micro chakras in each chakra, and 49 of them in each channel. Mostly, 50 percent of them are blocked in the first three to three and a half years of life, so we have only 50 percent to work with. In the left channel, you can open 100 percent. Even if some things are blocked in the right channel, you can still open them in the left channel.

I can give you an example. If you were not breastfed as a baby, your fifth micro chakra in the heart chakra will be blocked.

Rick: Mine must be blocked. My mother said that her doctor told her she shouldn’t breastfeed me or anything. I remember my mother crying one time because she was deprived of that experience.

Shyamji: I know several people like yourself. Unfortunately, it is not true that breastfeeding can ever be bad for the baby. Doctors sometimes promote formula.

Rick: Oh, yeah. In those days, they gave amphetamines to pregnant women. They called them “pep pills.” It was crazy.

Shyamji: There’s something deeper that’s happening. Maybe later in the conversation we can talk about the deeper reasons why, in the medical system, they believe that babies have no feelings.

Rick: Right, right.

Shyamji: That’s why, even today, right this very minute that I’m talking to you, some baby boy is being circumcised without anesthesia, because babies are not supposed to have feelings.

Rick: Which is crazy. I mean, if you have ever interacted with a baby, it obviously has feelings. Touch it, and it’ll cry.

Shyamji: Whatever adjective you use will be insufficient.

Rick: Right, right. “Crazy” is a kind way of putting it. Okay, so let’s not get too sidetracked. Let me just get down to the math again for a second. You said each chakra has seven micro chakras, so seven sevens are 49. How did we end up with 147?

Shyamji: Forty-nine in the right channel.

Rick: There we go. We did. Okay, good. Got it. Okay, proceed from here. Probably I’ve interrupted you several times in the middle of a thought. You might want to complete it.

Shyamji: Yes. Tell me, what were we talking about?

Rick: Well, we were talking about how they get blocked in the first place. I assumed, and you confirmed, that everybody has some of them blocked, in various combinations with different people, and that there are various life experiences that can block them. Maybe we should now talk about how you go about unblocking them.

Shyamji: Unblocking takes place through inner-tuning practices. There are different practices that I design for people as I see their age, their work situation, and what part of the planet they are living in. So it becomes a very individualized program.

Rick: But once a person has learned it or been instructed, there’s something they can practice on their own. They don’t have to sit with you every time, right?

Shyamji: No, they don’t. For example, I go to Europe three times a year. Every four months, I can see my students to see what progress they’ve made. Then I give them either a change in the mantra, a change in the meditation technique, a change in some yoga postures, or a change in the sleeping posture. I mean, there are lots of things.

Rick: Lots of things you can do.

Shyamji: Exactly.

🧘 Mantras, petals, and the nervous system

Rick: Okay. A question just came in that might be good to ask at this point. It’s relevant to what we’re talking about. This is from KP in Mumbai. He says, “Do micro chakras relate to the petals on the chakras?” In the standard literature, you see those pictures of the chakras. What about the words on those petals that we find in the Tantric literature?

Shyamji: Yes, all of those are relevant. The petals of the chakras are the ones that start to vibrate when you pronounce those sounds properly.

Now, this gentleman from Bombay—you said Mumbai—your question came from there. He will probably understand that there are four sounds inscribed, for example, on the pure lotus of the first chakra. Chakras are compared with lotuses. Why? Because the lotus flower is the purest lotus flower on the planet.

Why is that pure in comparison to a rose or lily? Because if a drop falls on a rose, of course it will roll off, but you can see a track through which it rolled off. On the lotus flower, that track will not be there. It is called stainless.

Rick: Nice. Yeah, they also say of lotuses that even though they have their roots in the mud, they have risen up above that. They’re above the water and…

Shyamji: That is what the yogis are supposed to do. They live an absolutely pure life, in spite of the fact that we live in the Dark Ages. So, the sounds that are there have to be pronounced properly. For example, the first sound and the first petal of the first chakra is called the sound of Va—Va.

Now, if “Va” is not pronounced by arresting the two canines on the inside of the lip, it is not correct. You can also say “Va,” which means that your canines are touching the outer part of the lip. The mantra will not work. It has to work on the inside, because the inside is a sensitive pressure point. When the canines vibrate that point as you make that sound, it will keep that petal, shall I say, young.

There are 49 sounds in all, and three complex sounds, so we have 52 sounds. The languages have borrowed their sounds from the chakras—every language. Some languages have 37 letters, some have 26, and some have 18. In Sanskrit, you have 52, and the 330 million mantras are made up of those 52 sounds.

Rick: Okay, let’s fill in a couple more gaps here. One is the assumption that everything we’re saying is based upon: that the nervous system on all its levels is the vehicle, or the instrument, through which enlightenment is gained. That’s maybe just good to express. What you’re talking about here is a way of tuning up the instrument so that it can support that experience, states of higher consciousness, and so on. You would concur with that, I assume.

Shyamji: Yes. You see, first of all, if we understand that the light of the chakras has to keep energizing the petals of the lotuses, which are called the chakras, when all 49 terms are properly used, you have light from the first chakra, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, and all of them are basically related to the top of the head, the seventh chakra.

For example, when your seventh microchakra in the first chakra is completely open, you’re getting all that yellow light sufficiently. The first microchakra of the seventh will then become open. Why? Because the seventh of the first is open, then the seventh of the second is open, and the seventh of the third is open. So the seventh chakra depends totally on the contentment of the lower chakras.

The seventh chakra depends totally on the contentment of the lower chakras.

That’s why I say that each chakra has a mind of its own. For example, the mind of your body is totally different from the mind of your gender. Men think differently from women because of their gender.

Rick: So what you just said, as I understand it, is that there’s a connection or a correlation between the lower chakras and the seventh chakra. As the lower chakras, or the lower microchakras, open, the corresponding aspect of the seventh chakra will automatically open because of that correlation. Is that right?

Shyamji: Yes, just like a tone. When the tone is in tune, it will have an overtone that is in tune.

Rick: Uh-huh, yeah, sure. You can take a guitar string and ring a certain string, and it’ll cause another string to resonate with that, or tuning forks are another example. Okay, good.

🧘 Contentment and the lower chakras

Someone sent in a question relevant to what you just said as well. I’ll read it. This is from Florence Boyes from New York. She said, “I think that, from Shyamji’s microchakra perspective, there is a discontentment in microchakras whose needs haven’t been met. Are there ways to compensate for the unmet needs of microchakras?”

Shyamji: Repetition of doing the same thing over and over again is an attempt to open the seventh microchakra.

Rick: Such as? Give us an example.

Shyamji: Well, we do that every day.

Rick: Okay.

Shyamji: Many people do it three or four times a day, because the seventh microchakra in the first is not open. The reason it is not open is not because they are not eating enough; it is because we are not eating properly.

Rick: So you’re not saying that people shouldn’t eat. You’re just saying that perhaps abnormal eating, such as overeating, would be caused by a discontentment in the microchakra, right?

Shyamji: Exactly.

Rick: Okay.

Shyamji: Because they are discontent, they keep on eating more and more, hoping that they will become content.

Rick: Right, right. You see the same thing with money, video games, and a million different things. People become obsessed with them.

Why the First Three Chakras Breed Discontent

The first three chakras are, by nature, restless and discontent. The more stimulus you gather for them, the more addicted you get to the stimulus. For example, if you have earned a billion dollars in your life, you’re not content; you now want to have two billion. When you have two, you want to compare yourself with those who have four. You keep on adding to that discontent, hoping that someday you will be content. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

Shyamji: The first three chakras are, by nature, restless and discontent. The more stimulus you gather for them, the more addicted you get to the stimulus. For example, if you have earned a billion dollars in your life, you’re not content; you now want to have two billion. When you have two, you want to compare yourself with those who have four. You keep on adding to that discontent, hoping that someday you will be content. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

The same is true with sex. The more sex you have, the more sex you want. The third chakra: the more power you have, the more power you want. No president has ever renounced their place after eight years. It’s just that they can’t; they have to leave after eight years, right?

Rick: After FDR, they had to.

Shyamji: So the first three chakras are discontent by nature. Intervention from the higher chakras has to take place for them to become content in the first three chakra minds.

Rick: Interesting. Just a reminder of a Gita verse based on what you’re saying: “The objects of sense turn away from him who does not feed upon them, but the taste for them persists. On seeing the Supreme, even this taste vanishes.”

Shyamji: Ah, beautiful. Yeah.

Rick: It’s almost a cliché. People say, “Happiness has to come from within, and you don’t get it from external objects,” and all that. But you wouldn’t think that was the case if you saw everyone in the world behaving as they behave. If you say that to somebody who is accustomed to deriving whatever shreds of happiness they get from external things, they won’t understand what you’re talking about, chances are.

So let’s form this into a question. What would you say to somebody who is addicted to this, that, and the other thing, trying to get fulfillment from outer experiences? How do we turn them around and enable them to discover that fulfillment comes from within?

Shyamji: One question I sometimes ask people to repeat to themselves is: When you wake up in the morning and say, “Yesterday, whatever you did, did it bring you any contentment?”

Rick: So they might say, “Yeah, I saw this movie. It was really great. I loved that movie.”

Shyamji: Keep repeating it.

Rick: You wouldn’t want to see the same movie every day. You’d get tired of it. Or the same baseball game, or the same whatever.

Shyamji: You know, when you play a game and you lose, you have to change the strategy. If you think that just because you can win one game, that’s going to make you content, think again.

You have seven different minds. Most of us don’t even use all seven minds. Most people, frankly speaking, live in the first three chakra minds, and they are discontent by nature.

It’s really the heart chakra mind that gives you a clue. When you open up to unconditional love, that’s what the heart chakra mind knows. The only problem with the heart chakra mind is that it just doesn’t know whom to love unconditionally.

Rick: And so it tends to love something that perhaps might not be so stable or consistent.

Shyamji: Love-worthy.

Rick: Right, right. I’m reminded of a quote that’s attributed to Einstein. I don’t know if he said it, but it’s that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about inner tuning. You have personal consultations with people, and you give them programs to follow. Then you go back periodically and reconnect with them, and maybe fine-tune the programs that they’re following. You have some people who’ve been with you for years. So if I was one of those people, what would my daily routine be like? What would I be doing on a daily basis?

Shyamji: On a daily basis, they will make an attempt to go to bed as early as possible, because the light at night is really not a very good thing for our pineal gland.

Rick: You mean artificial light?

Shyamji: Artificial light, like electric light. As much as we have gotten hundreds and hundreds of different advantages from electric light—lives are saved because we can drive the ambulance and take a person to the hospital, and enrichments from the light that we can be grateful for, as well as thousands of benefits from refrigeration and so on—the problem is this: We have lost the biorhythm of the chakras, which were related to our sixth chakra. It depends on the rhythm of light and darkness.

You see what happens: At night, when the sun goes down, the serotonin level starts to drop. As it gets more and more dark, the melatonin level starts to rise, and that’s why we can get into deep sleep.

Then, two hours before sunrise, the body feels rested. It tosses and turns to wake up. From the chakra point of view, what happens is that energy reaches the seventh chakra level. But two hours before sunrise, it is in the seventh chakra, and suddenly it drops from the seventh to the first.

Now, this happens around the equator. The time reduces, for example, in the New York area, which is much closer to the North Pole than the equator. In India, for example, two hours before sunrise, the energy will drop from the seventh to the first. Here, it is 90 minutes.

As the energy drops from the seventh to the first, the body shakes; it tosses and turns. Because we have not had enough sleep, we toss and turn and go back to sleep, so we miss the first chakra mind rhythm.

The first chakra rhythm is this: When you get up, your colon will stimulate peristalsis, and you will go and have a bowel movement. My students are taught how to regulate their first chakra rhythm by having two bowel movements a day—one before sunrise and one around sunset.

Once you have maintained that rhythm, all of a sudden, you are much more in tune with your body and with the purity of the body. The waste material doesn’t really want to stay in your body; it wants to go out.

But because of our lifestyle and our access to electricity, I have raised three or four children, and they will not listen. They will work at night. They will say, “I want to do my homework at 11 o’clock at night,” as if five o’clock in the morning isn’t very quiet. It’s the mindset: everybody is doing it, and therefore it becomes normal.

No, the majority of people sometimes do stupid things. That does not make them normal. The pineal gland is the only light-sensitive gland, and when you don’t listen to its call, you force it to produce serotonin at night and melatonin during the day.

When you catch up in time, you are going to have brain-related problems as you grow up. A sensible psychiatrist or doctor, when somebody has a problem with insomnia, will recommend that they take some melatonin before they go to sleep.

Rick: Why not take the melatonin from nature? Oh, I realized my mic was muted. Yeah, there. They also say, “Don’t sit at your computer at night,” and stuff like that. You just have to settle down, shut down, and get ready.

So what happens to people who live in, let’s say, northern Alaska, where for half of the year it’s light almost all the time, and the other half of the year it’s dark almost all the time?

Shyamji: Well, the—

The body tries to get adjusted. The suicide rate or the depression rate is far higher in those climates and at those altitudes, you will notice. I remember I was very, very impressed by Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish movie director. I thought he was one of the greatest movie makers in the world.

His subject most of the time was depression—how life is so depressing. Mankind did not evolve at the North Pole. It evolved around the equator. Now we say it was Africa, but when life evolved, which continent was where? What was the shape of the continents? Who knows? That was millions of years ago.

Rick: Yeah. Eventually, people migrated to those places.

Shyamji: No, did they search for food? Everybody left? Everybody left—people who could not find food. They were sheltered, or they went northward. So now we are stuck under the snow-covered peaks. Is that normal? That’s why when you go for vacation, you don’t go to the North Pole.

Rick: Some people do. They take these cruises to Alaska, but not in the wintertime.

Shyamji: One thousand, right? Yeah, I’m talking about the 999 people. All right, so a tropical type of climate.

Rick: So one thing you said is that, okay, if I was your student, I would be learning to get on a good routine: early to bed, early to rise. What’s another thing?

Shyamji: Another thing is that you work with the lights every day. For example, today is Tuesday, right? It is the day of Mars. Every day is named after a planet. You notice that?

Rick: I—well, my wife knows about that stuff, so I know. I know for that reason.

Shyamji: Yeah, maybe her wisdom will be even more rewarded when she understands the reason I’m giving you. Yesterday was the day of the moon. That’s why we call it Monday. Today is the day of Mars.

My students will be eating something orange or red. You can find so many colors in foods, vegetables, and fruits, so why not make a choice of the color of the day? That will lay the layer of the red planet. On Tuesday, you can wear something red or orange to remind you that today is Tuesday.

Rick: Well, not all planets have distinct colors, like Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, and—

Shyamji: They have a predominant color. Mars has a predominant color, which is red, orangey-red. Mercury is green. Jupiter is yellow. Venus is white. Saturn is black and blue. Sunday is gold.

Rick: So there’s an advantage to eating all these foods on the different days.

Shyamji: If you see what you do, what is the purpose of life from my standpoint and from the tantric standpoint? The purpose of life is to create circumstances in which you can become enlightened, which means to experience your own light.

Every color of the spectrum is contributing to that light. So if it is a seven-day scale, you have absorbed the whole spectrum—not only by wearing it and eating it. Ninety percent of the color you take in with your eyes, seven percent of the color you take in with what you eat, and three percent from what you wear. You see, you get a 100 percent effect if you concentrate and see that color.

If you know today’s Tuesday, you will watch every red car, every red sign, and everybody wearing a red tie.

Rick: So I have the wrong color shirt on today.

Shyamji: Well, tomorrow you’ll probably be wearing green.

Rick: Is tomorrow Green Day?

Shyamji: That’s right. Go to my website and download the parameters.

Rick: Sure, I’ll do that. I’ll download it. What the heck?

Shyamji: In my family, my sister-in-law is a gynecologist. She says, “Of all your teachings, I like the one about color.” And my brother says, “That’s the one I hate,” because she had to go out and buy more clothes.

Rick: That’s funny. Okay, so we have two things so far. We have early to bed, early to rise, and bowel movement early and twice a day. And we have this thing about the color correlations of each day. What else?

Shyamji: Mantra.

Rick: Mantra. Okay.

Shyamji: Let’s understand the word mantra. What does that mean? It’s made up of two words. “Mana” means mind. By the way, the word “man” comes from the word “mana,” or “manas,” meaning the animal that has a mind is a man. “Tra” means to go beyond. Mantra: that which will take you beyond your mind, so that you can live above the field of the mind rather than under the field of the mind.

When you live above the field of the mind, you can tell your mind what to do. When you are under the field of the mind, then the mind is telling you what to do. It’s almost like riding your horse while holding it from the bottom. That can be very rough, my friend.

The purpose of life is to create circumstances in which you can become enlightened, which means to experience your own light.

Rick: Yeah, it certainly can. Look at the world.

Shyamji: Meeting a guru is a technique in the Indian tradition that will bring you on top of the horse rather than having you hold on from the bottom. The bottom of the horse is suffering; the top of the horse is play.

There are two words in Sanskrit: maya and lila. Maya is when you are living a lifestyle that is leading to suffering, like Buddha said: “All life is suffering.” Most people live under the field of the mind. They’re riding under the horse.

Lila is when you get on top of the horse. Now life is a play. When it’s a play, you have two things: sometimes you lose, and sometimes you win. When you win, or when you do, you go and shake hands with the loser and say, “Today it was my day.”

Rick: Good. So the purpose of a mantra—or mantra itself—is to take you beyond the mind, based on its definition. When you go beyond the mind, what do you arrive at?

Shyamji: You know then who the subject is? Who are you?

Rick: You go to that which is fundamental to the mind, you could say.

Shyamji: No, no—the subject. You see, the mind is an object. For example, I have a glass in my hand. I say, “My glass,” right? The glass is an object; I am the subject. I also say, “My mind.” I am the subject; the mind is an object. “My body.” I am the subject that lives in this body, which is an object.

The confusion is that you become the body; you become the mind. That’s when the suffering begins. Live outside of your body, outside of your mind, outside of your ego, and then you can use them whenever you need to, whenever you want to. But you don’t become them. It’s like a role that you play. Like Shakespeare says, “All life is a play. We all have our entrances and exits.”

The confusion is that you become the body; you become the mind. That’s when the suffering begins. Live outside of your body, outside of your mind, outside of your ego, and then you can use them whenever you need to, whenever you want to. But you don’t become them. It’s like a role that you play. Like Shakespeare says, “All life is a play. We all have our entrances and exits.”

Rick:As You Like It, yeah. “All the world’s a stage.” So when you say live outside your body, your mind, and so on, I don’t think you mean disassociated from it, as if you were off five feet to the right or something. You mean somehow rising to a more fundamental level that is prior to the manifestation of mind and body. Would you say it that way?

Shyamji: Exactly—the subject, right? Try to remember what Socrates said: “Know thyself.” He didn’t say, “Know thy mind,” or “Know thy soul,” or “Know thy body,” or anything else. “Know thyself.” That means the people he knew did not know themselves, including Plato, who didn’t even understand what his guru was telling him.

Rick: So there’s a section in your book, and there’s a lot of talk among spiritual teachers about the ego—killing the ego or going beyond the sense of personal self. There’s a section in your book where you talk about that section of the Gita where it talks about the sense of doership, or recognizing that the gunas of nature are performing action.

When you go beyond the mind, when you know the Self, does that, in the same stroke, demolish the ego or kill it in some sense? Or does the ego become more of just a faculty, but it no longer recognizes who and what you are?

Shyamji: No, it is one of your powers.

Rick: You use it when you want, like your eyes or your ears. It’s a faculty.

Shyamji: Anything that is an object, the subject should know how to use. If the object becomes the subject, you are living your secondhand life, and secondhand life will never bring contentment. Knowing the subject is part and parcel of spiritual life.

Rick: So, just to reiterate, you wouldn’t say that the ego is at some point completely annihilated, but just that it takes its proper place in the whole structure of things?

Shyamji: I can give you a practical example.

Rick: Okay, good.

Shyamji: When you go to sleep, or I go to sleep, or anyone does, we want to make sure that the body is rested and quite comfortable, with the shoulders properly covered. The ego of the body is now in a state of surrender.

Then the feelings will take over. You will think about, “Oh, maybe I said something to somebody I shouldn’t have.” Now you have surrendered the ego of the feeling mind. Then thoughts will come to you about what you have to do tomorrow, and slowly you will surrender the ego of your thoughts.

Gradually, your third microchakra, which is the ego principle in the seventh chakra, comes into play. The moment you renounce the ego of the seventh-chakra mind, you have entered sleep. To ego is a complete state of surrender.

When we are deeply asleep, in the daytime we can do the same. Use whichever chakra mind’s ego you need, and then go to the next, and go to the next. In other words, you remain the subject. You hold on to the reins of your horse. The horse is the ego; you tell it where to go. You drive it.

That’s why Shri Krishna’s role is so important in the Mahabharata: he is the driver of Prince Arjuna.

Rick: Right. He’s the charioteer.

Shyamji: Exactly. All these epics are basically the story of a human being.

Rick: Yeah, allegorical.

Shyamji: Yeah.

Rick: There’s even a saying someplace or other that Brahman is the charioteer. I forget the Sanskrit. You may have heard it, but I think it fits in with what we’re saying. Do you advocate meditating before bed?

Shyamji: I tell people to sit for a minute, because between walking and lying down, there is an institution of sitting. You don’t have your heart doing the same thing when you’re walking; your heartbeat is much faster. So before you lie down, it is better to give your heart a minute of rest.

Once I told that to my cardiologist—“Is this a good practice that I teach people?” He said that it would give their heart a little bit more life.

Rick: A transition, yeah. I’ve been meditating for a long time—51 years—and on average a couple of hours a day. I have no problem sitting and meditating for an hour; the whole thing is enjoyable.

But I heard you in one of your recordings saying that it’s not advisable to meditate for longer periods because you go through these different cycles, and one of them is seven minutes, and then another is something else, and you’ll just be lost in daydreams.

Sure, the mind will pick up on thoughts and go off, but it doesn’t remain that way. One can have a very deep meditation for a full hour or whatever. Of course, we’ve heard of yogis who will sit for days in samadhi. So I presume that this is not some kind of universal rule that you can’t meditate for more than a few minutes.

Shyamji: No, no, I don’t say that. You do what you want. You live in a free world. You can do what you want. It’s just a matter of time.

If you don’t have a lot of time, the quality of meditation is more important than the quantity.

I have some students who are monks from different traditions. I can give you a live example of a monk who told me he used to meditate for two hours: an hour and a half in the morning and half an hour in the evening.

I would ask him, “Do you have your bowel movement before you meditate?” He said, “Not necessarily.” I said, “Then don’t close your eyes when you sit to meditate.” He was shocked. He wondered why his teacher hadn’t taught him that.

Years later, when I met him, this man was glowing. He said he only meditated for 24 minutes in the morning and one or two minutes at night. He was literally glowing because he would not close his eyes if he had not had a bowel movement.

Besides that, Rick, I want you to tell me: when we want to use a word, we should know what it truly means. Is that right?

Rick: Sure. What kind of word? Anywhere? Don’t take any particular word.

Shyamji: The word “meditation” has so many loose meanings. Everybody interprets meditation according to their own meaning of meditation.

Rick: Sure. It’s like the word “liquid.” It could refer to orange juice, it could refer to ammonia, and they kind of think—

Shyamji: That’s an example, right? But the better example is to understand what the word stands for.

Now, let’s see what is the root of the word meditation. In Sanskrit, we call it dhyana. I haven’t explained that; I’ll come to it a little bit later.

Let’s go to the word meditation. It comes from Latin, and the word in Latin is meditari, which means “to think.” How many people you think who are meditating know the meaning of the word meditation?

Rick: I’m sure they’ve all been given some kind of definition. But, as you just said, the definition must vary.

Shyamji: I’m sorry, I’m just asking you a personal question. You will admit to me that you meditate an hour or two every day?

Rick: Yes, I do.

Shyamji: Okay. What does the word meditation mean to you?

Rick: To me, it means allowing the active mind to settle down and to become more and more refined, to the point where thought virtually ceases, or ceases altogether, and one just resides in the Self or in pure awareness.

Then there might be periods where the mind percolates up again and then resides back again during that period. That’s the description of the experience.

Shyamji: You see, what you’re describing is the rate of breathing in relationship to the rate of thoughts.

Rick: Yes. Breathing settles down, and, of course, a lot of research has been done on this. The whole physiology settles down along with it.

Shyamji: Exactly. So, when we live in very stressful times, it can become a therapeutic tool to calm the mind. But that has nothing to do with meditation. That is relaxation.

Rick: Yes, but remember the second verse of the Yoga Sutras: Yogas chitta vritti nirodhah—yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind, which is what I just described.

Shyamji: Yes, beyond the chitta, there’s something else.

Rick: Yes, the third verse: and then the seer rests in the Self.

Shyamji: Right. Okay. What they are saying is that you think. What is the thought that you plant in your mind when you are meditating? Remember that meditari means to think, not to cease thinking.

I’ll tell you something.

Rick: Yes, that’s the English implication of it. In fact, meditation usually means contemplation. I think I’ll go sit and meditate on the meaning of life or something like that.

Shyamji: Contemplation is a state prior to meditation. You have yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and then samadhi, right? First of all, without pratyahara, you can’t even go there.

Rick: Define pratyahara for us.

Shyamji:Pratyahara is the ability to invert your senses—to discover the inner aspect of the senses.

The eyes know how to see outside; the eyes can also see what is inside. Some artists have a vision, and they paint. They have inverted their visual sense, and that would make them an artist.

There are people who compose a beautiful melody. They have inverted their fifth-chakra sense, called hearing. They heard the melody and then composed it. This is all pratyahara.

Without accomplishing pratyahara, you cannot go to dharana. Dharana is contemplation. Contemplation has to take place with a singular thought in your mind. You want to sustain a singular thought, whether it is a mantra or something else. Some people use the breath to concentrate on.

Once you accomplish dharana, then you go toward dhyana. Dhyana is an idea. You have to have an idea to think about. Meditation is to think about an idea and not be involved with your subtle body, your physical body, or your causal body.

Yes, it is a causal-body phenomenon, because the causal body is where the thoughts are coming from. So you want to refine your causal body by realizing the true nature of the Self, contemplating the true nature of the Self.

But it’s premature to think about that when you have not even been able to do what is called pratyahara.

I do not agree when people say that just because you can relax by sitting for an hour, you are really making use of the time as wisely as you could.

Rick: Okay. Well—

Shyamji: In the twenty-first century—

Rick: Just based upon my own experience, it radically transformed my life.

Shyamji: It progressively will.

Rick: Yes. Also, when you say “thinking about an idea,” just then, in the dharana stage, what sort of idea are you referring to?

Shyamji: “Aham Brahmasmi”—I am Brahman.

Rick: Okay, so you’re talking about a contemplative thing where one would contemplate the notion “Aham Brahmasmi” or “Tat Tvam Asi,” one of those?

Shyamji: Exactly. That’s a singular thought. When you are absorbing that singular thought, that is meditation. But you cannot have enough practice behind it. The practice part is pratyahara.

Without purification, by the way, you can’t even go toward pratyahara. Many, many people are meditating, but they don’t even have a bowel movement. There are people who are practicing yoga, standing on their heads without having a bowel movement. They don’t understand the role of apana prana.

Rick: Right. But presuming their bowels are taken care of, then sitting in meditation—I mean—

Shyamji: Is that complete? Having a bowel movement alone is not enough. After a bowel movement, many people take a shower. Many people don’t. Is that correct?

Rick: Sure.

Shyamji: Okay. When you don’t take a shower after a bowel movement, your body is tamas. Toilet paper doesn’t really wash or clean there. If I blow my nose into your tissue and my nose is dry, and then you put it under a microscope, you will see a dance. You will see a dance of bacteria.

Rick: Sure.

Shyamji: The same way, consider the role of toilet paper. We come from work-oriented societies. We do things fast and quickly. We grab a hot dog and run; we grab a hamburger and run. We don’t have the time to relate. We don’t have the time to even clean. We just don’t know how to clean.

Most people go into the shower, turn the shower on over their heads, and stand there. For millions of years, we went to ponds, lakes, rivers, and the ocean, and we went in feet first, not head first.

There are proper ways to purify your physical body. There are proper ways to purify your own sacred sexual energy. The second-chakra mind has to experience its own sattvic nature. Only then can you deal with the mind of the ego, which is the third-chakra mind.

You can use this method, that method, and another method haphazardly, but that doesn’t really take you anywhere in the way that you could go if you had proper guidance—a teacher monitoring your growth and taking you somewhere.

Rick: Sure. The English word for that is “dilettante,” meaning a superficial dabbler. You try this, you try that, you keep jumping around, and you never buckle down and do one thing.

Shyamji: I do not mean to imply that everybody is a dilettante. But I do mean that we don’t know how to clean ourselves or how to purify ourselves. The purification of thought and the purification of feeling are all important.

These will only be effective if we first know how to clean our bodies. We don’t even know which direction to sleep in. We don’t even know which posture to sleep in.

Rick: Okay, so there are all these things, and you place a lot of emphasis on them. We could talk for the rest of the whole interview about personal hygiene and all that kind of thing.

Shyamji: But hygiene is personal. I want to make it public.

Rick: Public hygiene. But let’s not use up all the time we have. We have to skim along a little bit in order to cover all the many interesting things you have to say that we haven’t gotten to yet.

You just dropped one idea that I think people will find interesting: purifying the second chakra, or sexual purity. What would you have to say about that?

Shyamji: Learn about the rhythm of your sexuality. On which day of the moon does your sexual wave peak? Feel that on your own, not because you are with somebody. Then it will react; it will not act. First, understand your own sexual rhythm.

Women are much better at it than men, but men can also, with practice, observe their own rhythm. If you work with the prana calendar, which is freely available on our website, you will see on which day of the week your nostril is strong.

Rick: Explain that about the nostrils, because people might not understand it and how they alternate.

Shyamji: The way it works is this: after the full-moon night, the following sunrise, nature wants your right nostril to be more open so that the prana is directed toward the left hemisphere of the brain.

The right nostril is called Pingala. When the left hemisphere of the brain is energized, for the whole hour from sunrise to one hour afterward, this is all mentioned in the prana calendar in detail.

For three days, that will persist every morning. Your meditation should end with the sunrise, and you check your breath. If your right nostril is open, congratulate yourself.

Three days after that, the left will take over. During the single sunrise for three days, your left nostril will be dominant. You understand the difference between dominant and recessive?

Rick: Yes. At any given time, the breath predominantly comes out of one nostril or the other.

Shyamji: Exactly. After the full moon, it starts the cycle with the right nostril. After the new moon, it starts the cycle with the left.

Rick: I presume this has been tested and measured. This has been known for thousands of—

Shyamji: For thousands of years. Recent brain research has also verified it.

Rick: There have probably been some studies on it.

Shyamji: Professor Patricia Carrington was my student. She was a professor of psychology at Princeton.

Rick: I’ve heard of her.

Shyamji: She introduced this study at Princeton, and they found it to be true because she had a few hundred students who were experimenting with it. But they didn’t accept it.

Rick: Why?

Shyamji: I don’t know.

Rick: It doesn’t make sense to Western physiology.

Shyamji: Exactly.

Right. What they said was that the reason it is happening is because of gravity when you lie down, and one side is affected by gravity. That is also not true, because when you change the nostril by lying down, it drains your sinuses, and the other side opens up. That is a technique for correcting a blocked nostril.

Rick: When you do pranayama and alternate nostril breathing, does that somehow balance the two sides of the nervous system?

Shyamji: No, that will just cleanse your Pingala and Ida so that you can breathe deeply for the rest of the day. I am talking about Nadi yoga. Yoga means the yoga of breath. Then it merges into Nada yoga, which we may talk about if we have time.

It is because of the hemispheric relationship that you want to establish control. For example, if you feel anger coming to you, with Nadi yoga you can control it more easily than otherwise.

Working with anger

Rick: Well, let me just interject a question that just came in from Michael in Davao in the Philippines. He says, “What is the best way to manage anger when it arises in the moment? Can you explain how anger and managing anger relates to the chakras?” I thought it would be good to bring up that question, since you just mentioned it.

Shyamji: Isn’t that interesting, that he was writing about anger while I was talking about it? There is some synchronicity there.

Anyhow, anger is something that arises when you see that something is not justified from your perspective. So the first thing you want to know is whether your justification is a universal quality or your own individual one, because the other person’s perspective may be totally opposite to yours.

The moment you start to consider the other person’s perspective, your anger is no longer dominating you. In the meantime, you start to reflect: Is it a genuine reason to be angry? Most of the time, you will be able to find a resolution.

When you start to consider the other person’s perspective, your anger is no longer dominating you.

Rick: Yes, that is a really good point. There is a lot of anger these days in the United States, and probably in other places, too. There is also a lot of polarity between different points of view, and both points of view hate each other and are angry at each other all the time. Then there are all these violent outbursts. What you are saying is pretty important.

Shyamji: Yes. The other thing is to drink two glasses of fresh water.

Rick: In the morning?

Shyamji: Yes.

Rick: When you are feeling angry?

Shyamji: When you feel angry.

Rick: I see. Two glasses. What does that do for you?

Shyamji: It calms you down.

Rick: Okay. What is the mechanism that calms you down?

Shyamji: Your body is approximately 80 percent water. When you drink water, it purifies the water in your body. The first glass of water will go to your brain, and the second will be distributed throughout the rest of the body, including the lymphatic system. It also stimulates the colon, so that you can have better bowel movements and so on.

Rick: So does this imply that dehydration can contribute to anger?

Shyamji: Absolutely. There is no doubt about it. What happens is that when you are angry, you do not think, because you are so taken over by the anger. So you really have to practice this: “When I am angry, when I am emotional, when I am sad…” When you are not sad, you have to remember these things, because once you become sad, it is difficult.

In other words, knowledge is very important before you put it into practice. You have to practice the knowledge first. That is called sadhana, spiritual work.

Anger can also be subsided. Notice that when you are angry, your right nostril is more open, invariably. So what you do is drink two glasses of water. First of all, you lie down and change your nostril. The flow should be in the left nostril.

Rick: Do you do that by blocking off the right one?

Shyamji: No, you lie down on your side.

Rick: I see.

Shyamji: You put a pillow under your armpit and just rest for 30 seconds to a minute. Your sinuses will drain, and the left nostril will become open. Then you drink two glasses of water. Watch what happens to your anger.

Rick: There should be little places all along the road for people who get road rage, where they can stop, lie down, and drink some water instead of shooting people.

Shyamji: They can drink water anyway. Lying down is good, too. If you have another driver in the car, let them drive while you go in the back seat and change your nostril.

Rick: It is good to remember. Obviously, people get into all kinds of fights and arguments and commit all kinds of crimes. They end up in jail for years because of anger, because of being caught up in some lack of control.

Yes. Anger is a lack of control over it. You cannot get rid of anger. You cannot get rid of the ego. You just have to learn how to use them properly.

Shyamji: Yes. Anger is a lack of control over it. You cannot get rid of anger. You cannot get rid of the ego. You just have to learn how to use them properly.

Rick: Yes, but haven’t you found in your own experience, and in the experience of your students as they evolve, that there is less of a tendency to fly into a rage about something? It is as if you catch it before it even flares up.

Shyamji: Exactly. Yes. The older and wiser you get, the more you can control your emotions.

Rick: As you were saying before about the horse—riding the horse or being under the horse—if you are under the horse, the horse can run away with you. But if you are riding the horse, you can keep it going where you want it to go before it even gets off in the wrong direction.

Kundalini and the sister powers

There is a question that came in from Florence, who asked an earlier question. She said—and I come across this a lot, so I would be interested to hear what you have to say—that people sometimes have very disturbing experiences with Kundalini awakening.

In fact, next week I am going to be interviewing a woman who did not even know anything about Kundalini. When she was about 52 or 53 years old, she had this profound Kundalini awakening and had to figure out what was going on. She is very happy that she had it now, but it was quite intense for a long time before she figured it out.

What has been your experience in dealing with such people, whether or not their experience has been positive?

Shyamji: It is Kundalini, which is the proper way to pronounce it.

Rick: Kundalini?

Shyamji: Kundalini. “Ku” and then “dalini.”

Rick: I swear I am pronouncing it correctly.

Shyamji: You are saying “Kundalini.”

Rick: I am putting the Italian into it.

Shyamji: It is a mistake on the part of Indian scholars who misspell it. For example, they spell it K-U-N-D-A-L-I-N-I. They say “Kundalini,” but do not put the A there.

Rick: Kundalini. The A is very minimal.

Shyamji: It is not even there: Kundalini. When you write it in Sanskrit or Hindi, you can write the A.

Rick: Okay. Yes, that is why in your book you have all these tiny A’s wherever they occur.

Shyamji: Exactly. Most of the Indian and Sanskrit alphabets have the vowel implied in them. For example, instead of using a K as in “cup,” you say it a certain way, and another person may pronounce it differently.

Rick: Okay. So, to her question, then—

Shyamji: The question is about Kundalini, which is a dormant energy at the base of the spine. It awakens only after the seven sister powers are awake, making the pathway for Kundalini to rise in the proper channel, which is called the central channel.

There was a Kundalini master who did not have a teacher, and he tried to awaken his own Kundalini. He did awaken it, except that it rose on the wrong side. It went up through the right channel, and he almost died.

Rick: That was Gopi Krishna, correct?

Shyamji: Yes, that is correct. He had a very hard time. I actually met him in Davos. He was making a presentation, and so was I. A lama was there as well. We were all making presentations about our work.

His problem was that he did not accept the authority of a guru. He wanted to do it with books. Look what happened to him. He had to eat a leg of lamb every day to stay grounded.

Rick: Exactly.

Shyamji: Anyhow, back to the question of Kundalini. When one of the sister powers arises, you go through this dramatic feeling. It is not Kundalini; it is one of the sister powers. I can give you their names if you want.

Rick: You can?

Shyamji: Yes. There are seven of them.

If you read the literature properly, as this lady has, and if she has ever read a book written by Arthur Avalon—

Rick: She has. She has mentioned him.

Shyamji: Then she will know that there are seven sister powers. They are named there. Any one of them can awaken and give you an extraordinary feeling, but that is not Kundalini.

In fact, I will tell you one thing. I have been involved in this field since the age of 12, nearly 13, so for about 70 years. In all my 70 years of experience, I have never ever seen a human being whose Kundalini was continuously awake.

Rick: Even you? When you grew up, it was not awake? Presumably yours is not, either?

Shyamji: I am working on the different Goddesses.

Rick: Does Kundalini awakening, or full Kundalini awakening, necessarily coincide with enlightenment? Or can you be enlightened and yet not have your Kundalini awake?

Shyamji: Full enlightenment takes place when Kundalini awakens without any obstruction and rises in the central channel to embrace her counterpart, who is called Mahadeva, or Shiva.

Rick: And you have never encountered a person who has done that?

Shyamji: No.

Rick: Why do you suppose that is?

Shyamji: I have been involved in this since the age of 13.

Rick: So when people think they have had a Kundalini awakening, are you saying it is one of these seven sister powers?

Shyamji: They are their counterparts. It depends on the nature of the experience, whether it is destructive or constructive.

Rick: That is interesting, because there have been spiritual teachers—so-called spiritual teachers—who seemed remarkable in certain ways. They were charismatic and eloquent, and they may have seemed to radiate Shakti or something, and yet they were very destructive in their behavior.

I have often wondered about that and thought, “Maybe they have had a partial Kundalini awakening, and it has gotten misdirected into some side channel or something.” But you are saying it might actually just be one of the sister powers.

Shyamji: Just leave Kundalini alone. Let us talk about her sisters first.

Rick: Did you just say that the sister powers have to be awakened before Kundalini itself can be awakened?

Shyamji: They awaken with your spiritual work, if it is done properly. Sometimes the gods awaken first, and sometimes the Goddesses awaken first. That is why the teacher comes into the picture. The teacher can intuit what is happening.

Now, you do not even need to intuit it. You have my Micro Chakra Psychology book in front of you. It will tell you what your behavior is like, what the block is, and what the opening is.

Having Shaktipat and these siddhis and powers can be a distraction from your own spiritual growth. I have a siddhi, and I use that every day.

Rick: Which is the inner tuning?

Shyamji: To feel the microchip, right. I have a CD; I can feel the difference between a blocked microchakra and an open microchakra.

Rick: Okay, it’s a siddhi. Do you say that my Kundalini is awake?

Shyamji: Oh, it is. One siddhi.

Rick: So would you say, as a general rule, that unlike Gopi Krishna, one shouldn’t specifically do anything to try to awaken their Kundalini? It’ll awaken on its own when the time is right.

Shyamji: Exactly. You do your sadhana. When Shri Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, “Karmanye vadhikaraste”—you are entitled to the action, but never to the fruits of your actions—the results are never to be contemplated upon.

Rick: I like that verse.

Shyamji: Do your dharma, do your karma, and let it happen. Out of ignorance, we start to use words that are not even used properly because we don’t know the real meanings of the words. Kundalini yoga, for example—it was a very clever yogi who was not even a yogi, actually. He was a customs inspector. I don’t want to talk about the personal lives of the people I’ve known in my life.

Rick: Yeah, I know the guy. He had a center down in New Mexico.

Shyamji: Yeah. Anyhow, I’m not here to talk about all kinds of people with all kinds of motives, including myself. What are your motives? My motives are to give people the realization that they can take charge of their own spirituality.

Subjective and objective science

Rick: Would you say, though, that these days there are hundreds and hundreds of spiritual teachers of all different flavors, sorts, and types? Do you feel that, by and large—for instance, I’ve interviewed 510 people. Not all of them are teachers, but all kinds of people, and many of them are teachers. My attitude is, nobody necessarily has the full picture, but everybody’s making a contribution. To use that analogy from, I guess, the Srimad Bhagavatam, we’re all holding up our sticks. God is really holding up the mountain, and we think we’re helping by holding up our sticks. But everyone’s making a contribution. It just seems to be the way things are configured these days. There’s this many-too-many kind of dynamic going on in the world right now. Do you want to comment on that?

Shyamji: I have no comment to make.

Rick: Okay.

Shyamji: Everybody has their own perspective, and it’s because people have the need that the teachers appear.

Rick: Many people seem to—I know they’re not dilettantes—but some people seem to derive a certain amount of benefit from a teacher for a certain amount of time, and people are definitely making progress. Then, at a certain point, they feel, “Wow, this guy is doing it for me. I think he’s taking me as far as he can take me.” Then maybe they’ll pick up with a new teacher. It’s like when you fly someplace: You usually have a few connecting flights, and each connecting flight has its value. You don’t just have the flight from New York to Paris that’s important; it’s also the one from Harrisburg to New York, or whatever.

Shyamji: Yeah, I agree with you.

Rick: Don’t get on a flight that’s going to crash, because you never know that in advance.

Shyamji: Yeah.

Rick: Okay, so there’s an interesting section in your book on a topic that I like a lot. You speak about subjective science and compare it with objective science. Obviously, modern science is usually the objective science that we learned in high school and so on. But yogis have had a subjective science for thousands of years, and I’ve always been interested in the comparison between them and the contributions that each can make. I don’t think either one eliminates the value of the other, but I think together they can be more than the collection of the two of them.

Shyamji: You are right. In the tradition of objective science, there used to be a psychology called vitalism. Vitalism was eliminated for whatever political reasons might have led to the subjective psychology, but because it was eliminated, many people don’t even know about it. David, my co-author, was an expert on vitalism.

🧘 Music, mantra, and the heart

Rick: Since you played mine, let’s play some. Okay, there we go. You let me know when to come in. I’ll hear your voice.

We’re going to play a selection from the CD that’s in the back of your book. You’re accompanying it, and we’ll hear your voice accompanied by the tambura instrument, which we see behind your right shoulder there.

Shyamji: That’s right. That’s an instrument I played with Ravi Shankar and many other great musicians and singers, especially.

Rick: I’ll play a little bit less, and then you just let us know when you’re ready.

Shyamji: The beginning. At the end of the day—Rati, Rati—good. Love it. Monday.

Rick: Welcome back. I could hear you, and we had the music playing while you were gone. People were listening to it, and someone sent in an email saying, “That was beautiful. What was that we were listening to?”

Shyamji: It was a mantra chanted for somebody who had severe depression, and it helped them a lot. So I thought, why not put it out so that people can buy it? For many years, people were downloading it or buying it from our website. There was no download yoga, so right now it’s complimentary. They can download it from the website.

Rick: Yes, it’s also on a CD that’s in the back of your book.

Shyamji: That’s also one way to have it. Shri Ratri means sacred, auspicious. Rati is the mantra that opens up your heart so that your heart can then want to involve itself in the love of the Divine in you. In microchakra terms, the fourth microchakra of the sixth will open up when you hear this mantra properly, and if you charge it for some time, it can really help you. When the fourth of the six is open, the goal of your life becomes enlightenment.

The goal of your life becomes enlightenment.

Rick: Nice. While the music was playing, a couple of people sent in an email saying that they would like to hear you finish what you were beginning to explain about how to purify the second-chakra energy, or sexual-chakra energy. You began talking about how people have different cycles according to the time of the month and all that, but then I think we got off on other topics and you didn’t get to complete that point.

Shyamji: Right. You see, the goal of sexuality is to find the right mate. The right mate is not only the person you’re finding as your mate; it is also the person with whom you will be able to parent together. Those are the considerations.

Third-chakra-age people fall in love between the ages of 12 and 18 for girls, and 14 to 21 for boys. That’s when people have their first experience, so to speak. When the experiences are constructive, God’s guidance of your intuitive mind can help you find the right mate.

So the purification, again, is of the thought, the causal body. Sexuality is an instrument; it is an object. You are the subject. The problem is that we have no universal school, church, or any place at home where we can teach people to know the Self—to know who the Self is—because we live in war-oriented times. We always have.

There are not too many cultures that even had the concept of inverting the senses—pratyahara. When people embrace religion, it is often to ask for forgiveness for their sins, to ask for forgiveness so that the unloving God will always love them. Then we do things totally the opposite. You commit a sin, and then you go and confess.

When you go and confess, it becomes a routine; it becomes a habit. It doesn’t work that way. You will rob yourself of your own bliss, of your own light, by believing in the old stories that may have been relevant to some people for some time. But they’re history—his story. I can’t afford to give my life away to his story.

No matter how old the story is, we are addicted to stories. Every baby, every toddler, every small child wants to hear a story before they go to sleep. We are addicted to stories, and then we start to take some stories more seriously.

Rick: Just to add a follow-up question on how—

Shyamji: To discover your own purity, including the purity of your own sexuality, you refine your own thought process. That’s why I mentioned the word “mental”—don’t lose touch with your thinking. Don’t gamble with your life. We have a thinking mind, and we have a causal body. Brilliant ideas will come once you open that up.

At the age when we fall in love, sexuality doesn’t become enlightened; it becomes bonded—bondage, binding.

Rick: Would it be fair to say, as a sort of summary point, that rather than being all worried about finding the right person, you should be more concerned about being the right person?

Shyamji: Exactly. You put it very nicely.

Rick: If you refine yourself enough, then everything else will fall into place.

Shyamji: Similar kind, right? That way, you will attract a similar kind. But if you keep on finding somebody whom your ego loves, that’s what will happen.

Rick: Maybe another way of putting it is: If you don’t know who you are, and they don’t know who they are, then how can the two of you expect to have any kind of meaningful relationship? You’re two people who are just sort of stumbling about.

Shyamji: My favorite way to put it is: One lonely person meets another lonely person. Now you have two lonely people together.

Rick: I suppose even a third way of putting it is this: There’s that beautiful saying in the 23rd Psalm, “My cup runneth over.” If you’re full, then you can give, and if the other person is full, they can give. If both people are empty, then neither can give. Both are in a sort of taking mode, and nobody gives; therefore, nobody gets.

Shyamji: I remember when my grandfather said—he said, “When the pots”—you know, pots, pans, pots and pans.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Shyamji: He said, “When the pots travel together, they rattle. But the fuller they are, the less noise they make.”

Rick: Good. Another good one.

Okay, so I hope we’ve answered that question. If there’s any follow-up question from the person or people who sent it in, feel free to send in a follow-up question, and we’ll deal with it. But here’s another—

Shyamji: Also, if there’s a later afterthought, they can write to admin@chakrainstitute.com. After the show is over, if there is a question, they can write to us directly.

Rick: If you want, I’ll even put that email address on your page on BatGap.com, and they know how to get in touch with you.

Shyamji: That would be great.

Rick: Okay, good. This is an interesting question that came in from a fellow named Bernard Blumenthal in Brussels, Belgium. He said:

My identical twin brother and I live on opposite sides of the ocean. He’s in Chicago; I’m in Brussels. We’re both 60 years old and struggling with a slow and steady disintegration of our professional lives, while being hyper-aware of both the general political strife on the planet and, predominantly, the dire, nearly impossible future of our living planet. Would a particular practice help us to become more pure, more relaxed, sane, effective, and positive? Or is the planet’s situation simply a psychological burden to bear until our civilization collapses and mass extinction gains us all?

Shyamji: What a remarkable question. Yeah, I congratulate you for your concerns. I really do. I have two answers. One is at the individual level, and one will be at the universal level.

At the universal level, choose the candidates who are concerned with your concerns. At the individual level, get yourself a three-body purification. When your own three bodies go through a period of purification, it takes five to nine days, depending on where you are. I do it around the world. They don’t—

Rick: Explain the whole thing, because this is the first time you’ve referred to that. Just tell us what it means—the whole three-body purification.

Shyamji: Okay. Three-body purification means purification of your thought process, purification of your feeling process, and purification of the physical body’s organs: colon, liver, kidneys. It took me 40 years to develop this. Once I developed it, I tell you, people just flock together to come. They can hardly wait to have another one.

Rick: This is an in-residence program that you offer here and there?

Shyamji: This place where I am right now, in New Hope, Pennsylvania. We got this place to do purifications. It’s very quiet—10 or 11 acres of woods—and we have six bedrooms. We don’t take more than 12 people, maximum 15. Sometimes people like to sleep in the laundry room. Sometimes they do that because they have to have it.

Then we do one every year in Holland, which is not very far from Brussels.

Rick: That’s true.

Shyamji: Yes. It’s a short training. In fact, I will be doing a workshop in Brussels as well. They can find my itinerary on thechakrainstitute.com website.

We do this purification in South America as well. In Colombia, for example, every January we do it over there for nine days. Again, nine days in Holland, five days in France, and five days several times here at our Chakra Institute, where I am being interviewed with you.

Most people get the most benefit from these purifications. After that, I do more advanced workshops where we can teach them how to do massage to themselves. It’s called inner-tuning massage. Everybody who has come to see me privately gets a 15- or 20-minute massage that they do themselves. Then my assistant does that—Marina Tolliver. She is one of the people I have trained in this.

I have about two dozen people around the world who are doing inner-tuning massage. Some of them are in Belgium, and some of them are in Holland. You will find all that information on the website.

Now, the best part of the answer to his question is that when you choose the right candidates, they will make the planet become livable. It may even extend the life of the planet. There are some advanced techniques that you can do, but I can only teach them after the purifications, and on the air, it is not fair.

Rick: Not feasible.

Shyamji: Yeah.

Rick: But I think what you’re saying, to summarize what you just said, is that, yes, the world is a mess, and things need to be done on the political level and the technological level, and so on, to deal with what a mess the climate is, and so on. Right leadership is important. But also—there we go.

Shyamji: Sorry to interject. I know many people who don’t vote, saying that it’s hopeless and that they don’t want to be bothered, which I think is really unfair. To live on a planet and not exercise your vote—the value of your vote cannot be overemphasized.

Rick: I’m listening to a show right now on TV. I haven’t finished it, but they said that the United States is about 132nd in the world in terms of voter turnout and voter participation. That’s crazy. It makes such a huge difference to have the right people as our leaders, and people just don’t.

Of course, a certain political party here makes it difficult to vote by making it as complicated as possible, suppressing it if possible. But you have to give the vote. Is that counted?

Shyamji: Yeah, very often. There was a Black priest who was interviewed on some television show. He said there were seven boxes of votes, and nobody came to collect them.

Rick: Yeah, that kind of thing happens. There’s a suit going on in North Carolina right now, but anyway, we’d better not get off on that tangent.

To Bernard’s point, and to your point, I think there are two elements. There’s what needs to happen, as you said, on a universal level, on a national level, and so on. But also, we have to become individually as fit as possible to withstand the challenges that undoubtedly we’re already facing in life, and that could actually become much more dire and much more intense in the coming years.

Darwin supposedly said, “Survival of the fittest is a law of nature.” So we have to be as fit as possible. Let’s say a donkey has to carry a really heavy load and can barely struggle with it. There are two ways of dealing with it: lighten the load or strengthen the donkey. Unfortunately, I don’t think the load is going to get any lighter in terms of what the world is going through. So we all have to be as strong and fit as possible, right?

Shyamji: Well said.

What Tantra means

Rick: Okay, we’ve covered a lot of points, but undoubtedly we haven’t covered everything. There’s one more point I thought of. On the whole sexual topic again, you’ve used the word Tantra. In many people’s minds, Tantra is synonymous with good sex, or using spiritual practices to make sex more long-lasting or more interesting, or something like that.

But then I hear more traditional Tantrics say, “Well, that is just a misrepresentation of it. It’s such a tiny aspect of it.” It’s unfortunate that the whole thing has become synonymous with that. Do you have any comments on the misuse of the word Tantra and the whole sexual connotation of it?

Shyamji: As usual, I go to the origin of the word. Tantra means a tool.

Rick: But literally defined, it means a tool?

Shyamji: Yes. Tantra is actually a tool to achieve a goal. There are two components of Tantra. One is called yantra, and one is called mantra. Yantra is the form, and mantra is the name. When the form and the name are complementary, and the practice is purely intentional, that Tantra will be accomplished.

Every Tantra gives you a siddhi, a power. Eventually, we must develop the power in order to be able to make use of it in a state of surrender. The same thing applies to sexual Tantra. We must develop the technique, and then we surrender it.

Rick: Who do you surrender it to—your partner? What are you actually saying?

Shyamji: Sexual intercourse is not the only thing that Tantra teaches. That’s only one part of it. Tantra should teach you how to make the marriage successful.

Rick: Right.

Shyamji: Sex is used as a glue to keep the bond together.

Rick: Okay. Tantra obviously has much more to do—much more even than marriage. I mean, it’s a whole huge body of knowledge, right, that has implications for even unmarried people.

Shyamji: There are thousands of Tantras—thousands. One of the Tantras is sexual. Rica is based on the second chakra, and Khurram Yoga is a third-chakra Tantra.

Rick: So there are different mantras for all the chakras?

Shyamji: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Because people are kind of obsessed with sexuality today, they interpret the word Tantra in a sexual way.

Rick: Sure. Relationships are an important thing for people, and very, very often they don’t work out very well. They cause a lot of heartache and trauma. People want to be able to learn how to do it right and have good relationships. That’s why they’re interested in this stuff.

Shyamji: The best way to beautify your own sexuality is to pay attention to your partner’s needs. If you pay attention to her needs and she pays attention to your needs, Tantra is accomplished. But most people go for their personal needs, and that’s what creates a little problem.

Rick: Yeah, like we were saying before, about taking rather than giving.

Closing reflections

Okay, I hope that answers her question—the woman from Switzerland. We’ve been talking for a little over two hours. Is there anything you feel is important that you haven’t had a chance to say? I’m sure there are lots of things, but what would you really want to make sure to leave people with?

Shyamji: The gem of the teachings is to go to bed early.

The gem of the teachings is to go to bed early.

Rick: That’s interesting. There’s that old saying, of course: “Early to bed and early to rise makes the traveler healthy, wealthy, and wise.” How early is early?

Shyamji: Well, it depends on the winter and summer. In the summer, for example, the sun sets very late, so just after the sun goes down, within half an hour, go to sleep.

In the winter, measure how many hours of sleep you need. If you need eight hours of sleep and you want to wake up at six o’clock, the sun rises at seven or something in the winter. Everything has to do with the sun. Find out where you are located in relationship to the sun.

The closer you are to the equator, the easier it is for you to wake up early. It’s only when you are farther away that you need more sleep, because you are not at home. The equator is your home. That’s where life began, at least human life.

Rick: I have this friend here in town, and I discovered this thing where you can be notified by email when the International Space Station goes over. Several nights I’ve gone out and watched it, so it’s really fun to watch it go over.

I told my friend, “Hey, tonight it’s going over at 10:02.” He said, “I’m sorry. I go to bed at quarter of nine.”

Shyamji: Now, this man is a good candidate for spiritual work.

Rick: Yeah, well, he’s a spiritual guy.

Okay, well, thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope everyone else has. I will be putting up a page on BatGap.com with your photo and your bio and a link to your website. I’ll put that email address you mentioned—admin@thechakrainstitute.com—and a link to your book, and anything else you want me to put there.

People can get in touch with you and find out, as you were saying, all the programs that you have to offer and when and where you’re going to offer them.

Shyamji: At 84, I’m still traveling three times a year around the world.

Rick: Yeah, well, that’s an inspiration.

Shyamji: I really have a passion to help people know themselves.

Rick: Yeah. It’s great, and you are a good example of what you teach.

Shyamji: You see, the thing is this: If we are made up of light—when a supernova explodes, stardust makes planets, and stardust makes this body—then we are particles of stardust. Inside this cage, there is a light.

When you meditate, you see that light. The idea is to increase that light day by day, day by day, day by day. The time comes when it will reach your heart chakra, and your skin will start to radiate that light. Your eyes will have that twinkle of a baby, because you are discovering your own inner light.

Inside this cage, there is a light.

It’s only possible in human birth. Whether or not there is another birth, I don’t know. But I know one thing: This life is under my control. Thank you for having me.

Rick: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you.

So, to those who have been listening or watching, this is an ongoing series, as most of you know. There are a few little things you might want to check out. If you’d like to be notified when new interviews are posted, subscribe to the YouTube channel. Also, subscribe to the email notification list, for which you can find a link on batgap.com.

This exists as an audio podcast as well as a video. If you’d like to subscribe to that, there’s also a page on batgap.com where you can subscribe to it. There are a number of other things, too. If you just check the menus on that site, you’ll see what we have to offer there.

So, thank you so much, Shyamji. I really enjoyed the conversation, and good luck. I hope you are able to do this for many more years to come, God willing. And thanks to those who are listening or watching. We will see you for the next one.