Sadhguru explores the connection between dreams, reality, and memory, explains the purpose of the “dream machine” he created for Anaadhi [1], and clarifies which level of karma needs to be worked on to make this your last life.
Questioner: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. You said that in the Anaadhi program, you created a Dream Yantra which put people’s dreaming process on fast-forward. Was this for their spiritual growth? Does this mean that one can do spiritual sadhana even in sleep?
Sadhguru: What is a dream? Everything that is happening within the scope of your psychological framework is actually a dream. Anything that is not existentially there but still feels as real as – or more real than – reality in your experience, is called a dream. Every thought, every emotion that you generate is a dream. In that context, the whole experience of your life is a kind of dream. Because if you are looking at someone, you do not see them the way they are, but only as they are reflected in the firmament of your mind. What you are seeing is largely a psychological process; so it is a dream.
Dreams are of many kinds, and they are a way of replaying memories on many different levels. As long as these dreams are going on, your day is a deception because in your experience, the dream is the real thing. You are fooling yourself to believe everything is fresh, but your dreams are based on past memory, so you are reliving the past.
Anything that happens in your psychological framework is a dream. For many people, dreams have more power than reality because they have never truly touched reality. What they call “life” is just what they think and feel. What you think and feel has become more important than the whole cosmic phenomenon. If something so vast and incomprehensible cannot uplift you, and a single thought of your own making can pull you down, then is this not a dream? And, what is worse, this dream is not even yours.
These are compulsive happenings based on the impressions you have taken in from your social exposure, and in the form of genetic material. when I say genetics, not just from your parentage – your genetics goes way back not only to your forefathers; it goes beyond, into animal nature. Today, we know this scientifically, but we have always known that the single-celled organism evolved into various complexities, and today we are sitting here in the form of a human being.
The memory of the life process and how it has happened from that single-celled organism to this complex mechanism of a human being, is still there in your body. You are on the top of the animal nature, which means you are a composite expression of all of this. If you look at a worm, it is just a worm; an insect is just an insect, a bird is just a bird, an animal is just an animal, a dog is just a dog, and an elephant is just an elephant. But what is referred to as a human being is capable of all these things.
On a certain day, you are capable of biting like an ant – just a little bit. On another day, you are able to growl like a dog. On another day, you can bulldoze through people like an elephant. On another day, you can tweet like a bird. You are capable of all that. Human beings are capable of all these things; on different levels of awareness, they become different things. All this memory exists within your system, though not all of it is in the form of living memory.
Somewhere inside, your body remembers your parents, your grandparents, and your great grandparents, even if you have not seen them and do not know them. This memory goes way beyond your present levels of understanding. It transcends human form and even animal nature, going to the basic elements. For this reason, the most basic form of sadhana in Yoga is Bhuta Shuddhi. You cleanse the five elements of all the memory of your father, mother, grandparents, forefathers, the chimpanzee, and that single-celled animal. If you erase this memory, then you are not somebody’s something but your own possibility.
Memory is far more important than you think. The way your heart beats is because something within the system remembers how to beat. The complexities of chemical reactions are happening because something remembers that this is the way to do it. This is a learned process through millions of years of evolution. Life learned to do itself and it still remembers; if it forgot, you would fall dead right now. The spiritual process is not about destroying this memory but distancing yourself from it so that the memory becomes an asset rather than a bondage, a dimension that propels you forward, not one that shackles you down.
In Anaadhi, we created a dream yantra for people to sleep in the presence of. The dream yantra was a tool to hasten that part of the dream which, in Yoga, is called linga sharira. This genetic body has a memory of its own, and this memory continuously plays. The effort in Anaadhi was to compress the linga sharira to a very small size. When it is compressed, it becomes concentrated, which can be an extremely overwhelming experience for people.
Many may not be able to endure such kinds of situations, and would need to be in a protected atmosphere. Even then, it can be very overwhelming because the dreams are going on fast-forward. We hastened the dreams a hundred times more than normal. Things were running at a haze within them. The idea was to reduce the content of the linga sharira, or the memory, so that the shrinking would not become too overwhelming. To achieve this, I set up a dream yantra to hasten the process of dreaming.
During the day, they did so much sadhana, as well as their own cooking and cleaning, while still getting a good night’s sleep. But they would wake up exhausted in the morning because the dreams were moving at such a rapid pace that their restful time became most exhausting. They were dreaming so hard. This process had to be done to reduce the volume of their linga sharira; otherwise, compressing it would have become very difficult and overwhelming.
All of this was in preparation of a sadhana called Linga Sanchalana, which is to activate the core linga within you. We set up this dream machine to compress the linga sharira and reduce its volume. It works in such a way that it only goes for the warehouse of karma, the sanchita karma. This can be done only for those people who are decided that they want this to be their last life. If you have a desire for food, more pleasure, or to watch a movie that is produced in the 22nd century, you should not go for this. Once the sanchita karma is taken away, this life will become incapable of taking on one more body even if it wishes to.
The prarabdha karma or allotted karma for this life remains untouched by the dream yantra. Because of that, you do not see any immediate transformation in the person. Changing attitudes, becoming gentler, becoming more loving and compassionate is not a spiritual process; it is a psychological and social process. Unfortunately, these things are being passed off as spiritual process in the world.
Spiritual process means dismantling the physical nature in such a way that it does not lead to ill-health or death. This is what a dream yantra is about. It takes away the substance that is necessary to form another body and find another womb, but this body is perfectly fine. If you touch the prarabdha karma, then this very body will start working toward dissolution. We do not touch the prarabdha karma; we just take away the sanchita karma, which means you will not be reborn.
