“I WILL DO SOMETHING I have never done for anyone else…”
The swami assumed a lotus position on his bed in the small, unpretentious motel room, his legs crossed and his neck, head and back forming a straight line. Then he gradually closed his eyes. When he had entered what appeared to be a deep meditative state, the color of his left foot began to pale. Then it turned yellowish-white like the foot of a corpse. When someone stuck his finger into it, the flesh remained surprisingly compressed, like clay. The swami had actually drained all the blood from his left foot while his right foot remained normal!
“It is done by willpower,” said the Swami Rama, celebrated yogi, lecturer, author and philosopher, as he came out of his meditative state. “A perfect control of the mind.”
The swami asked someone to hold his wrist as he went into another meditative trance. Within a few seconds, there was no sign of pulse in the wrist!
“I also reduced my heart beat to 12 beats a minute.” The swami explained a few moments later. “The normal beat is 70 beats a minute.
“I am doing this not to show that I am a magician or a super human being, but to show that by controlling the mind one can control one’s bodily functions, including the so-called involuntary muscles such as the heart and lungs.”
At 6-foot-1 and a trim 175 pounds, the stately 47-year –old Swami Rama is as eloquent in speaking each of 11 languages as he in practicing what he has been expounding all of his life. He is a vegetarian, and his main diet while at the motel in Claremont, California was an assortment of nuts, fruits and apple juice. He does not care to attend banquets or parties where alcoholic beverages motivate guests and hosts to carry on inane conversations; even when such gatherings are held in his honor. “I do not have time.”
This man dresses very simply and has very few worldly possessions. His usual attire consists of a shawl worn over an open white shirt and white trousers, a pair of sandals, and a string of mala beads given to him by a precious friend. “I do not have much to offer you,” he apologized to his visitors at the motel, “but (pointing to a plastic bag of nuts on a table) please… help yourself.”
The ascetic swami was born in a small town in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh. His parents belonged to a learned Brahmin family, but he was orphaned at the age of three months and was subsequently adopted by a great yogi and saint of Bengal who lived in the foothills of the Himalayas. He recalls being able to read Sanskrit when he was between two and three years old. Nobody had taught him– he just picked up a book one day and began reading it. “I knew how to read,” he explains, “because I learned how in my previous life.”
Swami Rama attended school for the first time when he was nine years old, starting in the sixth grade. Going to school was mere formality, because he was already teaching Buddhist and Hindu scriptures in a monastery. He finished high school at 13, then attended college, which again, was a formality. In fact, some of his philosophy professors at the university were students of his at his monastery.
The Swami studied and earned degrees in western psychology and philosophy in Europe, then lectured at Oxford in England and at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. In 1949, he became a shankaracharya (a rank in the Hindu faith somewhat analogous to a Pope) but renounced his position in 1952 to dedicate himself to teaching and lecturing. He is already the author of more than 18 books and is now in the process of writing an encyclopedia on yoga.
The swami came to the United States four years ago to work with scientists and doctors to establish the genuineness of the power of the mind and the soul. He has worked with Dr. Elmer Green of the Menninger Research Foundation in Topeka, Kansas, conducting investigations into voluntary control of the internal states. Swami Rama claims to be the first yogi to subject himself to modern scientific methods of testing his state of consciousness while at the highest level of meditation.
One of many astonishing demonstrations the swami performed at the Menninger Research Foundation was to stop the flow of blood from his heart for 17 seconds while in a meditative state. In the normal person, such a stoppage would indicate a dangerous unconscious cardiac condition. “I demonstrated that I can die legally and medically, then come back. I stopped my heart, my brain, my blood cells and everything else in my body, then made them function again.”
The swami has also astounded doctors and scientists in Topeka by using his mental power to move a metal object by more than 30 degrees. Asked at a lecture in Los Angeles whether such activity is strenuous, the swami smiled warmly and replied, “When you move your girlfriend on the dance floor, does it strain you? When Christ changed the color of water, did it strain him? It only involves organization of mind. When you have one-pointed willpower, you can move objects as well as do many other things that seem mysterious.”
Credit: Probe, June 1973
