Ever wondered why across cultures and religions of the world, one closes their eyes to pray, to connect to a higher power?
Yogi Ashwini mentions, “Eyes are an interface between the physical and the etheric world, eyes are a connection of yours with the physical world or at least the perception of it. The movement of the eyeballs corresponds to the occurrence of thoughts as they are caught by the brain….Not many of us know that the most active muscles in the body are not the heart but the eye muscles.”
You must have experienced that most of your thoughts are associated with people and objects you experience visually. So the sense of vision stirs up the mind and keeps you away from turning inwards. This is one of the reasons why psychologists believe that up to 80% of human energy is lost through the eyes. Research estimates that eighty to eighty-five percent of our perception, learning, cognition and activities are also mediated through vision.
This extensive usage of the sense of vision leads to channelization of a very high percentage of energy to the eyes which affects the amount of energy available for other purposes including spiritual evolution. “Animals with large and well-developed eyes, necessary for their survival, pay a high price for them. As all animals have a strictly limited energy budget, a major investment in the visual system only occurs at a cost to other organ systems,” says Eric Warrant, researcher in Functional Zoology at Lund University in Sweden. This can be further understood from the fact that people who are blind are often reported as having extraordinary auditory, olfactory or other senses.
So then key to conserving our energy, key to staying young and healthy, and the key to connecting with the divine, lies in sitting still, with eyes closed.
In the epic of Mahabharata, Queen Gandhari voluntarily blindfolded herself for life as a mark of love and sacrifice for her blind husband which gave her tremendous powers. This power could be transferred to anything that she looked at first after opening her blindfold. So during the war when she had lost her 99 sons already, she asked her son to stand in front of her completely naked while she would remove her blindfold to look at his body. However her son Duryodhan was embarrassed to go completely naked in front of his mother and therefore covered his waist with a wide banana leaf. When Gandhari opened her blindfold and looked at her son for the first time all the power in her eyes was transferred to Duryodhan’s body making it iron like strong. However the part around the waist remained weak and vulnerable as it was concealed from her vision, which later on led to his defeat in his final battle with Bhima. When she realized what Duryodhan had done, she reprimanded Duryodhan for not following her instructions. Duryodhan requested her if she could repeat the whole process again and this time he would remove the banana leaf…but Gandhari explained to him that she was not a magician and had only transferred all the energy of her eyes to him…And there was no way to repeat the process since the energy had been given away already.
So energy that is actually conserved when our eyes are closed during dhyan or other kriyas gets lost to whatever you look at first after opening your eyes.
Now the question is how do we conserve this energy in our body?
Yogi Ashwini has given a simple solution for this.
You must have seen photos of great saints or demi gods with a stream of energy flowing out from their palms. You must have also heard of them having a healing touch. That is because palms have chakras which are capable of feeling, absorbing and giving energy.
If after dhyan, you can open your eyes while looking into the centre of your palms and then your whole body, it is possible to absorb all the prana conserved, back into your body through your palm chakras.
You could do the same at any time when you have kept your eyes closed for long like while waking up in the morning to conserve the prana.
