The Divine Theme, Explained – Part 3

[Link for the chart]

These seven “pinches” are twists of sanskaras, and they have seven chief forms – stone or metal, vegetable, worm, fish, bird, animal and man. Every twist of the sanskaras gives the next form. So, there are seven twists for seven forms, and there are six previous forms before the stone form. The first form the soul got was the bubble, which was in the gas state. Then there are five other minute forms, until the stone form. From stone to metal and from metal to vegetable – each has seven stages.

So, the real twisting began from the stone form, and there are seven twists up to the human form. There are one million four hundred thousand (fourteen lakhs)* of species of each of the chief forms from stone to human. That is to say, in six forms (not including human) there are 6 x 14 lakhs = eight million four hundred thousand species (8,400,000) = 84 lakhs of species = 84 lakhs of bindings. There are eighty-four lakhs of bindings and seven twists. After every seventh stage (form) there is a twist.

The soul first gets the gas form – the form of a bubble. Until it gets to stone form, it passes through seven forms. That is why the rishis who knew things but could not reveal them to the world established worship of the last form of each chief form, such as the Tulsi plant for vegetable, the monkey Hanuman for animal, et cetera.

Because of the twists that the soul gets, it attains consciousness of Self. But this consciousness of Self is only partial and just for a second. The consciousness is not full and does not last long, similar to the experience of a pinch. At every pinch, or twist, this consciousness is used for knowing the Self. It is for this reason that the twists come into importance.

Now, to make this point clear, we go back again to the first state when the soul had its eyes closed. After the first opening, though it is a very slight opening at the stone state, the eye gets gradually drawn upward to the second touch and opening. The first six touches shown in the chart are soft but the seventh is strong.

Baba demonstrated this by lightly tapping his leg six times and, at the seventh, instead of a soft tap, he gave himself a pinch, giving a clear picture of the difference between the six soft touches and the seventh hard pinch.

Thus, at every twist, with a hard pinch, the eyes open wider and wider, and the soul is aroused to know itself more and more. Through these seven twists, and through eighty-four lakhs of changes through species and forms during evolution, and again through seven twists and eighty-four lakhs of rounds of births and deaths during reincarnation – known as the “shakings” – the soul, during all these twists and changes, gets loosened.

Ninety-nine per cent of the pundits have blundered in taking both evolution and reincarnation changes and rounds of births and deaths as eighty-four lakhs. In their ignorance, they said that these eighty-four lakhs of changes are only up to the human, and after the human form, the body reincarnates only four to five times, and then frees itself from this chain of deaths and births in mukti – liberation.

–www.lordmeher.org, p2882

*Footnote: Baba used the term lakh which equals 100,000. Fourteen lakhs = 1,400,000. The term crore equals ten million (one hundred 100,000).