How Tantrics make dead bodies walk - Research with facts and explanations included

It happens in India. The dead can live and there are facts to support this claim, however uncanny it may sound.

What I am about to tell you changes our whole cultural and societal presentation of death.

And the secret lies with tantrics who live in India.

I like to think of India as the place where the tantrics, the occult and mysticism breathe openly.

(A tantric relates to or involves the doctrines or principles of the Hindu or Buddhist tantras, in particular the use of mantras, meditation, yoga, and ritual. Definition taken from: tantric definition - Bing

Tantrics are also commonly known in India as those people who practice the beliefs and yoga practice associated to Hinduism or Buddhism. People go to them for blessings and to share their knowledge about the world, life, death and facts that science cannot uncover.)

The first event is about a man who lived in Vanarasi, North India. He was a tantric and practiced Surya Sparsh. I will name him: Aadi. (Aadi = Hindu word for ‘accustomed,’ ‘important,’ ‘beginning.’)

He was sitting in the shrine he had built with his own hands years ago. He spent all his time in that shrine, sitting in front of the deity he had moulded and sculpted with utmost care and devotion. He poured all his soul into his devotion to this deity – a deity who took the shape and form similar to any other Hindu God, but who held the heart of this man in its earthen mounds. This man, Aadi, was an old man with white hair flailing in that hot summer breeze. He sat on his cloth mat, bare-chested and covered by a loincloth. His eyes were closed and his body was shut down in that meditative cross-legged pose for hours without a single twitch.

His disciples peeked, their eyelids making that slight horizontal slit to check whether Aadi was still in trance or not.

A month ago, Aadi had imparted knowledge rooted in the bizarre, the uncanny, and the impossible. He had suddenly stood up on his mat, cracked his toes and neck before stepping out of the shrine. He walked to the end of the dry gravelly path where he bent to pick something up. When he came back inside the shrine, he held a dead bird in his hands.

“Close the curtains and leave a slight opening. Now one of you go and stand outside,” he said. “Stand by the entrance, hold this mirror like this and shine the sun’s rays in this spot.” He positioned his discipline at the entrance following these steps and went back in, rummaging through a jute sack behind the deity’s pedestal. He took out a magnifying glass and came back to the dead bird.

He held the dead bird in one hand, the magnifying glass in the other and shone the mirror’s reflected light on the small creature.

He remained still for a while and entered that inexplicable trance. Everyone was silent. Even the breeze had quieted down, and was whispering subtly around the shrine as if trying to convey that nature cannot be reversed by just anyone. At the hands of a human, would nature become an atrocity or would she show her true hidden blessings?

And the dead bird twitched.

The bird sat in Aadi’s palm, looked up, made a few steps and then flew away. It flew around the shrine for some time, in and out. It flew for more than an hour and then collapsed and died again.

The disciples were shocked. They did not know how to react from this surge of emotions at the possibilities this power could offer.

“My guru showed me how to make this happen,” said Aadi solemnly. “And I can show you how to make this happen.”

The disciples felt a rising excitement and eagerness in their chest. They heaved and panted with ardour and joy. “Then show us,” they said.

“This is nothing,” replied Aadi. “My guru can make this bird fly and even live for longer than I just did. He would add years to the life of this bird. He would give the creature back its life. Beyond that, my guru can even resurrect a human being.”

Aadi repeated this process whenever he found a small dead animal. “You see,” he used to say, “the dead is not completely dead. This dead bird’s physical temperature is higher than that of a human but will also cool down and leave faster. Within three hours, if you bring that dead bird to me, I can rekindle its life.”

One day, a group of soldiers marched into the shrine.

“Where is the man who brings dead birds to life?”

Aadi looked at them: men dressed like the King’s guards and clothed with arrogance. "It is I," he said.

One of the soldiers came forward and said, “Under the King’s orders, you are to come with us to the palace immediately.”

Aadi refused to go without further explanation from the soldiers. They were soldiers of the Muslim King Emperor and their barbarism towards the Hindus travelled further than the barbarism itself.

“The King orders you to come with us to bring the young prince to life. The young prince died of fever at 7 seven years old.”

“No,” said Aadi bluntly.

“This is an order, you don’t have a choice,” replied one of the soldiers.

“He thought it was an invite or a choice,” said another.

The soldiers laughed, but Aadi remained calm.

“Why?” They asked.

“I cannot bring the young prince back to life at the palace without my deity.”

They were silent for a second and then burst out laughing. “This? This mud statue?”

“I refuse to bring back the dead without my deity. I practice only in the shrine.”

“Then we’ll pick up your deity and bring it to the palace.” One soldier giggled and another walked around the pedestal, observing the deity while the other soldier was poking it.

“My deity cannot be moved,” said Aadi.

“Of course it can,” said a soldier. “Come on, let’s pick that mud statue up.”

And they picked up the statue and moved it about.

“Stop,” shouted Aadi. “Stop doing that!” He begged and implored them with all his heart, and warm tears rolled down his cheeks as he screamed, “I refuse to bring the King’s son back to life! I refuse! I will not do it!”

One soldier grabbed him and pulled him by his long white hair.

Aadi was brought to the palace, dragged to the King and butchered when he refused for the last time.

The deity was dropped and destroyed in all that struggle.

And all of the old man’s knowledge of more than 70 years died with him before he had imparted it to someone else.

The next event concerns a yogi who will be named Aarav (Hindu word meaning ‘peaceful’). He lived in Karnataka, South India.

Aarav was always surrounded by people. People came to him from everywhere, for blessings and to share in his wisdom and peace. He sat under the blazing sun with a gentle smile and a bouquet of wise words for anyone who came to him.

One day, a couple threw themselves at Aarav’s feet.

“Please, please, help us,” said the couple. “Our son, our young boy died.”

They begged, and nearly kissed his feet after drowning them in tears.

“He was so young, just a child who had started life,” implored the mother.

“I don’t know what you want, but I will offer you anything if you bring back our son,” promised the father.

The intense grief of the parents brought tears to everyone’s eyes. The people caressed the backs of the parents, bent with pain and saddled with misery.

Aarav looked at the innocent face of this child laying at his feet and thought, “This boy still has his life to live. This is an accidental death by nature.” And without uttering any word, Aarav dipped his finger in the earth oil lamp which was burning next to him. He placed his finger in the dead child’s mouth and the boy came back to life. The boy lived a very fulfilled life.

There are many instances when yogis have brought back the dead in the Indian culture. While the true events around Aadi and Aarav happened, our mind immediately treats them with suspicion, scepticism, doubts, terming them as irrationality. We term resurrection as something impossible even though all our world’s different religions have spoken of people who have come back from the dead, might I mention Lazarus and Jesus for Christians.

But a yogi does not seek to explain what the religious books narrate; instead, he explains how he can bring back the dead:

“When someone dies or is certified dead by a doctor, he or she is not completely dead on the spot because that death happens slowly as life is leaving the physical body. When someone dies, life doesn’t just go poof out of the whole body.”

Our doctors declare someone dead if the organs such as the heart, lungs and brain are dead. However, if the withdrawal of life happens slowly — you can imagine it a bit like life going out of your body from head to toe. In fact, for up to 11 or 14 days after someone has been declared dead, the fingernails and the hair still grow. Eventually, by using this life process which is still continuing in some parts of the body, the tantrics can rekindle that flame and activate the whole system again.

In India, this is not uncommon. But in our societies, the scientific world rejects such occurrences because the processes of life and death have never been quite explained. Science still cannot explain where life comes from and where life goes.

Let’s see a different example to further define this explanation:

When a dead body is burned during cremation, it is a common occurrence for the dead body to get up and flail about if no heavy material like wood or a cover has been placed above the body to keep it down. Science explains this occurrence by stating that something needs to hold down that body being burnt because the corpse will move due to the contraction of muscles and the burning micro-organisms.

The tantrics explain that when a corpse is burnt, life tries to leave the body in that moment. Life then retreats into a core — a space — inside the physical body. There is a concentration of life which happens more intensely in that space. The life in the body goes erratic in that moment and flails. Eventually, it falls after 7 or 8 minutes because it has exhausted itself completely.

It is that life which the tantrics use to bring someone back from the dead.

This also explains why there are rituals that need to be performed for up to 14 days in India when someone dies. The majority of these rituals are not understood even by most people performing them. Those rituals have lost their importance and their true meanings since they are practiced just for the sake of following traditions.

As tantrics and yogis explain, life energies recede slowly since they have been so imbibed in the physical body that they need time to leave completely. The Hindus consider this to be a very torturous process and refuse to let their loved ones suffer for so long until absolute death. As such, they hasten the process of the life and soul leaving the body by performing these funeral rites.

For instance, the first ritual is to tie the corpse’s toes together and the second is to wash the dead with water.

The first ritual is performed due to the fact that all the cells in the body are not yet dead. The cells which are still alive desire to imbibe the body with more life. You can imagine that they are making an effort to survive and want to bring back energies inside the corpse.

The second is performed to cease any life activity happening internally.

When you are taking a shower, don’t you naturally try to keep your face from being completely submerged? When you are swimming, don’t you come up for air or hold your breath to prevent drowning?

Now when you throw water over the dead body, it sort of drowns it.

The culture in India is absolutely beautiful. “This is a culture where life and death are understood very well,” says Sadhguru. And services are practiced to sustain those processes.

If someone understands life down to its deepest secrets, that person can exit the body completely after death and leave before death has matured within.

Is death a strange topic or a topic to be avoided or a topic that you need to tread around emotionally and carefully? Should it be? Isn’t death everywhere around us?

When I learned about these facts and heard what I would categorise as ‘good stories,’ I wanted to meet a tantric or a yogi who has that knowledge to impart.

However, will I ever be able to ask all those questions churning inside of me?

Probably not since that knowledge gets corrupted by my different worldviews and religious filters. That knowledge is commercialised and sold to people who barely understand the meanings of traditions. A lot of people have tried to tap into that knowledge to make it their profession. Now, they carry out those rituals like hypocrites who sell their services for fame and money.

My perception of life and death changes every time that I hear about things I never thought could be possible. But what I take from those stories also becomes the ground I walk on every day:

- To live gracefully and to die gracefully are very important.