How Tantriks Bind Household Deities, and How to Reverse It

The speaker opens by asking whether anyone today is so capable — whether any tantrik or sadhak holds such siddhis, such mantra or tantra power, that he can bind someone's deity or any deity at all. In the Ramayana era, he says, Indrajit used to bind the panch devas — Agni Dev, Varuna Dev, Yamraj and the rest — with his powers; he was named Indrajit because he bound Bhagwan Indra himself with a pasha and brought him away. So it is confirmed that such shaktis existed then. But is it possible now to bind someone's shakti, some great mahashakti? The question matters in tantra, he says, because whenever people get things shown or read, they are told "the deities of your house have been bound" — so what is that actually, and is there a technical reason behind it? His answer, given after the mechanisms have been explained, is that what gets bound are these attendant powers — not Mahadev here, not Mahakali. Neither you nor I, he says, have the capacity for so great a shakti to dwell with us in person; and even if it did, people would bind or remove it in that same limited way. So if one speaks of binding deities, it is possible, it happens, people do it — but the methods differ, and mainly it is lok shaktis, partial shaktis, that are bound. Nobody can bind Mahadev in person; no tantrik of the present time has that capacity in a manifest way, and those who have it will not do it. He cites Mahabhagwan Shankaracharya, who is Shankar himself, as having done keelan at many places — pinning fierce shaktis so that they would not have ill effects, since in this Kali kaal human beings misused them. There was goodwill in that, and he was that capable. Today, even if someone that capable exists, he will not do such things and will never come before everyone openly. Everything has a limit, he says: binding happens, but in this way — and when it is cut, it is cut in the same way.

To explain what "so-and-so's deity has been bound" really means, the speaker takes an ordinary sadhak who is new and has begun the sadhana of Bhagwati Durga. He takes up her ashtottara shatanamavali — "Om Sati Sadhvi Bhavapreeta Bhavani Bhavamochani…", the full 108 — as a purashcharan-style anushthan. He thinks: let me do 2,100 of it, a hundred a day; or 11,000, and completes that. He takes a sankalpa — for Bhagwati's pleasure, for her grace, for the destruction of all my sins and the pacification of all doshas, I resolve to complete this many recitations of the 108 names within this many days — and sits before Bhagwati doing japa by rule every day until it is finished. When the anushthan is completed by the rules, he says, and the purnahuti is done — a yajna or havan, or even no havan, only the japa dedicated to Bhagwati — then after the final samarpan it is one hundred percent certain that the sadhak will receive protection from all sides through Bhagwati's Yoginis. How will the Yoginis, her companions, help? The sadhak is new and has no knowledge of the field of tantra; but once the Yoginis have been invoked and show grace, they make him feel that field, those energies — through dreams, or when he is in ardha-nidra. Ardha-nidra, he says, is what we call the state of Shiva. Look at how Bhagwan Sadashiv's eye is drawn in pictures — half open, as if he were intoxicated. That is the half-conscious state, in which the paths to both the material world and the spiritual world are visible. Shiva's state is far higher — he is Parabrahma Parameshwar — but this is said to explain. When do you feel anything in sadhana? In that state, neither fully awake nor fully asleep. There you feel that some devi came and touched you and went; that the Devi's lion came, touched you, licked you with its tongue, and your whole cheek feels wet. These experiences happen, he says — they really do — and in this state they begin.

When all this begins, the speaker says, two things happen. The sadhak wants to understand these shaktis that are coming to him, this play of maya that has started. Either he studies tantra texts, watches YouTube, reads every tantra magazine, listens to people's experiences — and even after all that cannot reach one conclusion, because these things happen differently with every person. Or, after hearing it all, he goes to someone who knows these things, someone in that field, and tells him: yes, this happens to me. If that person is right, he says, he will tell him straight: do not get stuck in the experiences. Keep doing these things. Bhagwati's grace has reached you — that is clear; you have done so much sadhana, clearly her grace is there. But do not bring it down into materiality. Do not set up a relation between grace and material things. Do not say: grace has come, so let my debt be wiped out; grace has come, so let me get divya drishti; grace has come, so let the one I love start loving me. When you tie the effects of your sadhana to materiality, he says, you begin to wane from there. When things do not go your way you think, "I did this sadhana". Earlier you had not thought of it, but once you learned that grace had come and experiences began, you started hoping and expecting that these shaktis would do your work. Before, you were nishkam — in Bhagwati's bhakti, in her grace, running your life by her; now you are not. Now you want what you want, to get whom you want to get; what she wants no longer matters to you. You are classifying — "I need this, this and this" — and taking sankalpa over it. Things start going wrong from here, because once you have classified, the ones who give stop giving and, because of your demands, anaman begins. How do the deities get bound, then? Once this displeasure sets in your experiences drop, you get frustrated, your faith flickers, and you reproach them: I did so much seva, so many havans, so much of my money wasted, what did you give me? My beloved left me; I worked so hard for that job and did not get it, the age limit passed. You reproach them in countless ways. They feel no pain, he says — your ishta feels no pain — but her sevikas, the paricharikas present in this world, who live in our atmosphere and respond most sharply to what you do, will be angered and will punish. This is not binding happening; it is distance, distance forming between one and the other. The experiences lessen because of your reproaches.

When the attendant powers have drawn away and the experiences have lessened because of the sadhak's reproaches, the speaker says, what happens next? He goes and asks some second or third person: such and such things are happening to me. Some half-baked man among them will say: the deities have been bound. The deities have come under bandhan, that is why your things are not happening, that is why your experiences have gone down. When he hears all this — yes, the experiences are fading because our deities, the shakti that had awakened in us, has been bound; some tantrik has raised a ten-fold storm — he is then given a new sadhana: do this one. So the very thing through which he had obtained all of it, that sadhana and the sadhanas connected with it, he abandons completely, because he has no knowledge of it at all. If there is no knowledge, where will he do it from? He leaves those things and enters something new, given to him by a person who is convincing him that his shaktis have been bound, that his experiences were bound because someone did tantra on him. After that, the speaker says, he just keeps wandering. That bandhan will never end in his life — because there was no bandhan at all; the bandhan has come into his own mentality. This, he says, is the first thing: the false sense in which deities are said to be bound.

The second thing, the speaker says, is where deities properly get bound — how? When energy has been generated by a sadhak of some field, and he has found a right and able guru who has explained the processes of tantra: how projection happens in tantra, what the principle of energy projection is. The methods can differ, the words can differ, but the technique is one. What is it? The sound of the mantra. What is there in the tantra we do? Mantra, yantra and some herbs, substances and so on are combined so as to gather energy in one place, and having gathered it, it is cast onto the object or the feeling you desire, so that the thing gets executed. That, he says, is tantra. Take a maran prayog. When a maran is done on a person, what actually happens? The subtle energy of that person's body, his prana energy, is looked at: which deity's energy is protecting him, what is there and what is not. Then the whole planning is done accordingly — yes, in tantra we will have to do this and this; how will we keelan his protective shaktis so that they move aside? That is, his protective covering has to be removed first. Removing the deities of the house — understand it technically: energy is being removed by energy. One energy is first put into bandhan, that is, obstructed, by means of another energy, so that when a special energy is then sent to make some part or organ of the body stop working and bring death, his shaktis do not protect him at that moment. So the energy is projected in this way: through mantra, and through tantra, yantra and all such things, the whole process is done and the energy is projected — and after the projection the person dies. Whatever the process, understand it technically like this, he says. And the binding that was placed — on a household's deities — was done in the same way.

Coming to the root matter, the speaker says — how are the deities of your house bound? Whatever ishta deva or aradhya deva your house has, whom you have worshipped generation after generation — or, if you are a new sadhak, for some days, ten years, five years, one year — that shakti is present before you in your family in a partial form. You do regular puja morning and evening; the ang devi-devatas come and take seva and puja; the house is growing, you are becoming financially prosperous, everything is happening. When a tantric projection is made on you by some enemy, how does it happen, by what means? By what can the sattvik shakti in the house, and the house's deities and pitrs, be stopped? How satisfied are the pitrs? How much punya have you done for them, how much can they do? A prayog will be made aimed at them. In it the same principle of energy projection runs — a mantra, a method, with a sankalpa in it, and the use of bandhan mantras and pasha mantras by which that energy is somewhere made dull, or in a manner deactivated so that it cannot be active for you; or an obstruction is placed between you and them so that they cannot reach you. The work of removing that obstruction is also yours, he says. You will have to do it — someone or other will do it, only then will it happen. Because you, or people generally, have no knowledge of this matter, the obstruction does not get removed. And when these things have happened, your deities cannot do anything for you.

Going further in, the speaker takes up what is heard among the bhagats: that the deity was bound by vachan, bound by giving bhog. What is all this? What is giving bhog? Getting a child to do a job by tempting it with two toffees is one thing — so are the shaktis being tempted here? No, he says: they become bound in a vachan. What is a mantra? A mantra is a vachan. The duhai and the vachan in the shabar mantras — what are they? Because of them the shaktis come under the command of that mantra. They are not mahashaktis, after all; they are subject to the orders of the mahashaktis. When the duhai of Mahadev, the duhai of Shiv and Gaura, is given — that vachan — they are being compelled to obey. So, compelled, they have to do such acts, and your deities become inactive there because of those vachans, because of that mantra's command. How long that lasts, he says, depends on the person who is doing the projection. And the process of removing it is likewise of that kind.

Suppose, the speaker says, someone's deities have really been bound — the tantrik was capable enough and did it. When you actually learn that yes, this is real, such an act has been done, what should be done? Where do deities get their shakti from? From the yajna and havan that you do. That is why, he says, he keeps saying again and again: do at least one havan a month. However big the binding — say Bhagwati is your ishta and your kuldevi, and you learn that a tantrik gave bali and bhog, performed some very great act and took her into bandhan, put his whole strength into it — all of this certainly exists in tantra; energy has its own principle in the tantric path. In that condition, he says, the plain fact is that your DNA is related to that kuldevi. The particles of blood within you exist by the grace of Jagdamba, who is present in your family in partial form. So whatever anyone does, that connection will remain. And when, through this pinda made of blood and flesh, you do havan for that Devi, the energy produced from it — however great the shakti, however big the binding — a time will come when it breaks. It will not be able to remain. But you will have to do it. You can take help in it, he says: in the havan you will take a sankalpa — we are doing this havan of Mahadev so that our kuldevi's bandhan is removed; we are doing this of Bhagwan Bhairav so that our kuldevi is freed from bandhan, freed from every vachan of abhichar-krit prayogs and the like, and, re-established in the house, her shakti and energy receive nourishment from us and she does our welfare. You will have to attend to many things here, but this will be the initial stage: through havan, through a great deal of havan, through pushti-giving havan and paushtik karmas, you will free her and establish her. And so that nothing is done to her again, he says, the house is bound through mantras, through tantras, through such tantrokta keels, so that no energy makes such an attempt again.

When you go further in these things, the speaker says, when you begin to understand what the swaroop of Bhagwati is, then — as he says again and again — do the sadhana of the Shaktipeeth and the sadhana of their anga vidyas, and destroy forever every abhichar karma being done by an enemy. Let the enemy no longer have that capacity at all, he says. Make yourself strong now by knowing all these things in the right way; then things will go well.