Daily sadhana forever

Why daily sadhana? And why lifelong?

Experiencing the Infinite is an infinity of experiences. Infinitely-different experiences.

 

Surrendering to meditation changes its daily experience. Sometimes slightly, sometimes completely.

 

All inner experiences are needed. The more, the better.

 

Savour the condition after meditation.

 

Too many seekers, even sincere ones, are in a frenetic rush for the next experience, inner or outer. Undigested experiences also cause problems like an unsettled, torpid, or over-driven mind.

Savour systematically [1]. First pay attention to the condition, with or without words. Then, expand or enliven the condition by sharing it. Then, digest or assimilate it, until it is steeping subconsciously. [2]

Alternately turning one's attention outward and inward and outward again, supports the transition from a deeply absorbing meditation to the usual workday state. Or, try to pay attention - without the least strain - to both the inside and outside simultaneously.

Ultimately, one's inner, non-physical, layers should be able to switch to their most subtle or most gross states easily and quickly. At a subtler stage, there should be general, ongoing awareness, of everything. Daaji uses the phrase"360-degree awareness".

 

Your inner layers are not infinite. Experiencing the Infinite within completely needs an infinite number of experiences. Put differently, the spiritual journey is infinite.

NOTES

[1] like coffee tasters - How professionals taste coffee

[2] Daaji's AEIOU exercise, expressed differently

Bottom-line of meditation

 Bottom-line of meditation:

- what am I thinking or emoting or sensing?

- is it my starting object?

- if not, let go of it, gently.

Meditation then blooms, flows, explodes, dissolves, and does everything else by itself.

Attention and meditation

When 'consciousness' is replaced by 'attention', one looks at spirituality differently.

Attention is more neutral.

Attention also explains meditation much more easily than concentration or even focus.

I pay attention, or something grabs my attention. That something could be positive, negative, or neutral.

In Yoga and Sahaj Marg philosophy, Nature provides experiences to unwind my samskaras - all of my personal, interpersonal, and collective samskaras.

In or out of meditation, my attention is drawn easily to things I like, even more easily to those I dislike, or just to familiar things, because of my samskaras and tendencies.

Letting the samskaras unwind by letting my thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations - arising from the "heat" or energy of my attention - escape without grabbing hold, or by my remembering to release if grabbed, allows my attention to go back to its previous object. Hopefully that object is indeed the object of my meditation.

It is easier to understand the training of attention through meditative practice than training of the mind or expansion of consciousness. Attention doesn't encompass so many different overlapping ideas. Still, the quality of attention could be subtle, tight, heavy, light, torpid, distracted, clear, etc., depending more on its object than its supposed giver.

Meditation helps you to learn to sustain your attention with minimal effort through a simple two-step practice.

1. Start with attention on an object and 2. let go of everything else that pops up and moves your attention willy-nilly. This letting go also fosters the ability to switch attention easily and without stickiness.

What can we do with this effortlessly sustainable and effortlessly switchable attention? Anything in the world, really. But, in gratitude to those who so generously and freely regenerated in us this ability, we share this training with others freely.

Once our attention is effortlessly sustainable, we can also train it on subtler and subtler objects or concepts. E.g., Daaji talks about the 5 C's of the Heart Region: the feelings of contentment, calmness, compassion, courage, and clarity - and their opposites - discontment, restlessness, anger, anxiety, and confusion.

One way to measure spiritual progress: observe or witness your feelings in various situations and note how much closer they are to all the 5 C's. 

In the Mind Region, attention may be on the immanent and its opposite, the transcendental. Then the ego flows effortlessly between its separative and zeroed-out modes.

In Heartfulness/Sahaj Marg, we start with attention on an infinite object, one of the subtlest possible, light without luminosity - light without 'light'ness. Much like a Zen koan, it is impossible to grasp intellectually (though one can get to an asymptotic understanding), making it easy to witness the quality of attention itself, and its changes in every meditation.