Commonsensicality of laya

 In Sanskrit, laya means mergence or even dissolving. In spirituality or yoga terminology, laya has a very specific or technical meaning, a grosser effect dissolving into its subtler cause. This technical meaning and how laya occurs is easy to understand with an everyday example.

If I move a few chairs around for guests, I work at mental and physical levels. I - and they - may move the chairs more than once as well. In this set of actions, I think, I decide, I move a chair, I look and act physically, and I gauge and compare, and I move again, and so may the guests. But all this happens quite fast, and indeed, breaking down the mental and physical activities as I have done may actually take longer to read and understand!

We switch between physical and mental activities all the time without thinking about how we do it. Switching from physical to mental or going up or going to subtler levels of thinking is laya. It is not a physical or even a mental dissolving in the sense of an actual transformation (though that also happens). It is simply our attention going from one level of activity to its next or earlier subtler levels. This can happen even at physical levels - moving chairs generally to one location and then turning them to form a circle, for example, are grosser and subtler physical acts, comparatively. They require more and less effort, respectively. That is, more and less energy. 

It is easy to understand that mental activities take less energy than physical activities. But the continued reduction in the amount of energy as attention goes to subtler and subtler levels may not be as obvious.

What does this mean in the context of meditation? Attention moving from the world outside one's body, to one's organs (indriyas), to one's thoughts, to thoughts at subtler and subtler levels - in terms of greater and greater abstraction, less and less detail, more and more universality - transcendence - is laya. Babuji gives a simple sequence - actions to thoughts to ideas.

Those who only look at spirituality and think about it without practising it may have the idea that laya is a one-time activity. One goes up to the highest level once and that's it! Boom! Enlightenment! Life changes forever! That does happen, but not exactly as expected.

Unless one also stops existing at physical and mental levels, activities must obviously continue at those levels after reaching even the highest level. (There's also the slight problem that the highest or subtlest level keeps receding - there's always a higher or subtler level!)

Having reached a subtle level, it makes sense that one has to return to that level regularly to remember what it's like. One secret of spiritual practice is that reaching a state once, no matter how, is enough to reach it again just by willing it. But its experience may not be the same.

Laya is simple in many ways. Its theory is both elegant and reassuring. Elegant in the simplicity of the reduction of effort. Reassuring in that since we have come through those subtle levels to become who we are now, we can return at will. Secondly, and more theoretically, all subtler cause states are active in a grosser effect state. A simple example is an electric light in which subatomic particles or energy continue to be active at the subatomic level even when the light is switched on. And when it's switched off. In Babuji's terms, an idea continues to be active while we think and act. So the idea of a meeting drives thoughts and activities, including arranging chairs in a circle. We may not keep reiterating the idea while thinking or acting upon it, but it's still there.