Citta as attention

When citta in the Patañjali Yoga Sūtras is translated into English as attention, the connotations of that simple word make the  sūtras defining dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi  easier to understand.

dhāraṇā

deśa-bandhaḥ cittasya dhāraṇā - 3.1 PYS

location-binding of attention - dhāraṇā

Binding one's attention to a location - dhāraṇā

(Initially, this binding must last for 12 seconds for attention to be termed dhāraṇā)

What is location?

Location could be in space.

E.g., generally the object of attention is somewhere with respect to your body - outside it, upon it, inside it. It could be the entire body too, but that is more difficult. So generally a small object in space.

Location could be in time.

E.g., we think or plan or give attention to the future. Or worry about it. In the other direction, nostalgia is paying attention to the past. So is regret, or guilt. Again, generally a single event or a set of small events that can be held easily in working memory.

But there is a little-understood subtlety for both location and time. The entire attention or attending activity happens in the mind-field and in the present. We only work with our mental images or our memories of them. Even if the location is just a foot away, my attention does not go out of my body or brain and plop down on that location.

Remember the story of Gaṇeśa and Kārtikeya competing to go around the world and Gaṇeśa wins the prize by going around Śiva and Pārvati - his representations of jagat?

This is what happens with attention, whether it is upon an outside sensation or an internal, mental, event. In both cases, attention works on their internal mental representations or encoding.

Reflex or subconscious actions, while very fast and not analyses, are still the results of outside triggers and due to a circuit from sensory to motor neurons.

Location could be an abstract idea or a vision. Attention even on those occurs with an implicit, underlying, basis of space (inside my mind or brain) and time (thinking today, right now).

Location could be anything, really.

Emotions or feelings, a mental state.

Or physical activities.

Drinking tea.

Eating a sweet.

 

The generality of this sūtra is amazing. From this, one can get to obsession, positive or negative. That is simply attention resting or stuck involuntarily somewhere, or on someone, or something, for 12 or more seconds, and thus dhāraṇā.

Attention can also be grabbed by something striking or unusual. This is the idea behind advertisements which try to stand out from the normal. Please note that these are outside and also that they try to induce dhāraṇā, by trying to hold your attention for 12 seconds, if not longer!

dhyāna

tatra pratyaya-ekatānatā dhyānam 3.2 PYS

That [attention-binding resulting in] cognition-monotony - dhyānam.

That [attention-binding resulting in a] single-unvarying-stream [of] cognition - dhyānam.

Here, attention keeps resting on its object [mental representation] without shifting elsewhere and causes a steady single flow of cognition.

Consider the analogy of movie films. When snapshots taken at high speeds are replayed at speeds higher than 60 frames per second, our eyes or brain doesn't notice the discontinuities and movement appears continuous.

Similarly, our attention may rest on something, move away, and come back quickly without our noticing. This is normal thinking. But if it stays for just 12 continuous seconds, that is dhāraṇā. If that 12 seconds extends to 12x12 or 144 seconds or ~2.5 minutes, that causes the cognition flow called dhyāna. This light, free, effort-less - yet wilful - resting or training of attention for such short periods results in the flow of cognition called meditation. 

dhāraṇā can be, and is done, very easily every day without conscious awareness. dhyāna, while not uncommon on a daily basis, is more likely to be sets of discontinuous dhāraṇā where the discontinuities or breaks between 12+ seconds of attention are not noticed.

Of Patañjali's aṣṭa-aṅgas (8 stages), in the stages or aṅgas listed before pratyāhāra, attention is outward - beyond the body, on others, on other things, different from me.

In pratyāhāra, there is a shift or turn from outward - bahiraṅga - to inward - antaraṅga.

And the rest are completely inward or mental processes.

The inwardness of dhāraṇā-dhyāna-samādhi should be understood very clearly because while they can indeed occur during outward activities or engagement, they are defined by the quality of mental attention during the activities, and not by physical or mental activities themselves.

samādhi

tad-eva artha-mātra nirbhāsam svarūpa-śūnyam iva samadhiḥ 3.3 PYS

That-itself  meaning/essence/perception-alone shining [with] self-ness-void [of mind] itself - samādhi.

 That [single-unvarying cognition stream] itself [results in] meaning-alone [of object of meditation] shining with null self-ness/activity [of mind] itself - samādhi.

 

Here, the meta activity of the mind ends, i.e., the mind stops thinking about what it is doing, that it is paying attention or in a cognition flow. Or at least it pauses for a long while!

That is, shifting between the activity itself - attention on an object of meditation plus cognising it - and thinking about the kind of mental activity (attention to what I am doing) halts. Then, only the object's meaning or essence floods the mind-field completely.

saṁyama

trayam-ekatra saṁyamaḥ 3.4 PYS

Triad/triplet-as-one - saṁyamaḥ [union/summation process]

Imagine the quality of your attention as it rests easily, lightly, happily upon something for a brief while, which then becomes a short while, and that in turn becomes a long while. 

Specifically, for 12, 12x12, and 12x12x12 seconds. Or 12 seconds, ~2.5 minutes, ~half an hour.

It is easy to appreciate that the frenetic taking in of sensations slows down. It's like someone telling you,

"Ree-laaaa-xxx...

Take a deeeep, sloooow, breath...

Caaalm dooown... 

And now...

look at that object."

Imagine then that same restful, peaceful, light, effort-less attention continues to stay on that same thing for a longer duration, and then for a really extended duration. Attention becomes cognition and then a silent mind-field imbued and flooded by meaning or essence.

Imagine the quality of your attention at the end of that extended duration!

Now imagine doing that with tenderness, affection, love for an extended duration - almost half an hour. What would your mind and brain and heart be like?

Finally, after practising for many, many, many half hours,

say a 1000 or even just a 100 of them,

imagine that you can build up to that same quality of attention in minutes or even seconds.

You have then compressed

12 seconds of attention = dhāraṇā -

extending to 144 seconds of attention = dhyāna -

extending to 1728 seconds of attention = samādhi,

I repeat,

compressed 1728 seconds of clock time worth of

binding-to-cognition-to-mind-field-flooding,

into a few minutes or even a few seconds of clock time of samādhi-quality attention.

Imagine samādhi - your entire mind-field flooded by the essence or meaning of an object - in seconds! Well, OK, in minutes :-)

This is saṁyama.

Meta modes - 'I' or subject, 'am doing' or 'verb'-ing - do not kick in now, implying greater efficiency in mental processing.

Attention - thinking to feeling

Meditation is simply paying or giving attention to something without effort or with minimal effort. That thing could be outside or inside the body.

Orthogonal to inside or outside is the idea of limit. That is, that something is limited in space or time or both. Or that something is unlimited.

So something outside and limited, like a candle flame.

Or something outside and almost limitless or unlimited like universal space or universal life, by which I mean that from which all life in the universe has come.

For both inside and outside, for both the limited and the unlimited, when one uses attention the same way - with minimal effort - it is meditation.

As one rests one's attention on something, effort-less-ly, one learns about attention from practice:

• Over a brief meditation session, or a long session,
• over many iterations,
• over the ease of bringing the attention upon something at will,
• over the frequency of attention slipping away,
• over the quickness and ease of recovery to the starting object,
• and so on.

All this (and more) is training the attention through daily practice.

The choice of object decides whether meditation transforms one internally in specific ways or simply hones one's mental prowess.

A transcendental or unlimited object, inside or outside, means one's attention cannot rest on the object for a long time. It necessarily slips away.

A simple example - infinity of natural numbers. I can only hold about, say, 7 or 10 numbers in working memory at once. Beyond that, I switch to general patterns or generating algorithms or whatever helps me to think about the entire infinity of natural numbers at once.

From our own experience, and reports of unethical and immoral scientists, we know that meditation on an infinite object outside does not change us.

Not permanently.

But there are reports of people who have been transformed by meditating upon, or constantly remembering, some entity either immanent or transcendent or both (both within and without - technically called omnipresent).

Sometimes we ourselves have had a numinous experience. As we could not hold on to it as a continuing experienc-ing, it became a memory. It is still useful, for inspiring oneself and others, but one must go beyond a single, or even many, such past experiences. [1]

Feeling the meaning or presence is the next step up from meditation, simply, from thinking to feeling, when one's attention is completely filled by the object chosen to represent that presence. [2]

This complete washing out of attention is technically called samadhi. [3]

It is like tuning an old TV receiver manually and the screen then filling with images decoded from that tuned signal.

But here, when an infinite conscious presence is represented by the object of meditation, the TV screen of the attention and mind is taken over by that presence, which then works on increasing the sensitivity, resilience, and empathy of the meditator. Put differently, changing an old TV receiver from tuning into only the TV spectrum of frequencies to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. With analog and digital decoding as well!

Now, after enjoying and ruminating over it, please drop the TV analogy completely because a TV is not a conscious entity.

While there is indeed a mechanical or physical aspect to the meditative process, it is not rule bound in the way one would think if only one person were involved. As one goes deeper and deeper inside, separative factors (I vs. others) are replaced by factors more and more common to all conscious beings. For example, life and the source of life are about as abstract and common to all living beings as one can consider.

Thus, in a very simple way, one shifts from the definition of meditation itself to different objects of meditation and then from thinking to feeling.

NOTES

[1] One difficulty is due to the habituation ability of the body and mind. They like to feel and then put that feeling into memory to chew over later.

[2] The presence need not be infinite, at least initially. There is a gradation of objects from limited to unlimited to beyond.

[3] Per Sw. Vivekananda in his Raja Yoga, it takes 12x12x12 seconds, approximately 28-30 minutes of effort-less mental attention upon an object for its internal representation to fill one's attention. Once it happens many times, though, it can occur much faster, even reducing from minutes to seconds or less.

Concentration and meditation

Attention with mental force on an object = concentration

Attention without mental force on an object = meditation

Attention on the same object without force for an extended time also creates a state called concentration. Same result, but reached with lesser expenditure of energy.

Attention without force, aka meditation, is initially subject to the impurities and complexities present in the mind-field. They raise distractions and attention moves away from the initial object, as is usual outside of meditation. This movement away also happens due to outside sensations like sounds which cause immediate mental reactions.

In Heartfulness/Sahaj Marg, rejuvenation or cleaning removes the mental sources of distractions, and reduces reactivity.

Training the mind-field in meditation consists of accepting distractions have occurred, every time, and returning to the original object as lightly as possible. The subtlest possible way is to merely recognise the movement of attention. The return is automatic and natural.

Reduction in energy of a mental activity is termed as the conversion - laya - of rajas and tamas into sattva.

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.