The Psychologically-Quiet Mind

A quiet mind, or the mind-field of the self-realised, is not one without any thoughts forever. [1]

A psychologically-quiet mind blooms in, and due to, a spiritual path. Such a mind is without energy-sapping negativities or obsessions or useless spinning around its concocted images of itself and others. Yet it is dynamic [2], free, light, steady, and illuminative. Or pure, simple, and transparent [3]. If the body also attains a similar state, the Absolute can make the mind and body of such a self conscious of their own natural, effortless, living rhythms.

This psychological quietude can result through many ways. The external ways are generally divisive. Worse, their results, even if intense, are temporary. The internal ways let go of the outside totally or progressively. The results are self-validating, permanently transformative, and never-ending/infinite.

The mind is drawn to subtler and subtler levels and increased sensitivity. Detachment too, but only from that which separates, artificially and violently. The triggering elements of emotional turmoil are cleansed. Or like burnt seeds [4], they can no longer sprout.

NOTES

[1] Patanjali's Yoga Sutra 1.2: yogaḥ citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ results in 1.3: tadā dṛaṣṭuḥ svarūpe avasthānaṁ. Yet, Vyasa's commentary says not all vrttis cease in yoga. This may be taken to mean only those causing psychological turmoil cease.

[2] Stillness and quietude seem to go together. Yet, quietude, or better, calmness can accompany action, even mental action. Think poised action, without haste. Even better, efficient and effective action with interest, even affection.

[3] Babuji says without mala (impurities), vikṣepa (complexities), or āvaraṇa (veils or occluding layers).

[4] Like Vyasa, Babuji calls them dagdh beej.

The sneaky I and the practice of meditation

Normally, one's 'I' is thought of as one's physical body and whatever is inside. The 'I' may also define one's relationships with others. Liking something or someone also defines one's 'I', even more so dis-liking. Immediate, so-called instinctive, responses or thoughts also delineate one's personality, the I-me-my set of emotions, thoughts, sensations, actions, and memories in my conscious, subconscious, and unconscious.

One may also define one's 'I' by what one cannot or will not do, where doing includes thinking, speaking, and physically acting.

This is where sneakiness comes in.

In Living with the Himalayan Masters Swami Rama's Guru taught him graphically about perspective. [1] He suddenly hugged a tree and frantically begged to be rescued from it. It took a while for Swami Rama to calm down enough to realise who was grabbing what!

Now, think of meditation, an activity requiring little energy [2] and greater and greater relaxation over time. Its effects are palpable, but not instantaneous. In some ways, the effects are reductive, not additive, of the 'I'. Indeed after a particular stage, one has to deliberately relinquish the 'I'-sustaining thoughts in order to progress.

This may be one reason why people have trouble with meditation. They are so comfortable with their 'I' that they refuse to let go of it. Further, if meditation is defined as an effort-ful activity, they use the excuse of an inability for physical activity for not meditating and so losing their self-created 'I'.

NOTES

[1] The lesson was on mAya. mAya doesn't hold us, we hold it.

[2] In India, most things come with terms and conditions. If someone says, "It's easy to do that," there's generally some, or a lot, of context, background, and previous skill development left out. Meditation defined as effortless focus is not one of those things. When the focus is not effortless, one is not in meditation. In Heartfulness meditation, the situation is even easier, the source of the light in one's heart itself pulls one's attention inward and creates the effortless focus.

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.

Evolution and Samkhya-Yoga philosophy

There is a hyper-realisitic philosophy called sāṁkhya (literally, from categories or from numberings), which posits an evolution (or descent, depending on your point of view) from two sets of infinities.

One infinity is a unitary set called prakṛti (Nature/Manifestor) or pradhāna (Base/Foundation) [1]. From this infinity manifests everything non-conscious, including mind [8], body, and material universe.

The second is a set of infinities called puruṣa's. Like the sun radiates light, each puruṣa radiates consciousness. Every living thing is a unidirectional combination of one puruṣa and a part of prakṛti.  Consciousness illuminates, but is untouchable by, the non-conscious. Vaguely similar to sun rays illuminating the earth. [3]

Now to evolution of the universe or multiverse. Think of a puruṣa as a consciousness source which purifies one part - a jīva (you or any living creature) - of an ocean of prakṛti. bhog, samādhi, and whatever else makes this purification happen for you as a jīva is by your surrender to this activity with minimal conditioning [4]. You, as an ocean current or whirlpool, are able to tune into the incessant inspiration from your puruṣa better with more and more purification. Your actions become more and more natural and less and less conditioned by subconscious and unconscious tendencies (vāsana's) and emotional residues (saṁskāra's).

Spiritual evolution of humans is purification of a significant part of the non-conscious ocean - a particular threshold of jīva's (humans, e.g.) attaining self-realisation, with its ripple effects.

Self-realisation, IMHO, is getting off the seesaw of habitual likes and dislikes (Babuji's Heart Region) and letting the seesaw of I and the Divine (Babuji's Mind Region) rest permanently on the side of the Divine. Kabir has a nice couplet for the latter:

     Love's lane is exceedingly narrow; it can't hold two.
     When 'I' was, the Divine [5] wasn't; now the Divine is, 'I' am not. [6]

I like sāṁkhya because it explains very elegantly a confusing Vedantic idea - I don't have to do anything as I am never bound - by splitting the I into conscious and non-conscious I's. The puruṣa 'I' is eternally free and unblemished. The prakṛti 'I', my bit of ocean, is what changes, maybe from iceberg to water to vapour to space! 

prakṛti as a whole goes through cycles of simplicity and complexity, purity and impurity, lightness and grossness, across cycles of manifestation and unmanifestation, which cause evolution at a multiverse level.

sāṁkhya is atheistic as there is no need for a whimsical God to plan or direct anything. It is close to science in the idea of natural evolution occurring due to individual actions. ṛta (root of rhythm?), or collective karma at the level of the infinite prakṛti, instead of random chance as in science [7], also drives evolution. But ṛta is not arbitrary, and applies even to higher beings.

yoga/rāja yoga philosophy adds the concept of a special puruṣa, an eternal Guru or Guide, not subject to grosser mental effects even when it does associate with (a part of) prakṛti and incarnates in a physical body.

yoga is traditionally considered the practical aspect of sāṁkhya theory. Its practices or techniques take one's mind gradually from a mostly outward focus to an inward focus and then to one that can go both ways equally easily.  Inward focus is of many levels or stages, and one key principle of sāṁkhya - an effect manifests from a cause - is used in the technique of resolving (Babuji's laya) a grosser effect thought layer into a subtler cause layer.

In Sahaj Marg, dissolution/resolution is done through cleaning. And in meditation, by letting the (almost?) infinitely subtle transmission of the Source of Divine Light guide your attention towards Itself, or your mental vibrations towards Its own level.

NOTES

[1] Babuji's bhūma [2] seems to be both pradhāna and puruṣa's, in a latent state

[2] From the chāndogya upaniṣad (7.24.1)

[3] Sun rays do enter into physical reactions as energy, even while illuminating. Consciousness rays, qualitatively different, cause understanding or wisdom in a layer of prakṛti, but it's a unidirectional relationship.

[4] Some conditioning is needed while living in a physical body, in a specific society, at a particular level of technology, kind of social stage (child, parent, elder, sage), etc.

[5] Kabir says 'Hari' for 'the Divine'.

[6] "'I' isn't" is technically better than "'I' am not", as 'I' is considered to be a set of "I, me, or mine" thoughts.

[7] Perhaps statistical random chance is indeed ṛta for gases!

[8] Mind, intellect, and ego (manas, buddhi, and ahaṁkāra) are considered non-conscious or jaḍa.

Samskara, Stithaprajna, and Robots

Think of an event which happens regularly every day.

A normal event.

I like or dislike it. [1]

The "like/dislike" creates an emotional residue - a saṁskāra. The "I" makes it my saṁskāra.

Technically, the first is called rāga/dveṣa and the second ahamkāra or abhiniveśa. Those naturally in a state beyond likes or dislikes and unconcerned about their self-image and other-images [2] have sthitaprajña - settled wisdom.

From philosophical to material, theory to real life.

How is a sthitaprajña different from a robot (or even a machine)? After all, both are naturally incapable of rāga and dveṣa and have no abhiniveśa, the subconscious fear of losing their self, mental or even physical. [3]

The answer, I believe, is love. Transcendental love flows always, but at its purest and most elevating through a sthitaprajña.

 

 

NOTES

[1] I may like or dislike only some part of it, or all of it. Also, I may like/dislike myself or the others [2] who are in the event. Trivial likes or dislikes, and their emotional residues, don't have long-term effects on one's future.

[2] I create a mental image not just of myself, but also of others. Some parts of those images are useful in normal life. Most are not just useless, but also false.

 

[3] Arguably. A robot programmed with Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics will strive to protect itself in normal circumstances. Also, machines are designed to shut down if their inputs are too high or too low, outside operational parameters.