Inertia, impetus, and understanding

A different take on the three gunas - tamas, rajas, sattva.

Think of tamas as inertia - that which impedes movement and sustains rest. A mind or attention with tamas dominant is also at rest, a stuporous and involuntary rest, upon some object.

Think of rajas as impetus - that which makes something move and sustains movement. Attention of a rajas-dominant mind is also in motion, uncontrollable and without volition, pulled all over the place by different objects.

Think of sattva as understanding, and subtle, increased willpower. Understanding is independent of, othogonal to, motion or the lack of it. Attention with sattva dominant can rest on an object with little effort and for as long as one wills. It can also move from object to object with little effort as one wills.

A saattvic mind controls its tamasic and rajasic tendencies as needed to change attention naturally, i.e. resting on an object or moving to another as desired.

Mind-field as ocean and universe

[Prerequisite: read and have some understanding of PYS 1.2 citta vṛtti nirodhaḥ]

The term citta in the PYS is often translated as consciousness. In Samkhya-Yoga philosophy, consciousness or consciousness-force is citi-śakti [1]. A better and more precise translation of citta is the English word or phrase - mind-field [1]. Citta is usually understood as limited to a specific individual, possibly localised to the volume of space that is their body. What if this localisation is natural but unnecessarily limiting?

Imagine an ocean. Imagine a whirlpool near an island in the ocean. The whirlpool comes alive as the waters in the area form a spiral and dies with tides, currents, etc. going down - merging into and becoming indistinguishable from the waters around it. If you further imagine it to be a mindful entity, it might think of itself as localised to the area near the island. If its mind spans its coming alive and dying - or waking up and falling asleep - would it still think itself restricted to that area? Perhaps the mind-field would be that of all the waters around the island and the whirlpool would be one of the funkier parts that bubble up and down in a weird way!

Imagine all the connected water on Earth's surface - the oceans - as a single entity. There may be thousands or even millions of whirlpools, big and small, coming alive and dying every day, or waking up and sleeping daily. Imagine the mind-field of that entity like the motion of all the oceans.

Now imagine the enormity of shutting down or pacifying all the vṛttis, the whirlpools, of the oceans.

Samkhya-Yoga psychology or philosophy goes even further and considers the entire universe to have - or be - a single mind-field. Now consider pacifying or shutting down an entire universe of vṛttis!

(This is what each yogi is striving to do, most unknowingly, and a rare few, knowingly. Since this pacification is probably unnatural, there is another, subtler, interpretation of the word nirodhaḥ. Instead of shutting down, the mind-field vṛttis devolve into their subtler causes, successively, until the completely balanced and unmanifest cause is reached for individual areas of the overall mind-field.)

Science starts from individual bodies, conglomerates of matter, developing consciousness and frantically striving to connect and communicate externally. Vedanta philosophy starts from consciousness inherent in the Absolute - the source of all manifestation - and posits an interface - between that Absolute and the manifested physical bodies - called the mind-field, and the various physical bodies. This mind-field may be restricted to an individual body, or more elegantly, may span the entire manifestation at subtler levels and restrict itself to a single body at grosser levels.

A limited analogy might help. Consider icy water flowing on the ceiling of a cave in a cold climate. As water freezes, stalactites form. Water keeps flowing down stalactites, lengthening them. The ice at the tip of a stalactite is separate from the ice at the tip of the others. But ice at the root of one stalactite can be understood as part of a single ice sheet, and is the same at the roots of all the stalactites. And the subtler cause, the water inflow, from which the ice manifested, is even more obviously the same.

NOTES

[1] Sw. Veda Bharati. 1986. Patanjali Yoga Sutras of Patanjali with the Exposition of Vyasa..., Glossary. pp. 452. Himalayan Institute, India.

2.5 minutes of magic

Some 130-odd years ago, Swami Vivekananda, in his Raja Yoga lectures [1] quoted the Kurma Purana's definition, in time, of dhāraṇa-dhyāna-samādhi as attention resting solely on one object for 12 seconds, 12x12 seconds, and 12x12x12 seconds respectively.

What does this mean practically?

Say you like coffee. Place a cup of your favourite coffee before you. Start a stopwatch - your phone's clock app is a good option.

If your attention while drinking a good cup of coffee doesn't drift anywhere else for 12 seconds, that is dhāraṇa on coffee drinking. If it stays for 12*12 seconds = 12*(10+2) = 120/60+24 = 2 minutes 24 seconds, that is dhyāna on coffee drinking. 

Please note that becoming aware of your observation is also a drifting away! A meta activity is still a distraction.

Reset your stopwatch if any distraction occurs.

And samādhi? 12*12*12 seconds = (120+24)*(10+2) seconds = 2 minutes*(10+2) + 24 seconds*(10+2) = 24 minutes+240 seconds+48 seconds = 24+4 minutes + 48 seconds = 28 minutes, 48 seconds. (Make sure you brew many cups of coffee!)

All three states of attention must be natural and unforced. Any effort made takes one's mind back to the preceding state of active attention-placement, pratyāhāra, and the stopwatch resets to zero!

If not for distracting ads or incoming messages every few minutes, attention on the TV or, these days, on the mobile phone would be an easy way to explain the meditative state!

In Heartfulness practice, five minutes of meditation practice every day is enough for a start. One has twice the 2.5 minutes needed to reach an unforced and natural meditative state! Please note that transmission makes the practice even more effortless by sustaining the attention on the heart.

(A sincere and serious effort for just one week will give palpable benefits in resting the attention on a single object. They will be even more palpable coupled with Heartfulness  cleaning to remove emotional weight and unnecessary distractions. Try meditation alone for a week. Then add daily cleaning to the daily practice. Finally add the daily introspection and prayer before sleeping, for even greater benefits.)

And the magic? It comes from experience alone.

(Bonus points: before the day's meditation, link mentally to the condition after the previous day's meditation. After meditation, spread today's condition in the space around you, and share it with everything in that space.)

NOTES

[1] Sw. Vivekananda, 2016 ed., Raja Yoga, Advaita Ashrama, Mayavati

A little paean to meditation

Beautiful expression from a lifelong meditator:

Trying and struggling to achieve a level of meditation always brings the opposite results. One cannot fall asleep beating a drum and shouting to one-self repeatedly, "I am determined to sleep."

The states of consciousness can be changed only very gently. 

Let meditation seep through you like water into a rock, like the sound of a falling rose petal, like a baby's finger growing invisibly, like the sun's ray sipping a drop of water.

There are no dramatic manifestations, just a slow and graduating transformation.

- Pt. Usharbudh Arya (Sw. Veda Bharati), Superconscious Meditation, Himalayan Institute Press

Thoughts and progress in meditation

Here's one perspective of progress based on thoughts in meditation [1]. This seem independent of the type of meditative practice:

1. Random thoughts, followed by their chains or sequences of thoughts, as one's attention drifts. Daydreams and fantasies.
   
2. Random thoughts arising quickly, but no chains. One is able to detach or relax one's attention from each new starting thought.
   
3. Specific thoughts around current practical problems, in the conscious or subconscious mind.
4. Answers, solutions, guidelines. Inspired or intuitive ideas.
   
5. No thought arises uninvited. Inspiration from one's superconscious may be requested.
   

Stages 4 and 5 occur after a fair amount of introspection, releasing self-created layers and complexities, and changing one's habitual behaviour.

NOTES

[1] Arya, U., (Sw. Veda Bharati). 1989. Superconscious meditation (Problem Thoughts). pp.90-102. Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy.

Two simple questions to train your mind

There are effectively only two questions one has to ask to train one's mind:

1. What am I doing now?
2. What should I be doing now?

 If both answers match, one's mind is trained at the time.

The answer to the second question obviously requires some planning - short, medium, or long-term. But the two questions are the easiest way to check if one's mind is attending to what one wants, i.e., is "am" == "should"?

A lifelong project or goal, like mukti or self-realisation, is difficult to pin down to such a simple technique. But "am" and "should" matching naturally is a sign of progress.

Per PYS [1], an untrained mind fluctuates between these states of mental attention:

1. kṣiptam - disturbed, agitated, jumpy; habitually, involuntarily reactive; rajas-dominant mind
   
2. mūḍham - stupefied or somnolent; unreactive; tamas-dominant mind
   
3. vi-kṣiptam - distracted, but with illuminative flashes; mind sattva-dominant at times, but generally overlain by rajas

Further training leads to ekāgram - willed attention on a single object, as long as desired, with a sattva-dominant mind

In the highest mental state, niruddham, sattva is totally dominant, and one's attention moves effortlessly, freed of all potential and actual distractions.

NOTES

[1] Slightly evolved descriptions than in 5 mental states.

Cleaning and free will

Put simply, "my" past events are unchangeable - dead. But their effects or residues in the mind-field cause "my" present events.

My past actions predict my present actions in the same or similar situations.

Cleaning in Heartfulness removes the mind-field residues at subtler levels, reducing the intensity of events. Total cleaning may even prevent events altogether.

Cleaning removes emotional residues - samskaras. I can act now without being bogged down by my past emotional reactions. But only I can let go of my tendency to act as I did in the past. This can be done only by acting differently. Again and again, repeatedly, until a new mental habit is in place for those situations.

Free will lies entirely in my present actions - thoughts, speech, and physical actions. But the range or spectrum of possible actions in situations is dramatically increased by cleaning.