Its not so difficult is it?

The Vedantin starts his meditation on the awareness of I AM. There are no lower vehicles for him, no Chakra’s, no life force, no mind, and no intellect like the Kundalini Yogi.

He asks:

Who Am I? Am I the body or mind or intellect or consciousness?

He gets an answer:

I am Consciousness because that’s the only part which never changes. I am always aware of myself in all states.

He concentrates on his consciousness.

Then a strange thing happens. He realizes his oneness with everything. I will illustrate it for you. I have mentioned it before too.

Just think of a closed string of beads. The string could begin and end at any bead, yes? The vedantin notes this. In effect you could call yourself the beginning and the end of the universe. So could anyone too.

The vedantin in his realization says.

I am Everything ( Aham Brahma Asmi.)

If someone comes then to him in that state in search of knowledge, he says.

You too are that (Tat Tvam Asi).


To such a person nothing remains to be explored. He is always in bliss.

He might wander the world like a mad man, letting the world do anything to him. He is not mad of course, but the ignorant would think him so.

I know this would sound completely bizarre to you. But anyway, that’s the difference between a Yogi and Vedantin. Yogi believes in evolution, Vedantin achieves liberation.

Keep your mind at the point between the eyebrows.

Keep it there, keep it there...

Advaya Taraka Upanishad

It would be hard for me to update the blog for a while. In the meantime you could go to the link below and read the translated text of Advaya Taraka Upanishad.

It has immediate relevance to the subject we are interested in and makes certain aspects of the practice clear.

If you find anything perplexing in it feel free to post it here. I will try my best to answer you.

Advaya Taraka Upanishad

Zhine to develop Sambavi

Let us talk about Zhine (peaceful steadiness) here, a Tibetan Buddhist practice to gain control over the mind. It is useful while practicing Sambavi Mudra.

The Tibetans speak of three stages of Zhine, the forceful, natural and ultimate. The practice begins with focusing the mind on an external object and goes on to the fixation of mind on an objectless state.

You can sit in a chair for this practice. Cross your legs under you. Place the hands folded in your lap with palms up one over the other. Hold the spine straight but not rigid, head slightly tilted to keep the neck straight. Keep the eyes open (This is the main reason I am talking of this technique. It teaches us the Poornima Drishti.)

The eyes should not strain, it should neither be wide open or too shut, but just open enough to keep them relaxed and steady. The object on which you are concentrating should be dead ahead of you, not over or below the line of vision. Don’t move or blink, even if tears stream down the face keep the eyes steady on the object. Breathe naturally.

I would suggest the letter Aum in Sanskrit script or Aum written in English as the object of meditation. If you are using the English version make the A big and inscribe U and M within it.

The Tibetans inscribe the picture of the letter on a paper an inch square and fix it on a stick with a base to hold it on ground. This is a good idea. You can carry it around and practice the technique where ever you want. Make the letter white on a black background. Place it just a foot and half in front of the eyes while practicing.

If something strange occurs during practice think they are natural and continue practicing. In forceful shine you make your mind concentrate on the object. It would wander, but try to bring it back every time. If you can’t break session and try to concentrate on a quality you would like to develop, like compassion, truthfulness etc and return to your practice. You can do it as many times as you want. (If you have no tool to concentrate on you can also visualize a ball of light in the forehead.)

Never waver for a moment. Keep your attention steady on the object and breathe steadily. Slowly the breath would begin to thin and become un noticeable.

Just be aware of the object and don’t think about it. Slowly concentration would intensify and you will begin to get absorbed in the object. This is the time to start meditating without object. Look at the space in front of you and not at any object. Take an imaginary point in before you and focus on it. Then even forgetting it allows the mind to dissolve. This is called ‘merging the mind in space’. This leads to the next stage the Ultimate Zhine.

This is the natural next stage in the practice. Thoughts would not enter the mind and you will remain in a relaxed and tranquil state.

You should not involve in intense physical activity just before practice, this would agitate the mind and make concentration difficult. Then while you are practicing sleep might come. Stop it with your mind by concentrating more strongly.

The most troublesome problem of all is a lax state of mind while in meditation. Your mind would be calm and passive with no power to it. This can be very pleasant but is not conducive to reaching higher levels of consciousness. Strengthening your posture and alerting your mind would be effective in combating it.

Practice it always till you can consciously reach a state of steadiness of mind. This is the preliminary practice on Raja Yoga; the Tibetans learned it from Padmasambava a Tantric Yogi who came to Tibet sometime in the thirteen hundreds. It would lead you towards the attainment of Sambavi mudra.

I suggest this for those who are struggling to fix the mind at Trikut (the fore head, at the point between the eyes, the ajna chakra) without any previous experience in meditation. Sometimes props such as these might become useful to them.

I will discuss similar practices as we go on. Our mind tires easily and might welcome variety while involved in spiritual practices.

Welcome

I would have liked to post more in the blog, but it does not seem possible now because of other engagements. But I do have few things to say on the general aspects of spiritual practice which might be of interest to those who seek the truth.

Well I might get to it eventually.

In the meantime I would like to welcome Ashok Kumar to my blog.

Please be at home here.

Swetaswatara On Finding Truth

Dhyana is actually a mental activity and has little to do with bodily postures, but having said that a comfortable posture might be helpful in quieting the mind.

The Swetaswatara Upanishad says that the head, neck and shoulders should be held straight and steady while meditating. Then one should think of AUM. AUM is the Shabda (Nada) Brahman, the primordial sound. (Think of A as creation, U as the steady state and M as destruction). Just imagine that all the three is happening when you mentally pronounce the word. It would move us away from hindering thoughts and would help to still the mind.

I might write something on the worship of AUM sometime later. But really it’s not needed. It’s only a boat to steady the mind for further activity.

As you stay like that in your place of meditation you will notice the thinning of breath. At that moment you need to close your mouth and begin Pranayama. The Rishi prescribes Rechaka-Puraka-Kumbaka’s (You might want to look up the article on Pranayama to learn what it is). But to me such strenuous practices are not all that necessary. Just steadying the breath would do.

Upanishad says that a flat clean surface with no disturbing sounds or no captivating/awkward sights is preferable to every other kind of sites. Air currents should not also trouble us while we sit thus. Caves are suggested for this purpose. A room is as good as anything else as far as I am concerned, if it’s uncluttered and clean.

If you experience the presence of fog, smoke, sun, gaseous phenomena, fire, star, lightning, crystals and moon in the beginning it would lead you towards the final truth. You can meditate with your eyes open and see all these phenomena in the visible form.

I can assure you of that. These are not mere words; I have been through the experience.

According to Indian cosmology there are five states of matter in our environment. They call it elements. Prithvi (Solids), Jal (Liquid), Agni (energy), Vayu (Gaseous) and Akasha (Space). As you meditate your mind would start to understand how these elements form and evolve into each other. This would give you the Yogic body (that is you would know what the body is really made up of) and thus would eliminate old age death and diseases.

A word of caution: Though this is possible, if you concentrate on these aspects it would lead you astray from the search of truth. These are spectacles by the way side and we should not and stop our journey for them.

The first signs of Yogic state are lightness of body, strength in you, personal beauty, attractive voice, presence of good scents, aversion to worldly things, and diminished quantity of excretions.

All this is true too.

This yogi sheds his vestures and starts to realize his real nature, that is, his oneness with everything. This Deva (Spirit) is nothing but the whole world. He pervades all directions and is the first born in the universe. He is the one in the womb and the one outside and is the one yet to be born. He resides in the hearts of all as the inner spirit. He faces all points in the universe simultaneously.

The second chapter of the Upanishad concludes enjoining us to pray to this god who resides in fire, water, plants and trees and has entered everywhere in the universe.

It technically becomes a prayer to our own true self.

Taming mind

Fixing the mind at any place or on any object is a difficult task. I have had my troubles with it. It is the first and perhaps the final task we need to be good at to achieve anything in life. We all have certain leanings in us. Some like music and gets easily absorbed in it, to some others it might be some other things. But everyone has the talent to concentrate on the things that they like in exclusion to everything else.

Yet to gain control over the mind one needs to fix it on the most uninteresting of things. It would resist like hell every time you try to make you do it. But this is how you tell your mind who is the real master, who is in command and in the driving seat. But before I go any further with this I would like to point to an important difference in the concept of the mind among the western and the eastern systems of thought.

In the west the mind is taken as a part of consciousness, that is, part of the self. Thus mind is considered as a sentient entity. This makes it absolutely difficult to control. For how would you control the self which is the real controller!

But in the east, especially in India mind is conceived as Jada (inert). It’s an object in the phenomenal world. It appears sentient only because of its proximity to the self. This is an important difference and a very helpful one. An object can easily be controlled and made to do whatever the self wants it to do. There is whole philosophy on the subject, that is, how the world evolves into what we see now before us, but it’s not necessary to learn all that for our purpose.

I would talk here of a certain practices I used to follow to gain such control, to some these might look very insignificant and simple techniques, but don’t let the simplicity deceive you. This is the biggest step that you are going to take in your life, make no mistake about it. By adopting complex procedures you can easily deceive yourselves that you are making progress, not with these ones. You would know for sure whether you have made any progress at all while doing them.

Take up any tiny object, any uninteresting object will do, let it be a small pebble, a hook, or a button or anything you can find, hold it in front of you and look at it steadily, all the while thinking about it. Force your mind to think about it in isolation to everything else. Everyone would have their own method of thinking, so it would be unwise to outline it for you. Yet for the sake of illustration let us outline one. Say you are thinking about a button-

Well turn it in your hand, notice its shape, color, design, any flaws you can find in it, its material, its size, whether it’s smooth or rough to the touch, the way it is to be attached to the dress, where it is produced, how it is produced, the place you obtained it, its function, and so on to everything that you can think about it. These are not instructions to follow one after the other, these are only suggestions and you can improve on them.
You might believe that you know all about them even without consciously taking note of their features, or that they are trivial, but remember that you are not trying to check the extent of your knowledge or trying to expound your philosophy of life. You are trying to put your entire mind at work on an insignificant thing. The only way to keep yourself interested in it is to think about it without allowing your eyes and mind to wander.

Try doing this for five minutes every day. You will soon find how tiring it is to keep the span of attention for more than a minute or so. If you succeed doing it for five minutes the world would look very different to you from then onwards. You will start to observe the minutest details of the things that you see around.

Another technique is to try to follow a thought to its end. Some think we need a wealth of knowledge to do that. Again we are not trying to prove how knowledgeable we are. It doesn’t matter even if we know next to nothing about it. Keep it simple. Take up any word or idea, the less complex the better.

Any word will do. Day, road, sky, wild, summer, wind, you know it can be any word. Think of anything and everything on it, but keep at it for five minutes. This would make you hold a thought for a longer time. It helps you focus.

You can devise any number of such exercises yourself, but if you the above two regularly it would be enough to get you on your way to your final conquest of mind.

in fact there are only two methods to do that, practice and dispassion as Pathanjali terms them . Let us take up practice first.....

Try it Sometime

I have often wondered why people run after a kind of knowledge which is never attainable. It’s a waste of time. We ask so many questions about world and ourselves and falsely believe that their answers would make us aware about what we are. But such analysis is never going to get us anywhere.

Just think for a moment, do we know what happens inside our own body which is more near to us than anything else? We don’t. Even if you are the most brilliant of all medical experts you would not be able to know it at any given point of time. May be there could come a time when we can do so with the help of the tools we might develop as we progress.

But that time is not yet here. At present we are left with what we have and that is not enough to tell us about ourselves in any clear manner. So struggling against the impossible is not an option for us.

The only thing that we can rely on at this moment is the knowledge of our ‘existence’. No one that we know of would deny that they exist. It’s the only thing that they are ever certain of, this constant in all the changing phenomena that they observe.

We all know that we are not physically the same person that we were once, several things have altered, but the only thing which remains invariable in all these changes is this certainty that we exist. You are pretty sure of that. When you say “I” you mean something of which you are sure of. This ‘I’ don’t change at any time, it is to this “I” that things are added and from which things are removed either knowingly or unknowingly.

It is the only factor that is steady and reliable. So it follows that we need to follow this stable part to know ourselves, all else is unimportant because everything that we learn about them would open up other areas for investigation. That is, knowing about what happens within the body at any given moment may in turn necessitate the knowledge of the forces influencing them and in its turn the forces influencing those forces and so on. It’s a never ending process.

That’s why Ramana Maharshi advised, question yourself( “Who am I?”) at all times. That is the only way you would reach truth. In fact this “I” is the truth.

But this is not going to happen with an intellectual realization of it. Unless it becomes an experiential reality it’s not worth having.

That is why even the Vedantins advice the process of Sravana, manana and Nidhidyaasana and in that order.

Sravana or listening or hearing about the truth is the first step. This is necessary because we are normally very confused about what truth is. We may know that we are this “I”, but we are not sure whether all else is part of this “I” and without this knowledge you would never achieve peace.

Peace is the only quality worth trying for. If you don’t know it to be so yet you would very soon.

There is no point in going after something which is not sure to bring this state in you. So you need to be sure you would achieve peace by following a particular path before venturing to follow it. Unless someone tells us so we are never really sure about it.

That is the whole point of Sravana or hearing of the truth from one who have achieved it.

Next you think about what you have heard (Manana). This is not the ‘thinking’ that you do normally. That is called analysis, and that would not be of help here. You have passed that stage before approaching one who has experienced it. Once you have heard him/her your doubts have been dispelled.

So Manana or thought in this sense is constantly repeating the truth to yourself. If the knower has told you that you are the truth itself then you repeat it to yourself with firm belief. Unfortunately this is also not enough to get you where you want to get.

That is why Nidhidyaasana (Or meditation) is prescribed. In nidhidyaasana you sit somewhere and meditate on the truth you have listened to.

But most of those who follow Vedanta, mistakenly meditate on the words that they have listened to. Closing your eye and repeating “I am Truth “is not going to make you that. Words are only pointers; they are not the truth itself. Truth is the “I” that you know yourself to be. While meditating, in any practice, you look for this “I” and realize it for what it is.

It is the only trick that there is.

You achieve this by stilling the mind, which is ever active otherwise. When the mind is stilled the life force which runs everywhere from you would also become controlled, if you can control both you will see truth.

There is place where the mind sits quietly within you. It’s the place between the eye brows. When the mind merges at that place prana or life force also does likewise, then there are no obstacles to see truth in its entire splendor.

Try it sometime!