[Through meditation] let the intelligent human sinks speech into mind, sink that mind into intelligence, sink that intelligence into the mahat (great) atman, and sink that mahat atman into the unmanifest (peaceful) atman.                                                  Katha Upanishad 1.3.13

The challenge with the mind is that it’s the judge, the jury, the victim and the defendant …

A trained meditative mind takes you where you want to go!
An untrained mind takes you where it wants to go…
Did you ever try to take your mind off of a bothersome situation?

Did you ever try to take your mind off of a tough situation, or make it stop racing in the middle of the night keeping you awake? None of us are strangers to such situations right?  That is because an untrained mind leads you in the way it chooses. If you want your mind to go where you want to go, give meditation a shot.  Train it.  Yoga facilitates this process. Okay, now, how do we  meditate?

A lot has been written on what is meditation – but if you dig deep, the yogic concept is that everything around us and in us is made up of motion – fluctuations (vritti) – which in turn cause corresponding wripples in the awareness field (chitta).  Which came first is a chick-from-the-egg conundrum. To paraphrase modern neurologists, we carry our worlds in our nervous system. Doesn’t matter.  We are sitting in an ocean of fluctuations, where the ocean includes the inside and outside.  We cognize everything as fluctuations in that awareness field.  Not only that, we externalize everything – meaning, we externalize the fluctuations happening in our minds into the external world and interpret it as something that is happening outside.   Yoga in simple terms is to gain control of these fluctuations in our individual awareness field, while meditation is to understand these fluctuations.  That’s why yoga and meditation are tied together, and not separate. Meditation has levels, but consolidating them into just three:

Beginner-level: to turn the same sensory paraphernalia inwards, to just observe. Since we have no control, the thoughts keep changing… But just to follow
Intermediate-level: to stay with a thought to let it reveal itself at a deeper level. To be able to isolate and gain control over deeper mental imprints, using yogic techniques.
Advanced/Yogi level:  to achieve uninterrupted stream of consciousness, which aids to answer the true questions we all have.  And achieve the neutral zones where one can experience unconditional euphoria.  Yogis say one would be able to stabilize dream worlds and experience them, like the way we experience the external world.  For them, external world is just one of several possible realties!  A major deviation from how we extroverted modern humans view the universe, right?

Now the details:

What’s meditation anyway?  Close your eyes to the external realty?  No, try it a few times and draw your own conclusions.  It’s an underrated science. Again, dig into it if you want to know more.

We experiment with a lot of meditation recipes in our practice sessions.  The million-dollar question is: when do we start seeing some of the cool effects we were talking about a few blurbs ago?  Is there really a method to the meditation madness?  How does one go about meditating, what to look for, and how do we know that we are actually meditating?  Any criteria to say if we are in a state of meditation? Sit and close your eyes, without dozing off; does that qualify as meditation? If not, what is meditation?

Starting with contemporary research, there seem to be three characteristics to meditation:  1.  Relaxation, 2. Focused attention 3. Mindfulness.

EEG scans perhaps may be able to tell us if we are really focusing and mindful but otherwise one can’t really tell.   fMRI scanning of the brain is another way.  Unless you have one of those machines lying around the house, we can’t use that method to tell if we are meditating:)  Hence, we still have to rely on our own changes in body, mind and attitude to evaluate the effects of our practice.   The challenge with the mind is that it’s the judge, the jury, the victim and the defendant …

But, here’s what we can learn from those fMRI scans: expert meditators seem to have more gray matter in some critical parts of the brain that connect the old and the new parts of the brain.  (Gray matter apparently forms long distance connections in our brains while white matter makes more short distance circuits).  This may be a bridge to the old yogic thinking.  Yogis always maintained that meditation is all about “de-fragmenting the mind”, and be able to focus it onto a single topic.  Modern evidence seems to render some support in that heavy meditators have material that facilitates long distance organization of the brain.   Yogis of Patanjali-lineage called that mind integration phase as “dharana” and the actual process of holding attention as “dhyana”.  Steady single pointed absorption of the mind is the criteria for dhyana.

Dhyana is the literal word, but Tapas (ardor) in some contexts, and even Yajna in some others have also been used, like in the popular purusha-sukta, and in several other places in the Vedas.  It’s less important as what exactly it is called but it’s important only to the extent that yogis differentiated and categorized this meditation practice into several sub-categories. Some quick pointers for us:

Q:  So how to meditate?

A:  Focus all and the entire mind onto a single topic or a point.

Q:  Can I just sit, close my eyes and begin meditating?

A:  Possible, but not easy unless your body and mind came trained to the required degree. There’s a reason why Dharana and Dhyana are the 6th and 7th steps in the 8-step program.

Q:  Why does mind refuse to latch onto a single point?

A:  Because mind flickers all the time, which corresponds to twitches in body and breath, and vice versa. In that sense, our mind is like a hummingbird, constantly fluttering to keep itself ready to hop off from the current topic onto a new topic.

Q: Why do we twitch, fidget around all the time?

A:  Because that’s how our mind creates space and time for us.  At the end of day, it’s all vibrations and pulsations – spanda in Sanskrit and “Spanda-karika” is the associated saivite philosophy of that vibration-generator.  To physically place ourselves in the space-time that we inhabit, we constantly move the sensory surfaces .  For example:

• Our eyes “fidget constantly” at 2-3 times per second, called saccades.  “Shambhavi” mudra or gesture is that which aims to give the practitioner a control of this process.  When we practice, different gazes (tip of the nose, brow point, through the fontanel…), this is one of the main goals.
• heart – 1.2 Hz
• Breath – 0.2 Hz
• GI tract – 0.05 Hz
• Intestines – 0.006 to 0.2 Hz …
• Motor-sensory information bus is oscillating at around 10 Hz, like a metronome; this is responsible for a constant low intensity “physiological tremors” in our body.  All the twitching actually happens while responding to the out-flowing commands from this bus, trying to coordinate your position in space.  Mechanically we clench to activate the “motor” part of the muscles.  Asanas and Kriyas are all about de-clenching to gain control on unconscious body twitches.
• Our “consciousness” spotlight is organized by a neural bus running at 40 Hz (gamma waves).  Yogis call this level of consciousness “bhu” or earth-level awareness.  At this level, first chakra dominates – “I” preservation takes precedence, then I-replication…   During deep meditation however, it is not this high frequency, but lower frequency delta and theta waves that dominate, at least in the measurable EEG spectrum. This also happens deep sleep…  It is these longer wavelength delta and theta waves that organize the whole brain and synchronize.

When the five organs of perception become still, together with the mind, and the intellect ceases to be active: that is called the highest state. [Kathopanishad 2.3.10]

A piece of a long story of Lila from Yogavasista:

Sarasvati and Lila who thus conferred together that night, went into Svarupa Samadhi, free from the trammels of their body and remained motionless. In this state, Sarasvati shining with her former Jnana body, along with Lila with her newly assumed Jnana one, rose up in the Akasa, ten digits high (ten digits high?). Having penetrated far into the Akasa which is like a great ocean at the time of deluge, they observed there the following. In the immeasurable, transparent and subtle Cidakasa, there were to be found the hosts of Siddha-s who journeyed fleeter than wind. In it roamed, in all quarteis, Raksasa-s and Pisaca-s as well as innumerable Yogin-s with the faces of dogs, cows, camels and asses. There were also the multitudinous Dakini-s. (elementals), dancing about gleefully and the white Ganga with its fast current. There the songs of Narada and Tumburu were heard vibrating on their lyre…

Long story short,  our mind and body are fidgeting entities and their primary function is to preserve “I”.  In that effort, they are in a 24/7 scan-mode, and it is very difficult to enter a meditative state while in such a scan mode.  The more stable they are,  the more we can focus.  If we twitch once a second, our focus also has an opportunity to flutter once a second, if not faster, unless that focus is of high interest to the lower three chakras (self-protection, self-replication, or self-identity).  Because of the root chakra domination, when our life is at risk, our lower brain can actually put us in a meditative hyper-focused state; internet is full of stories of people doing amazing things while their life is in danger.  Looking at this another way, we apparently can never know much about “reality” unless we get into those stable hyper-focused states of awareness.  We need to enter such states to understand a lot of profound concepts of our interest, such as “freedom”, “devotion”, “bliss”…

Q.  How do we not twitch?

A.  Through practice of Yoga, in all its eight limbs.  According to Patanjali, yoga is that practice which eliminates fluctuations in the “mind-stuff”.  Right off the bat, in his treatise, Patanjali defines what yoga is:

योगश्चित्तवृत्तिनिरोधः ॥२॥
yogas-citta-vrtti-nirodhah (1.2)

Chitta is derived from the root “chit”, which means pure consciousness which is essentially the substratum that enables perception,  Which happens as a modulation of that underlying substratum.  Chitta is the same stuff, but superimposed with stored and transitory impressions, intellect and ego.  The choice of Patanjali’s word is important- he did not use the word “manas”, which translates closer to mind, but used chitta! Something to contemplate on…  So that’s yoga!  Yoga is not just that circus we all go through in our sessions, but it’s the science of internal focus!

In Indian mythology, Vritta is depicted as a demon, who apparently appears as a snake blocking the course of the rivers, and is heroically slain by Indra (the super god of vedic lore, and the chief of senses).  The rivers are nadis such as Ida (left, Yamuna), Pingala (right, Ganga)  and sushumna (central, Saraswati).

Q: How does one come out of a meditative state?

A: In this case, Prahlada (from Laghu Yogavasishta of Iyer)

The Chaitanya Sakti (or consciousness potency) issuing first out of Brahmarandhra pervaded, as before, the Nadis to all the parts of his body and when it got to the nine apertures of the body, Prahlada became conscious of this (physical) plane. Then his Chaitanya (consciousness) began to perceive material objects, only alter it shone as the reflection in the glass of the internal Prana. Hence that intelligence of his, which manifested itself in objects, may be compared to the reflected image in a mirror and thus assumed the attributes of Manas. As he recovered consciousness little by little like a lotus unfolding its petals gradually, his beautiful eyes opened. Then the beneficent Prana and Apana began to percolate all throughout his Nadis (nerves) and organs, thus producing a complete perception of the world. Like a lotus fanned by the mild zephyrs, Prahlada began to move in his position. In the twinkling of an eye, his mind became gross and his eyes, mind, Prana and body began to glow with life with their respective functions.

Patanjali broke up the method to achieve this meditation goal into eight steps – steps 1 to 5 are there to facilitate step 6, and so on.  We will continue with this theme in the next…

May we all be blessed with a “defragmented” and meditative mind_/\_/\_/\_