Notes from under the bus...... to Monadnock

Ack wrote:I spoke with Dan yesterday.

Dan is working on Michael Wyschogrod.

Go out, and stand on the mountain before the Lord.  And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
  All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
  Noble six hundred!

According to the Raja yoga system, the first step in the concentration continuum is dharana, which literally means “holding.” In dharana, you take some object and attempt to concentrate your awareness on it. The object of focus could be anything: the breath, a sound, a visualization, a flower, a person. When your attention wanders, which inevitably it will, you gently bring it back to the object. When it wanders again, you gently bring it back again, over and over. This act of bringing the attention back each time it wanders is called dharana. We are making an effort to hold on to the focus object.

As I mentioned previously, we can compare the process of developing concentration strength to the process of exercising a muscle. When we exercise a muscle, we use that muscle to lift a weight over and over, and as a result, the muscle gets stronger. The stage of dharana is comparable to this, except that instead of working against the force of gravity, we’re working against force of distraction. Each return to the focus object is equivalent to a rep in weight lifting. It’s hard work, but it’s one of the main ways that the concentration “muscle” is built.

The second step in Raja yoga’s concentration continuum is called dhyana. This word could cause some confusion, because the term is used in Buddhism in a similar but not identical way. Within the context of Raja yoga, dhyana is what comes after we have paid our dues, so to speak. We’ve brought our attention back over and over again to our object of focus, and finally, the attention doesn’t wander, but stays put, gently resting on that object. That’s dhyana. In the state of dhyana, our attention is like pouring a steady stream of oil upon an object, without any breaks or gaps in the stream. It’s a smooth, continuous stream of contact with the focus object.

Once we are able to do this with a specific sound or a breath sensation, or other sensory category, we can generalize that ability to any other object. It’s not like we have to learn the process entirely anew for each type of experience. Once we enter the dhyana phase, we find that when we’re eating lunch, for example, our awareness flows unbroken onto the tastes and body sensations that constitute the enjoyment of the food. However, if while having lunch we start to engage in a conversation with someone, our awareness shifts immediately and flows totally onto just that person. When the person is talking, we’re not caught up in our own thoughts and feelings; instead, there is a constant flow of presence and attention toward the person. When the person is done talking, we go right back to being completely absorbed into the tastes of the food we are eating as we take the next bite. The awareness moves easily from object to object, yet no matter what it rests upon, there is an unbroken flow of attention. This is dhyana according to Patanjali.

The third and final step in Raja yoga’s concentration continuum is samadhi, which refers to unitive experience. Again, there is a possible confusion in terminology here, because in Buddhism samadhi often refers to any level of concentration, from the lightest to the deepest. In the state of samadhi as understood in Raja yoga, we not only have unbroken concentration, but we actually become the thing we are concentrating on. This is what is meant by the often-heard phrase “to become one with something.” It sounds sort of mystical-shmystical, but it’s an experience reported the world over by all who enter states of high concentration.

Let me explain in a simple way how this happens. If you carefully observe your day-to-day experience, you’ll notice that whenever you see a flower or another person, or take a bite of food, or hear a sound, your awareness is usually divided. Part of your attention flows out into the objective experience and part of it flows back into your subjective subjective thoughts and feelings. In that moment, those thoughts and feelings create the sense of an internal “I” who experiences the external “it.” But imagine what would happen if, for a period of time, all the attention flowed into the “it,” and none of the attention flowed back into your mental images, internal talk, and emotional body reactions. What would happen to the sense of “I” separate from “it”? The “I” would vanish, leaving only the “it” for a while. Initially, we can maintain such merging or oneness only for a few seconds, but in the case of veteran meditators, it can be maintained continuously for minutes, hours, even days.

The Raja yoga system actually distinguishes two kinds of merging: sabija samadhi, samadhi “with a seed,” and nirbija samadhi, samadhi “without a seed.” This terminology may sound a little strange to modern ears, but it refers to something very specific and well defined. In samadhi with a seed, all sense of self disappears, and only the object of concentration remains, shining in consciousness. This is what I described in the preceding paragraph. The object that remains is the “seed,” which is still present even though the observer has vanished for a while.

Samadhi without a seed takes the concentration to an even more extreme level. In this state, awareness flows so completely onto the object of concentration that there is no time to fixate that object as something rigid, opaque, and extended in time and space. In other words, the object of concentration ceases to be an object, ceases to be a something. To draw a metaphor from modern physics, the object ceases to be a particle and becomes a wave. That waveform fills our consciousness, and we become that waveform, and we are that wave. As we merge with the wave, it links to all the other waves in the universe. Then the wave dies away into deeply fulfilling nothingness. Observer and observed both disappear. This is samadhi without a seed: a direct abiding at the Still Point of the turning world.

This level of merging is both incredibly rich and refreshingly empty. It contains the totality of the universe, and it contains nothing at all, no concrete object. Hence, it’s referred to as samadhi without a seed or pure consciousness or true witness.

That’s the growth of concentration as described in the Yoga Sutras. We progress from simple focus exercises (dharana), to states of continuous concentration (dhyana), and finally to oneness with the unborn Source (nirbija, or seedless, samadhi). If you can consciously taste moments of seedless samadhi in daily life, we’ll say you attained the initial stage of enlightenment.