I'd like to share with you some insights and observations from my practice of meditation
over the past 45 years.
I'll describe various techniques I've used and the experiences they produced.
I'll also explain important spiritual teachings that helped me understand and grow from those
experiences.
And, I'll discuss some of the mistakes I've made, to save you the trouble of repeating
them.
I hope all this will help you deepen your own practice of meditation.
My practice began in the late 1970's after I moved to sunny California to enjoy the climate
and begin my career in the new field of microcomputers.
Even though I enjoyed my work and the laid-back lifestyle, I felt quite strongly that something
important was missing in my life.
As a result, I found myself attracted to the practice of yoga and meditation.
I attended lectures by
Swami Satchidananda, who became famous for addressing hundreds of thousands of music
lovers at the historic Woodstock music festival.
I practiced hatha yoga with his students.
I chanted om namah shivaya with followers of Swami Muktananda.
And I began to meditate every day, often while sitting on a high bluff overlooking the Pacific
Ocean as the sun set.
My practice became much more focused in 1981 after I met Swami Dayananda, a traditional
teacher of Advaita Vedanta, who later became my guru.
Through all those practices, I was seeking inner peace and perfect contentment.
The only time I truly felt fulfilled was during meditation.
The simple techniques I had learned back then worked surprisingly well.
Yet as soon as I stopped meditating, those feelings of peace and contentment quickly
faded away.
Swami Dayananda taught that lasting fulfillment was indeed possible through a process of spiritual
growth, so when he started a three-year long residential course in Vedanta, meditation,
and Sanskrit, I moved to his ashram.
Years later, he ordained me as a sannyasi, a Hindu monk, and the rest, as they say, is
history.
I'm sharing this background with you to make an important point.
And that point is, the results of spiritual practice depend on your intention, on your
motive or goal.
Let me explain.
Today, yoga and meditation are quite popular in mainstream culture.
Most yoga studios cater to people who want to improve their physical and mental wellbeing.
And that's tremendously helpful, especially for those who struggle with the stress and
demands of modern, urban life.
Yet, the practices performed in those studios originated from the rishis, self-realized
sages who lived in ancient India, sages who never imagined that their practices would
one day be used for physical exercise and stress management.
They had a far loftier goal in mind - enlightenment, liberation, spiritual realization.
To use their practices merely for exercise and relaxation is like using a powerful supercomputer
to add 2 plus 2.
Yet, that is indeed the intent of most modern practitioners.
There's a related issue here.
I began meditating during the waning years of the free-spirited hippy movement in this
country.
At that time, many young people were drawn to yoga and meditation as a way to enjoy ecstatic,
psychedelic experiences without using hallucinogenic drugs.
They wanted to "Get high on God," as they said.
Even today, the intent of many dedicated practitioners is to seek wonderful spiritual experiences
like that.
But seeking such experiences in meditation has a lot in common with seeking wonderful
experiences on a tropical beach, or in a fancy restaurant, or in a movie theatre.
All these experiences are fleeting.
They all fade away, without leading to lasting contentment and inner peace.
For the ancient rishis, the practice of yoga and meditation was not for health and wellbeing
or for special meditative experiences.
Those practices were considered essential elements of a process of spiritual growth,
a process that culminates in the realization of your true self, atma, the so-called inner
divinity that is actually pure consciousness, unborn, uncreated, limitless and utterly untouched
by worldly suffering.
This personal discovery of your true self, atma, results in inner peace and contentment
that never fades away.
This discovery is commonly called enlightenment which is the ultimate goal of the practice
of yoga and meditation.
More than 1500 years ago, the great rishi Patanjali composed the famous Yoga Sutras.
Even today, this Sanskrit text is considered the source scripture and foundation for the
practice of yogic meditation.
I've called it yogic meditation here to distinguish it from other practices like mindfulness meditation
or the visualization techniques used in Tibetan Buddhism and elsewhere.
As you might know, sutras are short aphorisms used to present spiritual wisdom in a very
concise and systematic manner.
Patanjali's text consists of just 196 sutras.
You might be surprised that his sutras say almost nothing about the postures or asanas
that are the focus of contemporary yoga practice.
As we'll see shortly, the sutras describe an exceptionally powerful system of meditation.
Before we continue, it's important to address a widespread misunderstanding about the word
yoga.
Yoga is often said to mean union, based on its relationship with the English word yoke.
Obviously, Patanjali didn't know the word yoke, but he did know the three verbal roots
from which the word yoga can be derived - to join or unite, to meditate, and to restrain
or control.
In the second sutra of his text, Patanjali himself defines yoga as citta vritti nirodhah,
the restraint of mental activities.
Here, he uses the word yoga to mean both meditation and restraint.
He clearly didn't use it to mean join or unite.
Why not?
Because Patanjali knew that that your true self, atma, is already divine, already unborn
and uncreated, already limitless, and already united with the highest reality, brahman.
So, according to Patanjali, the purpose of yoga is not to become united with something
separate from you, but instead, to lead you to discover and abide in your true divine
nature, atma.
That's exactly what he says in the following sutra, tada, then, when the activities of
your mind have been restrained, that is, when you attain the state of samadhi, avasthanam,
you then abide, svarupe, in your true nature, drashtuh, as pure, limitless consciousness,
as the true self, atma.
Patanjali calls that state kaivalya, which literally means onlyness.
In the state of samadhi, only your true, divine nature remains, nothing else.
Now, let me share with you some observations about studying Patanjali's sutras.
After I finally became sufficiently proficient in Sanskrit, I was eager to study the Yoga
Sutras.
Because the sutras are so terse, they're always studied with the help of Sanskrit commentaries,
especially the commentary attributed to a rishi named Vyasa, not the same Vyasa who
compiled the Vedas.
The first time I studied the Yoga Sutras, I made a terrible blunder by interpreting
them according to my own perspective based on the non-dualistic teachings of Advaita
Vedanta.
The fact is, Patanjali was not an advaitin, a non-dualist.
So to understand his sutras properly, I had to study them again, being careful to set
aside my bias.
Yet, I still couldn't fully understand the text, so I studied it yet again with the help
of additional commentaries by great scholars like Vachaspati Mishra and Vijnana Bhikshu.
I was deeply humbled by my long and difficult struggle to fully understand the Yoga Sutras.
I learned to appreciate even more the amazing scholarship of the commentators.
Fortunately, failure to completely understand Patanjali's sutras will not prevent anyone
from attaining samadhi.
Like you can't become a great cook just by studying cookbooks, you can't attain samadhi
by merely studying the sutras.
On the other hand, my drawn-out study of the sutras helped me a lot, but not by improving
my daily meditation practice.
Instead, it helped me become a more skillful teacher of meditation.
The Yoga Sutras are highly analytical in nature.
Their emphasis is not on practice but on theory and technical definitions.
For example, Patanjali systematically defines ten different kinds of samadhi, using complicated
words like sarvitarka and nirvichara to describe different kinds of samadhi.
This terminology is extremely useful for scholars because of its precision, but for practitioners,
it can seem bewildering.
A detailed study of Patanjali's text is certainly not essential for practitioners.
On the other hand, practitioners can benefit tremendously from the many brilliant insights
found in the sutras.
Perhaps the most significant and beneficial teaching in Patanjali's text is his division
of yogic practice into eight individual steps, eight angas or limbs.
That eightfold division is so important that Patanjali's system of meditation is commonly
known as ashtanga yoga, the yoga of ashta, eight, angas, limbs.
In the next part of this series, we'll discuss the practice of those angas.
We'll need to use some of Patanjali's Sanskrit terminology, but we'll use the language of
modern psychology wherever possible.
And of course, we'll draw heavily from my own experiences and insights gained through
decades of daily practice.