Downward Facing Blog

Get high on your own supply

(or, how to free yourself from the usual mental rut)

Since I blogged a bit about pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, and dhyana, I think it’s time to touch on what samadhi is. I’ll have to divide this post into two or three I can imagine, since it’s a subject that takes a bit more time to explain.

Note: if you meditate yourself, you’ll understand what I am about to describe much better than those who don’t meditate.

According to Veda, the spectrum of consciousness is divided into seven different levels:

1. waking (connected to the A in AUM mantra)

2. dreaming (connected to the U in AUM mantra)

3. deep formless sleep (connected to the M in AUM mantra)

4. awareness/Samadhi (connected to the stillness after the mantra)

5. awareness while waking, while dreaming, and while in sleep

6. conscious of the underlying structure and rules of how reality is formed

7. complete non-dual awareness, one with God

Let’s take the first three; waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, since this is where we are our entire lives if we don’t practice meditation. We are like hamsters running mindlessly on a wheel that we can’t get off of: waking-dreaming-sleeping-waking-dreaming-sleeping-waking-dreaming-sleeping-waking, ad nauseum. This is precisely the wheel of suffering which we must extract ourselves from. To do so, we must introduce awareness into these states to become free of them. By “free” I mean, not to let the pain of attachment to the objects in the world become our only reality.

Waking state: interaction with the five elements (earth, water, fire, air, space) in their “gross” physical form. You are awake now, probably your right hand on a plastic mouse, looking at a screen made of god-knows-what. The objects you are interacting with are gross physical objects, and you use your gross senses and organs of action to interface with them.

Dreaming state: interaction with the five elements in their subtle form, such as in the form of imagination, dreams or daydreams, images in the mind, songs in your memory, etc. Close your eyes for a moment. Do it long enough for your mind to start generating images. It won’t take long. Once you have seen the dreamlike images and thoughts materialize open your eyes again. That is the dream state, and it can be experienced out of the bed, any time any place.

Deep formless sleep state: no awareness of the five elements at all. It’s like death. Nothing there. No awareness to even know if you are not there. Most people experience this every night, but that changes when you experience some level of enlightenment.

Now what is missing from these three states is awareness. Generally, the way the mind works is that it gets lost in whatever it is looking at, the consciousness taking the shape of the objects on a gross or subtle level. It’s simple to understand really. Notice as you read this that you probably forget who is the one who is looking at the screen. Like Buster the dog staring at the banana, and “becoming the banana” we too, pour our consciousness into whatever it is we focus upon. Pratyahara is pulling the in back inwards so that the mind takes the shape of consciousness itself. This is a state of Samadhi, the fourth state.

Samadhi, the fourth state (สมาธิ): The goal of our practices initially is to experience samadhi, what is merging with an object of meditation until we merge with it’s essence itself. This leads to dissolving of the ego and the object into the observing consciousness itself. In my early days of studying yoga I got the idea that Samadhi was some kind of mystical, nearly-unattainable state of being, something we would only experience after many lives of yoga practice. Samadhi is super common actually. Although the ultimate level of “without-seed” samadhi may take some time to reach, it’s not really so complicated.

There are basically two kinds of samadhi; with-seed and without seed. The word seed refers to mental impressions (samskaras) which remain in the consciousness from past actions. Large groups of these impressions coagulated together form a “karma”, or a compulsion to act in one way or another. For this reason, karma is, as I mentioned earlier, like heavy luggage that you carry around with you from life-to-life.

Each time you experience WHO it is who is observing (your consciousness) it is said that these past impressions come up to the surface of the mind, get burnt and rendered unable to sprout. The by-product is a clearer mind, which means we can see all the way through creation (our body) from top to bottom with perfect clarity. It can be compared to a glass of dirty water: if you try to look through the water, you cannot. Going into consciousness through samadhi is like cleaning out the water, bit-by-bit. In this way, eventually the glass is clean, the water is clean, and well, you’re really light and blissful.

A clean glass of water is the “without seed” state of mind, which is the ultimate goal of yoga. Otherwise we experience that when we go into samadhi, we stay for a brief moment, then, have a thought (past impression comes up). We then re-double our concentration on the mantra, it streams into meditation, and again and again; the mantra disappears, YOU disappear, and the only thing that remains is pure choice-less awareness. With practice, the time interval becomes longer and longer and you remain longer in a pure, thoughtless state. The body stops movement and the breath slows down or stops.

fifth state (turiyatita): As we experience more states of awareness, in seated meditation or otherwise, awareness that permeates the first three levels. This means you are conscious while you are awake, dreaming, or asleep. Simply put, that means you KNOW you are having the experience you are having, even while you are asleep.

Yes, even while you are asleep! Your body rests, but your mind remains aware.

An analogy could be a cup of hot water and a tea bag; if your mind is water and you want to make tea, you have to dunk the tea bag in repeatedly. Once will not do. The fifth level of consciousness is something like becoming perfectly strong tea.

So let’s work at making tea first. As I wrote earlier, you set up the body in an seated yoga posture, balance the prana (pranayama), pull the mind in (close the eyes, turn inwards), focus on the mantra (can be a short, one-syllable bija mantra such as OM), and then the rest happens naturally once you’ve developed concentration well enough. At some point or points over the next 20-30 minutes of doing this, it’s likely you will forget that YOU are doing this, and the only thing in your mind is the mantra. This is meditation. After some time, you let go of the mantra and sit and experience thoughtless waves of pure being. This is, probably, samadhi.

You go in, and it feels like you have no body, no borders, no mantra, no “I”, just a pulsation of being. This is considered to be fundamental level of who you are, what in yoga we call the “Self”. Then you come out, and you’re in waking or dreaming state… then you go in, pure awareness. Again and again you plunge your mind into it till the time stretches out and you “stay” in samadhi longer and longer.

More on the sixth and seventh state later on…

Mucho love beams, Adrian Cox