“tat savitur varenyam bargo devasya dhimahi dhyiyo yo nah pracodayāt…”
Rudi sat on his meditation cushion, across from Maggie and me, his resonant baritone voice intoning the words of an ancient mantra.1 His big blue eyes were closed now, and as he methodically fingered his black beads, the words of the mantra became one with his breath.
It was just past seven on a crisp October evening. Maggie, Rudi, and I had gathered, as always, at Acorn Cottage, for our Friday night mantra practice. (Jake was in Boston, setting himself up for his move back to work at his law firm four days a week.) I let my eyes drift around the room before closing them to begin my own practice. The one big room was spare but orderly, paneled in now-bronzed pine, and smelling of wood smoke. Books lined every wall, and a big harvest table sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by a dozen mismatched chairs. Candles burned everywhere tonight. At one side, near the woodstove, Rudi had created an altar with a swath of Indian silk. On it stood a brass statue of Shiva, a small wooden Virgin Mary, a golden Burmese Buddha, and various small icons of Hindu gods. There, in front of an icon of Krishna, stood the little bronze dancing Shiva that Jake had recently given him.
Rudi continued chanting his phrase: “…bargo devasya dhimahi dhyiyo yo nah pracodayāt.”
Rudi was chanting the gāyatrī-mantra, perhaps the most famous mantra in the yoga tradition. “Let us contemplate the beautiful splendor of God, that he may inspire our vision.”2 The gāyatrī-mantra has been recited in exactly the same fashion for thousands of years.
I studied Rudi for a moment. He was such an unlikely-looking yogi. He was heavyset, with a big frame—punctuated by an undomesticated gray beard and a wild shock of salt-and-pepper hair. His features were big, but well-proportioned. (One friend said he looked like an aging Herman Melville—a Berkshire eccentric from an earlier age.)
Rudi lived as a kind of hermit at Acorn Cottage, and functioned as a caretaker for the new owners of the estate. Most people in Lenox thought of him as the kindly and generous local gardener. He was that, of course. But he was also a remarkable yogi. Rudi had lived in an ashram in India for fifteen years, and now he occupied himself quietly doing yard work and gardening for the great estates in the area—but also practicing, reading, and meditating. He had become a friend and mentor to me and now to my friends as well.
I looked at his face closely. Rudi looked younger than his sixty-two years. His skin was darkened by decades of wandering (sometimes more than half-naked) in the Berkshire Hills. Though furrowed, one could see the boy in the man’s face: open to awe, sensitive, alert to life—an unusual combination of ruggedness and sweetness.
I was aware, too, of Maggie next to me. I found her physical presence reassuring. Maggie had drawn her prayer beads from their little velvet pouch, and had begun to finger them, eyes closed, silently intoning her prayer. Recently, Maggie had revealed to me that she never used the ancient yogic mantra Rudi had taught her—but, rather, a prayer from her Episcopal upbringing: “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee…” When Maggie joined us a year earlier, she was surprised to find this old mantra from childhood still alive in her imagination. Rudi suggested that she stay with it.
I closed my eyes and began to intone the words of my own mantra, the one that Swami Kripalu, the founder of the contemporary Kripalu lineage, had taught the community many years earlier: “Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya.” (Within the community, this mantra has often been loosely translated to mean, “Thy will, O Lord, not mine, be done.” Its more precise meaning is, “I bow to you, O Lord, who are the very essence of divinity.”)
Rudi, Maggie, and I had been practicing mantra together every Friday night for the past year. We had developed a kind of group rhythm: Rudi set up the altar, Maggie prepared the incense, and I said a ritual prayer from an ancient text. Practice and concentration deepened almost as soon as we took our accustomed places. Maggie sat in a chair by the window, next to me, and Rudi and I faced each other on meditation mats in front of the altar.
I began to move the coarse rudrāksha seeds of my mālā through my fingers. This particular set of beads was auspicious. It had been blessed many years ago by Swami Kripalu at a ceremony at the Temple of Kayavarohan, his spiritual seat in India. I fancied that it was still infused with incense from the temple. I kept it with me always. On those frequent nights when I fell asleep saying mantra, I slept with it around my wrist.
Incense wafted up from the small altar now, and a deep stillness began to overtake us.
Mantra japa (literally, “recitation”) is one of the oldest forms of meditation. The practice most likely grew out of the ritual recitation of the sacred Vedic texts in ancient India (well prior to 1500 BCE). The ritual repetition of these texts required the utmost concentration, since, as yoga scholar Georg Feuerstein tells us, “Each holy word had to be perfectly pronounced lest it should adversely influence the outcome of the sacrificial ritual.”3
Rudi, Maggie, and I had discovered that we were all devotees of mantra japa—but each in our own fashion. Though Rudi’s mantra was an ancient Vedic chant, its function was identical to my somewhat more recent yogic mantra and to Maggie’s Christian prayer. We would each begin by voicing our mantra out loud. After a while, as our minds became still and absorbed in the vibration of the phrases, the sound spontaneously became more subtle and quiet. Eventually, the words became altogether inaudible. Our minds were then absorbed in the inner vibrations, to the exclusion of all other thoughts, and consciousness would often descend into a compelling stillness.
This movement from verbal recitation to mental recitation probably reenacts the history of the science of meditation itself. Yogis discovered that the mantra could be either voiced fully, or whispered. According to the Yoga-Yājnavalkya (a second century CE text on yoga), says Feuerstein, “Whispered recitation is a thousand times better than voiced japa; whereas mental recitation is a thousand times better than whispered japa.”4 Sramanas experimenting with meditation discovered a principle that appears over and over again in yogic science: The more subtle the object of awareness, the more one-pointed the mind has to become in order to apprehend it. (Whispered sound is more subtle than spoken sound. Silently repeated words are more subtle yet.) These subtle objects “draw the mind down,” as Rudi would say.
These Friday evening sessions brought me routinely into delightful altered states: I would sense every cell in my body vibrating with the subtle mantra; I would often have the experience of bright light vibrating in my body; I could feel energy pulsing from the bodies of my friends in the room—and even inanimate objects. Sometimes I sensed that my body was shrinking to the size of a grain of sand, or expanding to the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. At others, I would feel that I was all head and no body. After a while, time boundaries collapsed, and at any given moment it was difficult to know whether we had been practicing for three minutes or for an hour.
Rudi’s little Zen alarm clock began to gong softly at eight fifteen. We had been immersed in our practice for almost an hour and fifteen minutes.
After the gong, Rudi, Maggie, and I sat for a while in silence. The pine boughs in the corner wafted a sweet scent through the room. I could feel the softness of Maggie’s breath next to me, and the warmth of her body.
Finally, Rudi smiled, and, gesturing to the new bronze Shiva on his altar, said, “Thanks to Jake, we have a new guest. He’s added extra voltage to my practice.”
A famous yogic scripture encourages mantra recitation in the presence of Shiva. The Linga-Pūrana says (charmingly) that “recitation in one’s home is good, but recitation in a cow pen is a hundred times better and on a riverbank a thousand times better yet.” Furthermore, the text notes, “in the presence of Shiva, recitation is infinitely efficacious!”5
Maggie’s face was set in a question, which she soon addressed to both of us: “Is your mantra kind of saying itself all the time in the background of your mind?”
She went on to observe that in the week since our last practice, she had found her mantra spontaneously intoning itself throughout the day. Rudi said that, yes, his, too, came and went.
Rudi explained: This spontaneous inner repetition of mantra is quite normal for practitioners. The more one says the mantra, the more it gets grooved into the synapses, neurons, dendrites of the nervous system. It becomes a kind of background “hum” in the brain, so that when we need its power—the power of a concentrated, equanimous mind—all we need do is to say one or two rounds, and the whole altered state can be automatically cued. We can always dip into the stream of mantra which is continuously being chanted in the deepest parts of the mind.
Maggie nodded her head and pondered his answer. She wondered out loud: “Do you think mantras have magical powers?”
Rudi laughed. “That’s probably a myth. Mantras have power, sure. But it’s just the power of concentrated mind.”
Rudi spoke the view accepted by most yogis: mantras do not themselves have magical powers. This is not to say that they cannot be the doorway to supernormal powers. But any supernormal powers which arise through use of a mantra, arise simply because of its use as an object to focus the already existing powers of the mind.
And, as Rudi, Maggie, and I would soon discover, concentrated mind has surprising possibilities indeed.
In their exploration of mantra and ritual recitation, yogis stumbled onto the secret antidote to Puppy Mind: when the mind is focused repeatedly on one object, it naturally settles. Here, then, is a possible solution to the restlessness of ordinary mind! Tie the wild animal of the mind to an object. Tie the puppy to a post.
In mantra recitation, yogis were simply binding the mind to the object of sound, letting awareness come back again and again to this object of concentration. This was a momentous, though probably accidental, discovery.
When the puppy is tied to the post, he may at first object, and pull against the restraint. But eventually he will calm down, quiet, and settle. And so, too, the mind. Initially the mind wanders, adopting its characteristic discursive quality, but eventually it settles into the object.
As we have seen, early meditation experiences bring an almost immediate revelation of Puppy Mind. But persistent investigation inevitably brings an encounter with this first strategy for stilling the mind: find any stable, neutral, immovable object and lash the mind to it. Tie the mind to a mantra. Or an icon. Or tie the mind to the breath. Tie the mind to any ritual repetition—the gāyatrī-mantra, the Hail Mary, or any external or internal object. Bring attention back over and over again to this one object.
om namo bhagavate vasudevaya
om namo bhagavate vasudevaya
om namo bhagavate vasudevaya
When the mind settles into this phrase over and over again, it eventually gives up its battle and surrenders.
Yogis discovered that this capacity to concentrate is already an innate part of the mind. The experience of concentrated mind happens quite naturally in the course of everyday life. Perhaps we are at a symphony concert, and for several moments we are completely rapt by a beautiful melodic line in the violin—in, say, the haunting largo of a Bach violin concerto. Our attention goes out to meet the music, and stays right with it—not missing a single note. The mind is tied to the object.
Or perhaps we’re at the beach. As we’re lying facedown on our towel, we become fascinated with a small granite stone just in front of us on the sand. We examine it and explore it with our awareness. Our attention is drawn by the object, and, at least for a moment, settles into the object. We’re riveted.
As Rudi, Maggie, and I had discovered in our mantra practice, these experiences of concentration bring with them certain very pleasing side effects. As the attention holds the object, it becomes very one-pointed—that is to say, it does not flicker and drift, but stays settled on the object. Distracting thoughts are blocked out by the one-pointedness, and mental restlessness abates. The stream of discursive thought narrows. This produces a slowing of the brain waves, a calming of the nervous system and the breath, and often the sense of bliss, well-being, happiness, and—in more advanced stages—rapture. The body and mind are suffused with a sense of calm abiding.
These commonly occurring experiences can arise either in relationship to an external object like the violin melody and the rock, or an internal object—say, a visualization, or a physical sensation like the breath.
The meditation traditions discovered that this normal capacity to focus attention can be intentionally cultivated, and that these everyday experiences of concentration can be profoundly deepened. Usually, in the rāja-yoga tradition, the practice of concentration begins with what is called “concentration in front,” learning to focus attention upon an external object (trātaka)—like an icon or a candle. Then, the practitioner can move to an “internal object” like the breath.
When the mind settles into an object, we may begin to experience dhāranā, the first stage of meditation. Dhāranā is taken from the root dhr, which means to “hold fast.” At this stage, says I. K. Taimni, one of the great modern commentators on the Yoga-Sūtra, the mind is “confined within a limited sphere defined by the object which is being concentrated upon….The mind is interned, as it were, within a limited mental territory and has to be brought back immediately if it strays out.”6
Patanjali begins the third chapter of his Yoga-Sūtra with his simple description of dhāranā.
Concentration locks consciousness on a single area. (3.1)
Patanjali tells us early on in the first part of the Yoga-Sūtra (1.39) that the distractions of mind are “subdued” through “meditative absorption in any desired object.”
Yogis discovered a remarkable by-product of this absorption. When the mind is highly concentrated or absorbed in an object, it becomes capable of “knowing” that object in a special way. This characteristic of concentrated mind also sometimes manifests itself in everyday life. One of the most powerful common experiences of this “knowing” happens during lovemaking. When making love, our attention often becomes rapt and one-pointed; the stream of attention narrows, and the rest of the world is obliterated; nothing exists but the beloved.
In these moments, something else may happen: our perceptual acuity may be enormously heightened. We’re aware of every cell in this beloved body. We “know” the love object with all of our senses—smell, touch, taste. We may have a sense of direct connectedness to the essence of this person. Indeed, at a certain point we may feel One with the object of our love. We may experience a state of bliss, of intense happiness in conjunction with this sense of union with the beloved.
So sweet is this experience of union with a beloved that many of us at some point will organize our lives around it. We throw caution to the wind in order to have it. The bliss and rapture of this experience is the engine that drives much of our art and literature, and it is an endless source of human inquiry. For this reason, the image of the beloved is often used in yogic teaching to evoke our longing for these states. For some of us, it is the closest we get in ordinary experience to the experience of “yoga,” or “union” with another object.
Profoundly unitive experience is not confined, of course, to love-making: we may experience variations of the state of dhāranā whenever our attention is drawn fully into any task—playing the flute, swimming laps, building a stone wall, making soup. When all of our mental faculties become involved in the task at hand, action and awareness are drawn together. The mind becomes one-pointed. Distractions fade away. The pressure of time fades. We feel profoundly absorbed.
In these normal experiences of highly focused attention, we have a taste of the fruits of attentional training at which all contemplative practice aims—a rudimentary introduction to the experience of “union.” But even the deepest experiences of everyday concentration are only a small taste of the concentrated states yogis experience in meditation. Patanjali’s teachings will show us that deep states of mental absorption differ from our everyday one-pointedness even more than those seemingly concentrated states differ from ordinary states of sheer inattention.
After our session of mantra japa, Maggie and I walked home together from Acorn Cottage—a two-mile trek through the woods. We stopped for a while at the cemetery across the street from our houses.
The night had turned cool, and we could see our breath in the distant light of the moon as we walked among the two-hundred-year-old gravestones. Orange and yellow leaves had begun to pile up around the base of the granite monuments. We stopped at the Winslow plot, and Maggie sat down on the edge of the enormous family obelisk, facing the Berkshire Hills. I sat in a pile of crunchy leaves and leaned against the gray stone base. Neither of us was in a hurry for this night to end.
Maggie took a deep breath of the crisp air. “Everything is more alive after these sessions, you know? Colors look brighter. Everything is so vivid.”
Maggie’s declaration was a sign that her concentration had indeed progressed into the state of dhāranā. As meditation practice progresses, we will experience seemingly miraculous moments, however brief, when our attention really does move toward the object in a steady stream. It is well-aimed, alert, and unwavering. At first, we experience these truly concentrated states for only seconds at a time. But these seconds are powerful indeed. They permanently change the mind.
There is a simple reason for this. In those moments of unwavering concentration, the mind is free of craving and aversion. In those moments of dhāranā, we are conflict-free. The mind, at these times, is said to be “secluded” from the kleshas—detached from the pull of the afflictions.
Sramanas discovered that in these states, the very roots of suffering are subdued.
In their gross form, as patterns of consciousness, they [these causes of suffering] are subdued through meditative absorption. (2.11)
The great Thai meditation teacher Mahasi Sayadaw explains precisely how this works:
When the mind is concentrated on the object of meditation, it does not attach itself to other thoughts, nor does it desire pleasant sights and sounds. Pleasurable objects lose their power over the mind. Dispersion and dissipation cannot occur….As concentration takes the mind to more subtle levels, deep interest arises. Rapture and joy fill one’s being. This development frees the mind…for anger and aversion cannot coexist with joy.7
We respond powerfully to this experience. The self, accustomed to internal states of fragmentation, alienation, self-estrangement, and anxiety, will inevitably find a deep quality of refreshment in these experiences of seclusion—a reliable sense that everything really is OK.
Something fascinating is happening here—something not yet accounted for in our Western psychologies of transformation. In these highly concentrated moments, we experience precisely the kind of fulfillment for which we have been longing. I have said that the ego ideal organizes our longing to be held in the state of perfection which we have once known (however fleetingly). Well, here it is. Here is the state of perfection for which we have longed. Here is the state toward which the ego ideal has been driving us. In the Buddhist tradition, these states of seclusion are often called “the experiences of delight” for they reliably bring with them feelings of “bliss, rapture, contentment, harmony, and expansiveness.”8
There is, in these secluded states, all the sweetness we could want. There is nowhere to go. Nothing more to do. For a few precious moments we can let go of the search for the Yellow-Crested Firebird. There is no more reaching. Why bother looking elsewhere? Paradise is right here.
These conflict-free moments temporarily suspend the forward motion into which the ego ideal perpetually drives us. We are home. From this settled state, it will be possible, later on, to investigate the more difficult and imperious inner representations of the ideal ego. Concentration practices like this lay the foundation for all the further work necessary to free us from the delusional aspects of the quest for the Firebird. For this reason, some form of concentrative practice is found in every spiritual tradition. This practice systematically promotes the development of equanimity, steadiness, and nonreactivity. Later on, as we shall see, these qualities become the all-important foundation for investigation of the very ways in which the illusory aspects of the self are constructed.
Patanjali and his colleagues and students explored all of this internal territory directly—using only the tools of their own highly developed minds and bodies. In recent years, however, human beings have brought new tools to bear on the same problems and questions that preoccupied Patanjali. We have brought the contemporary tools of neuroscience, which include things like EEGs and sophisticated functional MRIs. Careful research into the physiological effects of meditation and yoga have begun to confirm the discoveries of the yogis in contemporary, scientific terms—lending an interesting new layer of knowledge and experience to Patanjali’s text.
We now know, for example, that as we enter highly concentrated states of meditation, the fundamental physiological components of stress and anxiety are profoundly altered. We know that “seclusion” promotes states of equanimity in several ways: The levels of stress hormones—epinephrine, norepinephrine, and cortisol—are ratcheted down, calming the nervous system. Heart rate and blood pressure drop and the breathing rate slows as the body’s need for oxygen is reduced. Metabolism slows. Muscle tension is relaxed significantly. Brain wave activity begins to shift from the “beta waves” of regular wakefulness to somewhat longer, slower “alpha waves.” We feel what it’s like to inhabit a truly calm body.
New research shows, too, that meditation produces identifiable changes in the brain. Studies by a team of researchers including Richard Davidson and Jon Kabat-Zinn have shown (through EEG readings) that meditation increases activity in the areas of the brain associated with positive feelings, reduction in anxiety, and faster recovery after negative provocation.9 Another study suggests that meditation not only changes the way the brain works in the short term, but very likely creates permanent changes that enhance equanimity.10
One of the first fruits of this physiological experience of equanimity is an enhanced sense of realness, and a heightened perception of the body. We can often have the experience during meditation, as Maggie did, of being more real than ever, more present.
The experience of “landing” in the present moment can be a powerful one. In ordinary states of consciousness, this is not available, because the mind is so constantly churned by its identification with the past and the future—and these thoughts of past and future are often associated with guilt, remorse, longing, anxiety, or fear. (These afflicted states then inevitably bring with them a surge of stress hormones, and an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing rate.)
When the mind is not afflicted with grasping or aversion, it does not lean forward or backward. For the moment, awareness is just here, just now. During our practice of mantra, for example, Maggie discovered that she had absolutely no negative self-talk—no lingering doubts about the meaning and purpose of her life.
But now we must confront an even more curious by-product of meditative absorption. We discover, as Maggie will, that as the mind becomes truly concentrated, it reveals wholly new powers. Concentration training brings us access to altogether new mental possibilities.
In concentrated states, the boundaries of the conscious mind are relaxed, and feelings, memories, and thoughts which had been just out of awareness become available to consciousness. There is an enhanced sense of receptivity to our own intuition and to the intelligence of our unconscious. We may come out of these concentrated states noticing that a thorny problem or question in our life has been solved—that we “know” how to proceed, even though we have not been thinking about it at all.
Contemporary science has shown that these concentrated states give us greater access to the right hemisphere of the brain, which is the sphere of symbols, dreams, and archetypes—where a special quality of nonrational, nonlinear wisdom resides. The discovery of this repository of wisdom can leave us with a deeper sense of trust in inner wisdom.
When the right hemisphere of the brain becomes dominant, we experience a loss of a linear sense of time. We may also experience distortions in the proprioceptive sense of the body, as I had during mantra practice. At these times, the body may seem to get very large, or very small, or parts of it disappear altogether.
William James, one of America’s first psychologists, and a pioneer in the investigation of altered states of consciousness, said it over a hundred years ago: Our normal waking consciousness is separated only by the flimsiest of veils from vast, and unexplored worlds of consciousness.11 In early states of meditation such as Maggie was experiencing, we step through the veil. We can be captivated by what we experience on the other side. There may be a sense of heightened spirituality and enchantment that accompanies the inevitable perceptual and time distortions that arise. We come back from meditative states knowing that we are somehow not separate from the realms of mind and matter that ordinarily seem to lie just out of reach.