“Sit with me for a moment, can you?” Maggie asked. We had arrived back at her dark porch, and she seemed reluctant to let me go. She gestured to the two old Kennedy rockers on the wide front porch.
We sat for a while, rocking and looking at the moon, as Maggie told me what was on her mind. Some of it I had already guessed. Some of it astonished me.
Over the past year, Maggie had noticed a shift in both her yoga practice and her meditation practice. Although she had been a yoga student for well over a decade, Maggie had begun, just a year earlier, to take four or five classes a week instead of her usual one or two. She began to notice new wellsprings of stamina and energy. After years of halfhearted and intermittent practice, Maggie’s daily practice had begun to gain momentum. She felt, I think correctly, that our Friday evening mantra/meditation sessions had contributed to this acceleration.
There were subtle changes in her body which she thought were a result of her increased practice, and she recounted these to me. But the changes that most puzzled her were the mental changes.
“About six months ago, I began entering deep states of concentration in yoga class,” she said. “Almost like a trance. They were something new for me.”
Maggie described the “trance” in detail: Her mind became quiet and focused. External distractions melted away. She was relaxed, even in difficult postures. She felt a sense of inner warmth and light. At times, the external world itself disappeared, and she was aware only of bare sensation, movement, and inner stillness. Time evaporated.
Her face changed as she spoke. Even in the moonlight, there was an intensity to the glow in her skin.
“The most astonishing thing is that this very same trance has started coming into my writing.”
Maggie continued, with a skeptical sense of wonder in her voice: “I sit down at my desk. Close my eyes. I breathe—slowly and deeply. Almost like in postures. I may meditate, or hear my inner mantra chanting away. Then at a certain point—who knows how long—my eyes open and the writing begins. I don’t even know where it comes from.”
Maggie described how she found her writing in these times to be effortless. She had no sense of time as she sat at the computer. She felt a distinct sense of guidance—guidance from what she described as intuition, hunches, inner cues. “There is an inner knowing that is almost like a voice but not quite a voice.
“It was about nine months ago when I began to write the new novel. Remember? Well, from the beginning this novel came out in an entirely new voice. It wasn’t really ‘my’ voice. I’ve never written like this before. I don’t know how to write like this.”
Maggie described how this experience of writing was different from all of her earlier experiences. “When I started writing, over twelve years ago,” she said, “what I really needed was to hear my own voice.” Her first novels helped her to define herself, she said. But this was different. It wasn’t so much Her Voice now, as The Voice. It was no longer about self-expression, exactly, but about getting out of her own way enough to let this bigger, more mysterious voice come through.
Maggie described the difficulties of letting this voice emerge. It required patience, trust, and (she smiled) “ridiculous amounts of time.” Sometimes her efforts were rewarded with unusual energy and creativity.
She leaned forward in the dark. “It scared me at first. It was so powerful. As if I were being taken over.”
Maggie explained that in her earlier novels she had been “trying too hard—trying to control.” This time, perhaps out of desperation, she had let go. And the floodgates of her mind opened.
Now Maggie told me something that stunned me. She had been secretive about the content of her book all along. I just assumed that it was how she preferred to work. Actually, she was nervous about telling me the whole truth.
It spilled out: Maggie was writing this book in the first person, in the voice, in fact, of a real person. Well, a real dead person. His name had been Duncan Gregor. I knew of him, just by chance, through a former writing teacher of mine: He had been a little appreciated but gifted English novelist in the 1930s and 1940s. His novels had long been out of print—indeed, were not even that well-known in his time.
I was stunned. How on earth, I wondered to myself, did Maggie find this particular voice? What was the attraction?
“It’s as if I accidentally tuned in to a special frequency on a radio,” Maggie continued. “And there he was. Duncan Gregor. God. Of all people. His voice. His personality. His whole drama.
“The writing begins as images in my mind sometimes—images that are almost like memories. Like something that actually happened to me.”
The process, she said, was leading her into a novel that was more complex than anything she had written—way beyond what she imagined her skills to be. But she was just going with it. The characters that emerged were compelling, unsettling.
“At any rate, I just can’t stop. I’m drawn on. I know I’m becoming even more peculiar than before. Which is saying quite a bit.”
Then Maggie told me something she had shared with no one—indeed, something that she believed no one else on earth knew: Georgiana Winslow might have had a brief affair with Duncan Gregor. Maggie had only pieced this together in the last year or so. About a year earlier, she found a collection of Gregor’s novels, and two slim volumes of his poetry, in her grandmother’s library. The books had been read repeatedly. Many of them had notes in the margins, in Georgiana’s hand—as though Georgie had not only read them, but pored over them. In studying these volumes, and the marginal notes, Maggie had found a small section of love poetry that she convinced herself was dedicated to Georgiana. She believed the affair had happened in the summer of 1921, when Gregor visited Lenox.
Since the novel had begun to write itself, Maggie told me, she had been ransacking her attic for her grandmother’s diaries. She hoped she might find some hints in them of the story that was unfolding in her own mind. Was it real? Was it imagination? Was it memory?
“I’m sure of one thing,” she said. “This whole book process is somehow connected to yoga. The more I practice, the deeper it all goes.”
We sat in silence together, enchanted momentarily by the moon, and the ripple of a breeze fluttering through the leaves strewn about the front lawn.
Maggie added a postscript. “I need your help. This voice. Is it inside me? Outside me? An angel? A muse? My own imagination?”
A final concern tumbled out. “I wonder,” mused Maggie, as much to herself as to me, “if this preoccupation with inner worlds isn’t separating me from real life.”
She turned to me. “Do you think I’m OK?”
Maggie’s discovery parallels one of the central findings of the sramanic tradition: the mind has many layers. What we most often experience as “mind” is merely the surface of the mind (Puppy Mind), where the currents and eddies of discursive thought keep us persistently stirred up. Beneath this choppy surface, however, lie vast depths. In these depths, the mind lies still and transparent, with possibilities and powers which we in the West have imagined mostly in science fiction.
These possibilities of mind emerge hand in hand with the deeper stages of concentration and seclusion. As meditative skills develop, we will inevitably penetrate what the twentieth century Indian philosopher Aurobindo called Illumined Mind.1 Some of the hallmarks of this Illumined Mind were already there in Maggie’s new writing practice: the experience of mental absorption; the capacity to attend to a task with complete absence of self-consciousness; the evaporation of a sense of time; supernormal powers of perception; the experience of “knowing” an object of concentration without “thinking about it”; an ineffable sense of higher guidance.
Yogi sramanas found that when the mind is not afflicted, it manifests some surprising new powers. Sri Aurobindo and many other yoga philosophers have mapped these powers in detail. It is commonly acknowledged, among yoga adepts, for example, that Illumined Mind:
~ Transcends the ordinary space-time continuum
~ Can directly know the subtle interior life of all objects
~ Can directly know the mind itself
~ Perceives the interconnectedness of all created things
~ Perceives all the potential events in the universe in each aspect of the universe
~ Sees the identity of microcosm and macrocosm (This feature of Illumined Mind is called complementarity.)
~ Thoroughly knows the universal through the particular
~ Sees the whole field of mind and matter to be made of “the same stuff” (This feature of Illumined Mind is called coalescence.)
In chapter three of the Yoga-Sūtra, Patanjali describes many of these vast powers of Illumined Mind. His descriptions are much more colorful than the somewhat sanitized list above. He says, for example:
Focusing with perfect discipline on the powers of an elephant or other entities, one acquires those powers. (3.25)
The powers of an elephant!
Many of the sūtras of chapter three—from 3.16 through 3.56—are equally intriguing.
Being absorbed in the play of the mind’s luminosity yields insight about the subtle, hidden, and distant.
Focusing with perfect discipline on the sun yields insight about the universe.
Focusing with perfect discipline on the moon yields insight about the stars’ positions. (3.26–28)
Most of these powers make Maggie’s connection to the mind of Duncan Gregor seem mundane by comparison. But we are once again getting ahead of our story. Later on I will examine in more detail precisely how—and why—these supernormal powers emerge and what Patanjali means by “perfect discipline.”
All traditions that cultivate mental stillness inevitably discover the deeper reaches of the mind explored by Patanjali and his peers. Carlos Castaneda’s teacher, Don Juan, discovers them when he “stops the world”—and his description of them is strikingly similar to Patanjali’s. Thomas Merton discovers them when he empties himself for God.
Aurobindo’s use of the term Illumined Mind is apt, because in all contemplative traditions its characteristics are associated with light, luminosity, and radiance. As Emerson said, “To the illumined mind, the whole world burns and sparkles with light.” In the yoga tradition, Patanjali, when describing this mind, is moved to the use of uncharacteristically poetic language, referring to the mind as a highly polished “gemstone.”
The Quakers describe in great detail their common experience of “the light within”; Kabalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism, describes “the divine light”; Shaker writings are full of references to the light generated through concentrated work and worship—and the Shakers’ elegant artwork overflows with images of both inner and outer light.
The compelling luminosity of “deep mind” draws the seeker’s awareness increasingly inward. In the yoga tradition, this increasing interiority is seen as a developmental imperative. All adult development moves from the external to the internal. That is to say, our experience of each stage of our “waking up” process is inevitably one of deepening interiority. We experience each newly developing level of consciousness as interior to the preceding level (not literally inside it, as the mind is not inside the brain, but interior to it, in an ineffable fashion).2 Each new discovery of the interior light cultivates a strengthened capacity for what yogis called “introversion”—the drawing down of consciousness toward its source and origin. And who is not compelled to follow? Introversion draws us into an exploration of the compelling inner structures of the mind.
Yogis found that virtually everything that exists, seen and unseen, physical and mental, has a subtle inner structure. The Yoga-Sūtra is threaded with references to this subtle inner world. Patanjali frequently uses the Sanskrit word sūkshma to describe this subtlety.3 In the yogic view, even subtle structures have subtle structures—layer upon layer of increasing subtlety which may at times seem to regress infinitely. Again, this view, so central to yoga, is common to many esoteric spiritual paths. A fourth century Jewish mystical text describes in great detail the seven layers of heaven leading to the rebuilt temple, and the final layer (composed of “wings”) above which was “the Holy One.”4
The best-known model of this view in the yoga traditions is the Vedantic description of the koshas, or “sheaths.” This model, developed in the early Upanishads, found the human self to be composed of increasingly subtle sheaths of matter, energy, intelligence, and consciousness. The physical body, which we normally think of as the substance of the self, is only the most gross and obvious layer of this reality. Beneath this gross sheath (or anna-maya-kosha—literally, the “sheath of food”), lie four increasingly subtle layers of reality. For practicing yogis, these “sheaths” were not a theory, but a reality they routinely experienced.
The prāna-maya-kosha, or “sheath of energy,” lies interior to the physical body, as it were. This sheath of energy is the link between the physical body and the mind. The next subtle layer, or mano-maya-kosha, manifests the basic functions of mind. The next sheath, vijnāna-maya-kosha, is the subtle mind—the mind which includes higher, discriminating activities, such as discernment and wisdom. And underlying it all is the ānanda-maya-kosha, or sheath of bliss—the subtle, interior blueprint upon which all human psycho-mental structures are built.
The idea of sheaths first appeared over three thousand years ago, in the ancient Taittiriya Upanishad, and reappears in differing forms in almost every subsequent generation of yogis. Yogis’ model-making has for the most part been driven not by the desire to create complicated metaphysical theories, but simply to map the actual experiences yogis had in meditation—the direct experience of increasingly subtle realms beneath the gross surface of everyday reality. Sramanas struggled to name and describe the multidimensional structure of the universe that they routinely discovered in their internal investigations. The maps they drew made it easier for those who followed them to orient themselves on their inward odysseys. On the whole, their maps are remarkably similar to one another, though some are much more detailed and elaborate than others.
Although Patanjali does not specify in the Yoga-Sūtra, it appears likely that he was influenced by the view of the ancient Sāmkhya philosophy, whose map of the subtle realms enumerated twenty-five categories of existence. Patanjali’s interior map, in a significant modification from the ancient view, had twenty-six categories (or tattvas) since he includes in the Yoga-Sūtra a category called īshvara, or “the Lord.” As we will see, his inclusion of “the Lord” will have a central and fateful impact on the way he sees practice and development unfolding in the process of yoga.
Yogis often described these subtle inner structures as “seeds,” and found that there were seeds within seeds within seeds—regressing almost infinitely, like nested Russian dolls. Patanjali and his colleagues believed that freedom and the end of suffering come inevitably as the result of opening and knowing these seeds, systematically, carefully, one at a time. As each seed is opened and explored, our view of reality is profoundly altered, and we’re drawn deeper, into the next seed. We cannot help ourselves. We want to know this subtle interior structure. We’re drawn to it, as Maggie is in her writing practice, and feel it to be somehow more real than anything else. Paradoxically, in the view of the yogis, what seems less real (less gross, more subtle) is actually more real. Patanjali’s map offers one of the world’s most sophisticated tools for the navigation of this unknown inner territory.
The whole of life, in the view of the yogis, is a great journey in which we trace our way back through this territory, step-by-step—like following a magnificent river all the way back to its source. The source of this river is small, quiet, and subtle, but when we find it, we know we are home. When, after months of struggle and quest, Lewis and Clark discovered the source of the great Missouri, they stood awestruck in the face of this small eruption of water from the earth. They knew incontrovertibly that they had found it: home. The source. They wept. This journey of human life, too, is about tracing everything back to its source. And near the source of this great river, as we shall see, is īshvara, “the Lord.”
Introversion is simply the process of knowing these increasingly subtle aspects of experience—and this knowing proceeds automatically as the mind quiets. As I have said earlier, the path of meditation is sometimes described as marga, the hunter’s path. Since the dawn of time, human beings have been hunters—sitting, watching, waiting, and sometimes following the tracks of animals back to their nests. In Patanjali’s view, through the practice of yoga we follow our own tracks—retracing our steps backward toward stillness (nirodha), cessation, and freedom.
As this natural process of introversion proceeds, it is quite common to experience the minds of other beings, just as Maggie had apparently begun to experience the mind of Duncan Gregor. From the perspective of yoga, this is not at all strange. Yogis’ close investigations of “deep mind,” yielded insights remarkably similar to those of contemporary physics. They found that objects that appear utterly separate and discrete are actually woven together in the fabric of space and time—and are in some ways profoundly entangled with one another. This entanglement includes even what we think of as “our minds.”5 They found, indeed, that the entire universe is more like an interwoven whole than like a collection of discrete objects—more like an enormous sweater. Tug on any corner of this sweater, and the whole of it is moved.
The nineteenth century English poet Francis Thompson said it eloquently:
All things by immortal power,
Near and Far
Hiddenly
To each other linked are,
That thou canst not stir a flower
Without troubling of a star.6
Through practice, we will discover that all minds are one—connected at the source. Just as whales communicate across vast distances of ocean, so, too, our minds—also connected as family—communicate across vast distances of time and space.
Maggie’s great fear, when learning of the process of introversion, was that it would separate her from others in some way—that it would separate her from the world. In fact, the outcome of introversion is just the reverse. As we proceed to know our own minds and our own deeper reaches, we begin to know the subtle world of all so-called external objects as well, and we will finally discover that (as Patanjali will instruct us) “we are all made of the same stuff.”