The Silenced Mind: Meditation from the Roots of Yoga

The Silenced Mind: Meditation from the Roots of Yoga

Beck Anamin

ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-54394-966-7

ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-54394-967-4

© 2018. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE - ABOUT MEDITATION

CHAPTER TWO - THE NATURE OF MEDITATION

CHAPTER THREE - HISTORY

CHAPTER FOUR - MEDITATION AND RELIGIONS

CHAPTER FIVE - MEDITATIVE TECHNIQUES

CHAPTER SIX - PRAYER, MANTRA, MINDFULNESS,

AND GETTING READY TO PRACTICE

CHAPTER SEVEN - CONCENTRATION, MEDITATION,

AND ABSORPTION TECHNIQUES

CHAPTER EIGHT - PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

APPENDICES

APPENDIX 1 - REFERENCES IN REFERENCE NUMBER SEQUENCE

APPENDIX 2 - THE YOGA SUTRAS APHORISMS ON MEDITATION

APPENDIX 3 - BIBLIOGRAPHY

ADDENDUM 1 - THE SILENCED MIND - MEDITATION COURSE

PREFACE

Approaching a personal relationship with meditation can be a daunting experience. The language itself is often esoteric, sometimes mysterious, sometimes misleading, and we use it carelessly. Today’s use of the word ‘meditation’ is sloppy, covering an undefined spectrum of things, resulting in different meanings for different people, cultures, groups, religions, sects, and places. The most defined and correct use of the word is the name of the seventh limb of Yoga, the second of three ‘meditative’ limbs (concentration, meditation and absorption). Words, such as Eastern and Western, create an artificial division. For the student or seeker, words that seem foreign, thought structures based on ethnic history, frequent author insistence that their one method is the correct one, and personal writing styles can irritate or generate resistance. Those of us who would like to learn the truth about it are thwarted by religious, national, political, local, and traditional cultures that mock it and discourage involvement. The portrayals by teachers are so inconsistent with each other that it is hard to find the common ground.

Perhaps fifty years before writing this book the author experienced a block that is familiar to many. Having a childhood infused by Lutheran and Methodist Christianity, which had lost believability and allegiance by then, Yoga seemed sacrilegious. It took an ‘accidental’ encounter with J. M. Dechanet’s book Christian Yoga to make it seem acceptable. Yet, ‘meditation,’ used to represent the three highest forms of Yoga practice, lay dormant beyond the cultural barriers for many years of Yoga practice. When the barrier crumbled and reading about it became imperative, he found little commonality across the books. The common thread that had to be there - the heart of meditation described in this book - did not reveal itself until retirement age.

Some read a single book or work with a teacher, and then faithfully follow an approach. That instant acceptance is a valid approach for them, but not for many others who need more insight, who need ‘to know.’ It could not work for the author, and the limited supply of competent meditation teachers existed only in cities or ashrams separated by many miles. The programs by rare local teachers offered highly diluted, reinvented, homegrown styles with such strong misinterpretations that they moved students farther away from true meditation. Teachers and books preached grandiose benefits, but provided little ‘how to’ information.

The ‘one-style-suits-all’ approach offered by many raised a warning flag carrying the caption, Acceptance without understanding. Acceptance without understanding belonged to encampments with walls around them. Encampment walls blocked objective viewing. All books and teachers, including the book on Christian Yoga, confirmed that meditation could support religions, traditions, movements, or groups without being of them. Meditation existed as an independent entity, as if it were a live breathing organism. The writing of the book then received impetus from an internal voice, If you do not understand meditation well enough to confidently describe it to others, as something real and not strange, you cannot effectively practice it yourself. He knew that writing was his way of reaching understanding.

As his drive for understanding gained momentum, reading of each new book generated increased frustration, confusion, and misunderstanding. It seemed that everyone’s approach to meditation was different; that there was no right way. Making matters worse, many books increased the yearning for the truth by focusing on the grandiose and wonderful things that would come to the meditator. Everyone would easily reach nirvana, achieve samadhi, transcend the material to enter the ethereal, or be treated to some similar miraculous event. There were many names and descriptions. Everyone would get tremendous physical and mental health benefits. Everyone would become relaxed, spiritual, and happy. The seeming grandiosity and lack of a right way engendered suspicion that meditation was a game of charlatans. That was a wrong understanding, but the pull of that belief even now surfaces as more westerners present their views in books like "Meditation for Dummies."

The ‘meditation business,’ like all other pursuits, includes the full range of promoters, from the highly competent responsible practitioners to the barely competent irresponsible ones. Charlatans, hopeful students, imitators, intellectuals, mercenaries, highly competent masters, enlightened beings, and quasi-religious fanatics all produce training courses and books. The author needed help to distinguish between them, but he learned that it was not available. He saw how easily he and others turned personal choices over to the first person with a believable storyline. He learned that those who want to make you a captive of their framework were the ones to listen to with the most caution. Yet, accepting the always possible, but not probable, appearance of a true Master along his path, he remained open to the guidance.

He saw that his lack of a big picture of meditation, with no carrying basket for the confusing details, often caused his attempts at meditation to fail, as they certainly did for others. With meditation seeming to be a game of technical skill, he swam in the sea of technicalities with little satisfaction. Details, theories, and intellectualisms of meditation lured him away from the all important root conceptual truth.

The astonishing benefits described in meditation books excite us and arouse our curiosity. Rich in language, esotericism, philosophy and history, filled with new ideas, and written by caring, spiritual people, they are magnetic. If we can stay with them, there is much to learn. Meditation books open the window to Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian cultures. They teach us of the relationships between meditation, religion, spirituality, Yoga, Zen, and other practices. They too rarely, however, focus on the daily practice of meditation.

It is easy to cross paths with books and teachers that want the seeker to believe that they present the only valid view of meditation, while paying no recognition that there are many valid approaches to meditation. When we are just starting to learn about meditation we come to understand that authors and gurus do advocate commitment and submission to their view. Few of us recognize that we can maintain control. The decisions about degree of life investment, depth or height of involvement, aspiration, and giving control over our life to an outsider are ours to make. We need to make our decisions by considering our life, needs, and view of our destiny - if we have one. For some adepts who are aspiring to go higher, it is absolutely necessary to fully learn and accept the worldview of their Master, but the rest of us have not entered that world of submission to another.

This book came about as the accumulating ruminative process resulted in an organized view of meditation practice. The feeling deepened that if the mind wrestling could produce a book that could help him to understand, it could help many who certainly faced the same issues and difficulties. If it could help that one struggling average being through the frustrations, it could potentially help many average people who would like to use meditation in their lives, while also providing some structure and understanding for seekers like him. The community needed a meditation book for the average person, in understandable language and style, while providing some conceptual help to the advanced Yogi. Since it was clear that it also needed a book that focuses on the ‘how’ of meditation, the book veered from the benefits and the ‘why." Yet, before getting into the ‘how’ of the many forms of meditation, the book develops understanding by exploring the purpose, philosophy, and goals.

This is not a traditional book on meditation, and not the product of a highly evolved guru or Master. Those books often address the needs of and are understandable by seekers who have already experienced long practice and its results. The intended audience for this book ranges from the beginner to those higher echelon meditators who want to follow the spiritual path toward becoming an adept or a Master. It enables a long journey on the spiritual path. It contains more than enough information to carry the meditator along the axes of meditation for as far as the bulk of the population needs to go.

This foundation for this book is in the roots of meditation, where specialty versions do not yet exist. Building on that foundation, it draws from many of the schools of meditative thought, holistically merging them. It provides insight to the nature of meditation and its relationship to other practices, including prayer, chanting, mantras, and mindfulness. However, the book primarily leads the potential meditator to a personally suitable active meditative practice, derived from a wide range of techniques.

Although continued practice of meditation inevitably leads to spirituality, this is not a book on spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is highly personal, involving many disciplines and considerations. It is also not a book about religion, although the practices of meditation and religion often tightly interweave to create a beautiful tapestry from two mutually supportive but independent forces.

Although it may sometimes sound Buddhist, Taoist, or something else, this book comes from No One’s Land where ‘ists’ and allegiances do not exist. It has passed onto paper through a yogi, but that yogi has no loyalty or homage to a given Yoga ‘tradition.’ No enclosing and limiting walls exist in No One’s Land, not for traditions, religions, theorists, atheists, theists, scientists, philosophers, or any other belief system. The occupants of that non-adversarial space seek, promote, and honor Truth alone.

This book has not come from the viewpoint of an enlightened being. Yet, marvelous enrichment, insight, and knowledge grace the path of any seeker, sometimes through accrual and sometimes sudden. Enriched seekers come to know that the events will be sporadic, and unpredictable in nature and effect. Although brief events, they leave a residue, and sometimes produce a noticeable restructuring.

In short, a mission that began with a personal need became global. Others needed a book that would define the true nature of meditation in straightforward, easy to understand language, without losing the purity of the teaching. They needed a book that would tell them what the game was all about, but they also needed a play book describing how to do it. To enable personal choice and path finding, they needed a book that would show the breadth of techniques available to their choosing.

DO YOU KNOW?

Meditation is Yoga, the highest Yoga.

Yoga is about awakening to the Union of the individual mind with the ultimate soul.

Yoga is about mind stillness - moving toward the stillness of the soul.

Yoga uses many tools to arrive at the stillness.

All those tools lead to evolving into experiencing higher levels of consciousness.

The highest level is ‘absorption in soul consciousness.’

The ultimate evolved consciousness is totally still.

The components of what we today call ‘meditation’ are:

Concentration

Meditation

Absorption

We use the term ‘meditation’ loosely and sloppily to include all forms.

There are hundreds of techniques of ‘meditation.’

All derive from a common root at least 5000 years old.

The techniques serve many purposes.

All ‘meditation’ quells the mind activity, puts it ‘on hold.’

Every ‘meditation’ technique everywhere puts mind activity on hold.

CHAPTER ONE

ABOUT MEDITATION

Unvarnished Straight Talk

This book aims to help people truly understand meditation and make it useful in their lives. It cannot begin without stating the unarguable, unvarnished basics. First, the ability to meditate is a natural trait of our species, the only species that has that ability. Shamans practiced it in the earliest of our civilized communities. We are the only species that is aware of our consciousness, and the only species that can explore and experience it. Second, but foremost and rock solid, pure meditation is about stilling all mind activity, not just putting thoughts on ‘hold.’ Whether its proponents tell you so or not, every valid meditation technique you will find anywhere requires that mind activity beyond what a specific meditation technique may require does not intervene. That is true for techniques of thought exploration, sensory focus, verbal imagery, gazing at yantras, reciting mantras, and many others. Third, meditation experiences the underlying consciousness zone that is always there: it does this during the times that mind activity is not locking the meditator in everyday material-sensory consciousness. The process of becoming a meditator is one of developing gaps between mind activities. As the spaces become longer with practice, meditation continually improves.

You should be aware that the word ‘meditation’ has slipped into loose modern usage. Because it is familiar to so many people, this book will often use it that slack way. In proper formal use, the word points to the second of three skill sets defined in the Yoga Sutras, with all three necessary to experiencing the higher consciousness states. The true power of meditation comes when it integrates ‘meditation’ with the first-level skill of ‘concentration,’ and the third level skill of ‘absorption in consciousness.’

The Price

There is one other unvarnished Truth. We are rarely aware of the prices we pay for what we get, but the prices are always there. In everyday normal life, we continually make price/value decisions: they are usually subtle, subconscious, and hidden from us. If you are going to meditate, you will need to make those decisions, based on how valuable meditation is in your life. What you get from it will be consistent with your amount of true understanding of meditation, personal intention, discipline, energy, and caring about having it in your life. The higher consciousness experiences and everyday benefits that meditation brings are your birthright, but they are not free. You need to ‘put in’ to ‘get out.’ You need to give up some things. You may need to pay for what you get by relinquishing prior beliefs, ideas, needs, priorities, values, and attachments. That could place you in a position akin to a boy willingly and lovingly playing the piano, while the other kids are playing baseball outside his window, or in the position of the boys lovingly playing baseball, some with growing dedication to it, while he plays the piano. Life is a stream of continuous choices. Through our tradeoffs we are always establishing a trajectory toward our future.

Experiencing Consciousness

We live in a sea of accessible consciousness that our everyday mind experiences block from our attention. When we meditate, we first experience entry level ‘mind consciousness.’ That zone extends progressively through stages leading up to the ultimate of Yoga’s ‘Absolute Unity’ or the Buddha’s ‘Awakening.’ (The often-used modern term ‘enlightenment’ points to an informal undefined state far short of this). Along the way, meditation can bring many practical insights and experiences for the everyday world. Many techniques exist by which we can apply meditation to achieve everyday benefits. That cannot happen without creating spaces between our mind activities.

Multiple progressive levels of consciousness experience are available to humans and only to humans. We normally experience two of them. Our everyday activities involve sensory experience and mind experience. The material/sensory awareness is a base level of consciousness. Mind, the zone of thoughts and other mental activities, is a higher level of consciousness. Several levels of consciousness higher than mind are available. The degree to which we can escape from the domination by our senses and mind involvements is the degree to which we can experience higher levels of consciousness. Meditation is the tool for that escape from senses and mind. Ultimately, meditation is about personal evolution to and through levels of higher consciousness. Spirituality (spirit-uality), as opposed to materiality (material-ity), increases with the evolution.

No ‘Right’ Way

Forgetting the fine point of word usage for now, be aware that meditation is not one thing, and there is no ‘right’ or ‘single’ way to meditate. Research for this book uncovered nearly 400 documented techniques of meditation, and that is only a partial collection. Modern Buddhist meditation techniques, often visualizations, are continually arising, and books on Buddhism contain hundreds. There are also hundreds of Yantras (printed or woven symbolic visualization patterns) available to meditators. The large numbers of mantras and chants can also be powerful meditation tools.

You will never use more than a few of the available approaches, but you will want to experiment with some to find ones that are right for you in fulfillment of your needs and supporting your unique life. You might find one or more that will become your standard practice while in your ‘meditation space,’ which might be a special room, at an altar, in a special setting, or whatever works well in your unique life. You may find other opportunities that work for short meditations while at work, walking, or in any activity. You may come to make your physical Yoga practice more meditative by watching your breath or perhaps using a special lightly audible breathing technique, the Ujjayi breath (often called ‘ocean breath’), to focus on. At other times you might practice an ‘applied meditation’ technique to help develop a quality such as stress relief or compassion, to heal, or bring intuitive understanding of something specific.

The View

Although hundreds of meditation forms and techniques exist, ancient and modern Yoga traditions typically gravitate to and teach either a single form or a narrow range of forms. Many religions sanction well-defined meditation practices that may vary from sect to sect. Texts, sacred and not, of both philosophical and religious movements provide guidance to meditation. Many modern authors who have no affiliation to any tradition or movement have invented, redefined, and reinterpreted meditation techniques for both spiritual and practical use. The Yoga Sutras from 250 BCE define the baseline for meditation. However, that definitive depiction was not original: it followed on the Samkhya philosophy, which also conditioned the Gautama Buddha’s meditation. Samkhya had derived from the same ancient Harappan culture as the Vedas. That early culture provided the foundation on which all Yoga and meditation rests.

Serious students, casually interested people, and those at all levels between them, have learned meditation from those greatly varied sources and have practiced it with success and effectiveness, but many have given it up or slowly drifted away. Others have failed at making it part of their lives. Few have learned that many other approaches are available to them beyond the ones they know, or that it is important to match meditative technique with personal karma and needs. Most have not had an opportunity to come to know the purposes, science, practice methodologies, and much else that is available about meditation: the broad-based view that would facilitate that does not exist within any of the movements. All movements build walls around their knowledge, claiming that it is the only needed knowledge, and they discourage exploration beyond their walls. Broad and thorough knowledge of meditation can only come about through individualized study that is appropriate to the drives of the student. It can only become fully and correctly known in a view from a personal No Man’s Land, where no one owns knowledge or truth separate from the restrictions and dogma of organizations, drawing useful knowledge from all and being respectful.

The Roots of Meditation Are Deep

We do not know when we ‘aware’ humans - the fully modern version of Homo sapiens - actually became ‘aware.’ No evolution text includes a timeline with a golden asterisk marking that point for us. No authoritative list documents the ingredients of ‘aware.’ Earlier versions of humanity-to-be, leading to our species, clearly possessed some ingredients, but not the full set that makes us what we are. We do know that the situation changed dramatically for us little more than ten thousand years ago, as if the waning of the latest Ice Age caused the perfect environmental conditions for a magical set of dormant genes to activate: all of the varied sapiens populations of the world suddenly became different, seemingly limitless in ability and creativity. Perhaps that is when our awareness became as full as it is. Perhaps just then we became able to form abstract concepts such as ‘aware’ and ‘suffering,’ and understand their linkage. Perhaps then a door opened to experience of consciousness through meditation,

We do know that a culture on the Indian continent in the southwestern corner of today’s Pakistan recognized and struggled with ‘suffering’ at least five thousand years ago. The teachings of their mystics - meditative people who could make contact beyond their human material/sensory and mind consciousness levels to gain insights: it is clear that they then developed a philosophy for living life in a way that would reduce ‘suffering.’ That ‘suffering’ is the same suffering that Krishna, Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, and others later hoped to end for humankind: the ‘suffering’ it is the mental turmoil that we create in response to the situations we encounter. Nature provides catastrophes, hardships, tests, challenges, sickness, injury, death, and miseries. Humans experience pleasure, pain, love, hate, joy, sorrow, and many other things. The human mind creates suffering by how it responds.

By four thousand years ago, the people of that ancient culture had merged with Aryans (which simply means ‘Kinsmen’) who had migrated from the area we came to call Persia into the region of the river cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, the homeland of the Aryan/Harappan culture. As they migrated to the east and west, the Harappans carried the philosophy with them. During the early days of