Wagner |
02-03-2024 05:29 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by Unseeking Seeker
The meditator meditates. Maybe chanting a mantra, visualisation or breath watching helps maintain focus, making attention single-pointed. Then that doing also ceases. Sans thought, all that is, is awareness self-aware in silence.
How may this silence be deepened without any doing, since the doer has disappeared and so doing has ceased?
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Dharana, which is what you are describing in your first paragraph, is broken one-pointed concentration; one's attentiveness keeps getting swept away from its aim via the tenacious effluence of the vasanas, and vigilance must be willfully upheld in order to bring it back to the locality of the focus. When with effort this one-pointed concentration becomes persistent and steady--or apparently so, there are still "residual flickers" of interruption--it is called dhyana. At this stage one's mindfulness of the focus is absolute. If this state of near-perfected one-pointed concentration can be made to continue indefinitely, this being possible only through the sheer dint of habituation afforded by repeated practice, then the dualistic necessity of effort will be assuaged completely and the concentration becomes spontaneous as it were, and it is then called (savikalpa) samadhi; automatic, perfected one-pointed concentration. Metaphorically speaking, the contrast between dhyana and samadhi is like the difference between needing to intentionally push against a wall to maintain constant contact with it, as opposed to being drawn into the wall as if by a magnetic force.
Quote:
Who or what remains, navigating the void?
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It's not a "who or what" that remains . Rather, the apparatus which appeared to insist/subsist on the existence of distinction simply evaporates (for lack of a better word) and there just is, without even the support of the object of concentration. And this is called nirvikalpa samadhi (manolaya/temporary manonasa). Sri Ramana Maharshi compared the object of concentration used in meditation to a stick used to push all the other wood (i.e. the thoughts/vasanas) into a fire, and when all of that other wood is burnt up, the stick itself is thrown into the flame and consumed.
From a practical standpoint, the goal of any and all effort in meditation is to attain dhyana as long and as often as you can. The resulting samadhi over time will weaken and eventually destroy the vasanas forever, and this being accomplished, the state of manonasa will become perpetual, and this is called moksha.
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