There is a lady who has been doing dhyana for quite some time. Everyday without fail she would write to me seeking my blessings, so that she can move ahead in dhyana. Recently, I got a mail from her asking if I could help her find a camera that got lost recently. Such emails, especially from those who have been long practicing, set me thinking.
Why do people do dhyana? Most of the people who come to me either want to pass an exam, some of them desire a better job or relationship and the rest have a heart trouble or a factory that is about to shut.
I know this because I keep getting your emails and as I read them, I wonder if I am really a Yoga Guru or a consultant to whom people come for solutions to their various problems.
It is foolish to think that dhyana would make you immortal or help you recover a business loss or make your ailing heart hale and hearty. The creation is based on certain laws, and neither you nor me, not even the trinity can violate those laws. If you want to make your life better in any way, then focus on social activities, not dhyana. If you direct a fair percentage of your income and time to charitable activities, your physical life will improve automatically.
Everything in creation is a combination of the five elements, including your body. You are tied to this creation with those five elements through specific centres in the body called chakras. When you sit for dhyana, you get plenty of thoughts—about business, friends, physical health, maybe even a scene from the last movie you saw. The thoughts that come to you during dhyana indicate the chakra or sense with which you are tied to creation. That thought will keep coming back to you and when that thought comes, only the lower regions of brain (that control the five senses) will be active. That is, the brain will function at a normal level only and no matter how ‘high’ a state you think you have reached, you would be simply entertaining yourself or daydreaming.
You can have only five kinds of thoughts, relating to the five senses. In dhyana you block those thoughts, because those are your vrittis and yoga, in the words of Patanjali, is chitt vritti nirodh (blocking the vrittis of mind). Once that happens, the lower thoughts get converted into higher thoughts. Then those higher thoughts are blocked and they get converted into super higher thoughts.
What are super higher thoughts? For instance, during the day you saw someone breaking the leg of a dog and while sitting for dhyana, the incident generates anger in you and you think that you should have intervened and prevented that from happening.
That is a super high thought, but that too is a disturbance in your dhyana. So after a stage, even the super higher thoughts are blocked to reach a state of thoughtlessness.
This journey has to be treaded step by step and to ascend the steps you have to improve your karmas, only then the thought of dhyana and yoga will come to you and you can reach a thoughtless stage. Thereafter, the state of dhyana comes.
The writer is the spiritual head of Dhyan Foundation.
www.dhyanfoundation.com