Deep Meditation - A Closer Look

[TensorTympani]

In this thread I’d like to take a closer look at the core of Yogani’s Deep Meditation instructions from Lesson 13:

Find a quiet, comfortable place where you can sit, preferably with back support. We want to remove unnecessary distractions. Just sit and relax somewhere where you can close your eyes for twenty minutes without interruptions.

Once you have gotten comfortable, slowly close your eyes. You will notice thoughts, streams of thoughts. That is fine. Just observe them without minding them. After about a minute, gently introduce the thought …I AM… and begin to repeat it easily and effortlessly in your mind. If your mind wanders off into other thoughts, you will eventually realize this has happened. Don’t be concerned about it. It is natural. When you realize you are not repeating the mantra, gently go back to it. This is all you have to do. Easily repeat the mantra silently inside. When you realize you are not thinking it, then easily come back to it. The goal is not to stay on it. The goal is to follow the simple procedure of thinking the mantra, losing it, and coming back to it when you find you have lost it. Do not resist if the mantra tends to become less distinct. Thinking the mantra does not have to be with clear pronunciation. I AM can be experienced at many levels in your mind and nervous system. When you come back to it, come back to a level that is comfortable, not straining for either a clear or fuzzy pronunciation.

Do this procedure for twenty minutes, and, then, with your eyes closed, take a few minutes to rest before you get up.
[Yogani]

My plan is to go through these instructions sentence by sentence, because each sentence is equally important for establishing an effective and safe Deep Meditation practice.

Who is this for? If you haven’t practiced Deep Meditation for at least a few weeks, this thread may be “too much information”. It is probably better to simply read the instructions above, practice, and then re-read and practice again until you have developed some intuition for it. If you have been practicing for longer, this thread may be useful to you. A more detailed conceptual understanding in your left brain can subconsciously help your right brain and so improve your skill in meditation. Think of a musician: reading about music theory can indirectly improve their playing, even though they don’t think about theory while they play. So the idea is not to actively apply anything you read here in your practice but just to allow the information to sink in. Taking a closer look can also deepen your bhakti for Deep Meditation practice. On the other hand, if you find my analysis confusing rather than clarifying, please don’t take that as a sign that you’re doing something wrong. Not everyone benefits from analysis: there are excellent intuitive musicians who have never learned music theory, and telling them they need to understand it might only bog them down rather than improve their playing.

Topic 1: The procedure of Deep Meditation

Today let’s look at this part:

[R]epeat [the mantra] easily and effortlessly in your mind. If your mind wanders off into other thoughts, you will eventually realize this has happened. Don’t be concerned about it. It is natural. When you realize you are not repeating the mantra, gently go back to it. This is all you have to do. Easily repeat the mantra silently inside. When you realize you are not thinking it, then easily come back to it. The goal is not to stay on it. The goal is to follow the simple procedure of thinking the mantra, losing it, and coming back to it when you find you have lost it.

Here is a drawing of the process these sentences describe:

Take a moment with it before reading on. Does it match the passage above, and can you relate it to your own experience of Deep Meditation?

The drawing is a loop: a repeating process that can be roughly divided into six parts, which I have drawn as three blobs and three arrows.

One might think that “Gently favoring mantra” is the only part of the loop that matters. That would be a mistake, and it is why I drew all three blobs in the same style: it would not be correct practice to try to stay in “Gently favoring mantra” alone, with the agenda of never losing the mantra.

Losing the mantra is one way of forgetting to gently favor it. The most common way is probably to lose the mantra into thoughts or sensations, but there are others, for example forcing the mantra, or favoring another thought with the mantra in the background. In these two cases the mantra isn’t lost, yet we are no longer doing the part of the instruction that says: “Easily repeat the mantra silently inside.” Because we favor the mantra gently, forgetting to favor it is natural, which is why I labeled the arrow “forgetting” with “natural”. There is no point in trying not to forget the mantra; that would be a departure from the simple procedure of Deep Meditation.

Once we have forgotten to gently favor the mantra, we may be favoring other thoughts or sensations, we may be in stillness, or we may have started to force the mantra without noticing. In all of these cases we will eventually, and just as naturally, remember what we are doing. This realisation that we were off can come as a clear thought, or it can barely register.

Now the instructions tell us to gently return to the mantra. This is part of our intention when we sit down to meditate: whenever we have the choice, we take this step and gently return to the mantra, rather than consciously deciding to stay with the thoughts or sensations. If the mantra cannot be gently favored, we don’t force it. We will come back to this later in the thread, when we look at this part of the instructions that explains how to enter the procedure of Deep Meditation in the first place:

Once you have gotten comfortable, slowly close your eyes. You will notice thoughts, streams of thoughts. That is fine. Just observe them without minding them. After about a minute, gently introduce the thought …I AM…

Notice that gentleness applies both to how we think the mantra and to how we return to it after losing it. This will be important for the second part we’ll look at next time:

Do not resist if the mantra tends to become less distinct. Thinking the mantra does not have to be with clear pronunciation. I AM can be experienced at many levels in your mind and nervous system. When you come back to it, come back to a level that is comfortable, not straining for either a clear or fuzzy pronunciation.

Feel free to ask questions, or propose corrections and improvements.

[TensorTympani]

In the last post we looked at the sentences of the Deep Meditation instructions that describe the loop I depicted in the diagram above.
Now we will inspect the sentences that directly follow them:

Do not resist if the mantra tends to become less distinct. Thinking the mantra does not have to be with clear pronunciation. I AM can be experienced at many levels in your mind and nervous system. When you come back to it, come back to a level that is comfortable, not straining for either a clear or fuzzy pronunciation.

Topic 2: Mantra refinement and refinement of the procedure of Deep Meditation

2.1 Recap of the loop
Let’s first get a better feel for the loop diagram by looking at a familiar process outside of meditation that can be described in a similar way. Imagine you’re on vacation, relaxing on a beach. Nothing is scheduled for the day, and your only plan for the next few hours is to read a novel you have been looking forward to. The process of reading the novel can be described by a similar loop. We just replace “Gently favoring the mantra” with “Leisurely reading the novel”. It is “leisurely” because we want the reading to be enjoyable, so there is no point in focusing on it with laser-like attention, which would feel like a strain, more like work. We also don’t mind if the sound of the waves, children playing, thoughts about ice cream or lunch, or even nodding off distract us from reading. Eventually we notice, and our intention to read the novel lets us return to it gently and effortlessly, without any meta-thoughts like “Why was I distracted from reading the novel? I need to pay better attention!” It is the combination of intending to read the novel leisurely and being relaxed about the possibility of forgetting this intention for a while that makes both the return to the novel and the entire cycle of reading, getting distracted, and returning easy and enjoyable.

While reading a novel in this way is pleasant and relaxing, it is obviously nothing like Deep Meditation. There is no refinement of the reading process towards stillness.

It is precisely the sentences I quoted at the top of this post, which describe how the mantra refines itself, that make the essential difference from our leisurely reading example.

Before you continue reading, I want to remind you again of the point of this exercise. We’re breaking down a whole into several components. What we actually do and experience during Deep Meditation practice is the whole; the components don’t really exist and are only artificial concepts. Still, there is some use in decomposing the whole into pieces: it makes it easier to study what we’re doing, to recognize mistakes, and to gain a better understanding, which leads to more confidence in ourselves and in our inner Guru.

2.2 Refinement of the Deep Meditation procedure

Let’s look at the last sentence of the part of the Deep Meditation instructions we focus on today. I’ve marked it in bold below.

Do not resist if the mantra tends to become less distinct. Thinking the mantra does not have to be with clear pronunciation. I AM can be experienced at many levels in your mind and nervous system. When you come back to it, come back to a level that is comfortable, not straining for either a clear or fuzzy pronunciation.

What this sentence describes is that the entire process of Deep Meditation, and not just the mantra, can refine during a session.
I depict this in the graphic below:

The original loop is now replaced by a spiral.
“Not straining for either a clear or fuzzy pronunciation” when gently returning to the mantra means, in this diagram, that we follow the natural path outlined by the spiral, rather than trying to skip ahead a few windings towards the center, which corresponds to a fainter state, or forcing ourselves back up to a clearer form of the procedure of Deep Meditation and the mantra. This is obviously a highly idealized depiction of the procedure of Deep Meditation. In reality, it is not possible to clearly identify or count the windings we have taken. The purpose of the diagram is to give a visual representation of how the loop depicting the procedure of Deep Meditation can be modified so that it also represents the refinement of the procedure.

2.3 Mantra refinement
Now let’s look at the mantra refinement in isolation:

Do not resist if the mantra tends to become less distinct. Thinking the mantra does not have to be with clear pronunciation. I AM can be experienced at many levels in your mind and nervous system. When you come back to it, come back to a level that is comfortable, not straining for either a clear or fuzzy pronunciation.

You can think of the blob called “Gently favoring the mantra” as the periods during Deep Meditation when you do just that, instead of mind wandering or realizing you were off. But think about it. What does it actually mean to think the mantra? Are we really favoring the mantra without any gaps? Probably not. There will be mini versions of mind wandering, gaps of silence, and gentle returns to the mantra in between, without us even noticing.

The mantra refinement itself can therefore be depicted as a Droste or Matryoshka version of the original loop:

Don’t worry if that is mind-boggling, because it gets even crazier when we combine these two types of refinement.

2.4 Combined refinement of procedure of Deep Meditation and mantra

Admittedly, the following illustration of the two refinements combined is likely somewhat over the top. And probably only interesting to stare at for very nerdy people or AIs who want to adapt and learn a variant of Deep Meditation suitable to their variant of nervous system (e.g. their “J-space”).

The moving spotlight indicates the present moment and depicts the highly idealized (and very unrealistic) scenario of refining the mantra by “one turn”, then refining the procedure of Deep Meditation by “one turn”, and so on. Clearly, this is not what happens in reality, but looking at the process of Deep Meditation in this abstract way might produce a sense of awe. And it might make us more at ease with the idea that mantra refinement can continue without limits, so we can let go of any holding on to an unnecessarily clear form of thinking the mantra. Clearly, the process is very different from the mental procedure of leisurely reading a novel, and this graphic tries to illustrate why.

Fractal structures like this exist in nature, for example a romanesco broccoli :

It is amazing that we have something like that in our minds.