Dhyana leads to cessation of unwanted thoughts

More the physical efforts better would be the fruits of action. Mind, on the contrary, becomes most creative when it is relaxed. This state is arrived at when one is in a state of ‘Yoga’. Once mind becomes peaceful and relaxed, the thought process becomes easy and simple. It becomes free from any complexity, preconditioning or limitation.  Unaffected by any internal or extraneous influences, one looks at issues in hand with an open mind.  You then have a full hand view of whatever is explored, whence you intuitively get to the root of wherever attention is paid.  Spontaneity becomes the rule of mind’s game play.  Also, one would be able to distinguish between “what one wants” and “what is right” and make most appropriate choices in life.   

The process, however, is not easy, as it encounters lot of bottlenecks of its own making. Humans are thinking beings. Nonstop they keep breeding and entertaining thoughts, be they in response to external stimuli, or the ones arising out of in-store impressions.  Mind even flirts with assumed thoughts and keeps mulling over them.  During the day, it is barely for 45 to 50 minutes of deep slumber at night that mind is at rest.  Even during dream stage, mind keeps entertaining thoughts picked up during waking stage in recent or distant past.  Not to say anything about waking state.  Supposedly each being attends to around sixty to seventy thousand thoughts every day. Mind, in fact, is not at rest even while apparently idling.  This human predicament is beautifully portrayed in a couplet by late Maithili Sharan Gupta:“Koi pasa na rahne par bhi janman maun nahi rahta; Ap-apki sunta hai waha ap-apko hi kahata.” It means: “Even if nobody is around, mind is not at rest, it keeps listening and speaking to itself.” This, he wrote describing Lakshman’s state of mind while guarding Lord Rama and his consort Sita sleeping at the dead of night in a fierce jungle, during their fourteen years of exile. 

So, mind invariably remains loaded with a massive crowd of thoughts and feelings, ordinarily difficult to contend with.  Out of them, some of the thoughts lead to action.  Not all thoughts translate into action.  The weaker ones die out.  But every action is necessarily preceded by a thought.  Thinking and feeling, as you are aware, hold the key to all actions on our part.  Evidently, the character, content, and intent of the thoughts and feeling will define the quality of our efforts and fruits of actions thereto.  

What if the thought-crowd occupying the mind becomes unruly, which is in evidence for a large majority?    Mind becomes restive.  It then unmindfully wanders hither and thither, and usually gets lost in the unwieldy thought crowd.  It loses its sense of purpose and direction.  Caught up in this bind, mind loses the sense of alert necessary to invoke one’s faculty of discriminate intelligence for due diligence on account of attention deficiency.         

The question now is: How to ensure picking up qualitative and well-intended thoughts, worthy of leading to happy ending?  It obviously calls for purifying our mind of all inconsequential and undesirable thought imprints.    But for which, mind will be short of the wherewithal necessary for meaningful application.  The irony, however, is that a disorderly mind caught up virtually in an impregnable dense jungle of thoughts, hosting untamed wild thought-animals, by itself cannot find a way out.  Even otherwise, standing on a plane, which hosts problems, it is not easy to find a way out.    

Here comes the role of a Guru. He first enlightens you with your mirror image – the way your mind is inherently predisposed. He then makes you turn your attention inwards to figure out and acknowledge yourself the desire and mind trends, habits & attitudes, as well as virtues & attributes. He then shows the way forward to steer clear of the mental mesh and create ground for restoring orderly functioning of mind.  Following which, he leads you through a step-by-step process to acquire the state of Yoga”. You may then have access to the whole landscape of mind, which knows no limits.  

There are numerous dhyana techniques in circulation across globe, lot many in circulation on U tube channels.  But whatever method you use, the driving spirit of the concept of Yoga as suggested by its proponent sage Patanjali remains: “Citta vritti nirodha” which means cessation of all unwanted thoughts. To attain that state, Patanjali has offered eight-fold sutra – Yama; Niyama; Asana, Pranayama; Pratyahara; Dharana; Dhyana; and Samadhi. 

To be continued……