Mystic Mantra: Achieving dhyan through karma

There is a lady who has been doing dhyan for quite some time. Everyday without fail she would write to me seeking my blessings, so that she can move ahead in dhyan. Recently, I got an email from her asking if I could help her find a camera that got lost recently.

Such emails, specially from those who have been practicing it for long, set me thinking. Why do people do dhyan? Most of the people who come to me either want to pass an exam, some want a better job or relationship or 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 really am a yog guru or am I a consultant to whom people come for solutions to their various problems.

It is foolish to think that dhyan 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 trinity, can violate those laws. If you want to make your life better in any way, then focus on social activities not dhyan. 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 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 dhyan, 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 dhyan 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 dhyan you block those thoughts, because those are your vrittis and yog, 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 superhigher thoughts.

What are superhigher thoughts? For instance, during the day you saw someone breaking the leg of a dog and while sitting for dhyan, the incident generates anger in you and you think that you should have intervened and prevented that from happening. That is a superhigh thought, but that too is a disturbance in your dhyan. So after a stage, even the superhigher 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 will the thought of dhyan and yog come to you, only then can you reach a thoughtless stage. Thereafter the state of dhyan comes.