Mystic Mantra: Achieving dhyan through karma

There is a lady who has been doing dhyan for quite some time. Every day 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 practising it for long, set me thinking. Why do people do dhyan? It is foolish to think that dhyan would make you immortal. 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. 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.

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. That is a superhigh thought, a disturbance in your dhyan. 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.

Yogi Ashwini, the guiding light of Dhyan Foundation, is an authority on yoga, tantra and the Vedic sciences. His book is Sanatan Kriya, The Ageless Dimension. Contact him at dhyan@dhyanfoundation.com