Philosophy: Stilling the Chatter of the Mind
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(Rough Draft of Talk, might be some typos)
The Annamaya kosha is the realm of the body, and the practices of yoga are our tool for learning how to work consciously with this layer of our being. By posturing our body, and learning to work with it consciously, the body becomes more balanced and harmonious, and this is how we ‘peel’ or ‘chip’ through this layer in order to experience our true nature at a subtler level. We don’t destroy the body in order to dissolve this Kosha, far from it, we actually dissolve it by learning how to work with it.
Similarly, with the pranamaya kosha use pranayama practices to balance and harmonize the breath flow, and as the Sutras and the teachers of this lineage instructed, the ultimate pranayama is simply flowing with our breath— moving with the harmony, not against it.
These same methods and perspectives apply to our next kosha, the manamaya kosha. Here we work with our minds, and the main tool is that of mantra. Mantra is the asana or pranayama of the mind, so to speak. Through mantra we are able to bring balance and harmony to the mind, allowing it to function at its highest potential, just like we do for our body and breath.
Mantra, as you may know, is an empowered sound vibration that pulls your awareness within. It has a power known as Matrika Shakti, which is a suble power that breaks up tension at the layer of your subtle body, allowing energy to flow. When we do postures for our body, we use specific shapes to open up our energy flow, and it is the same with mantra and our subtle body. ShambhavAnanda Yoga’s mantra has been handed down through 4 generations of realized practitioners, and is therefore considered a Chaitanya mantra, meaning living mantra. This means that the mantra itself carries a strong momentum that can accelerate your practice when you use it.
Using a mantra should be thought of in the same way as using a yoga posture or a pranayama. When we don’t use our practice in these realms, we know that it is easy to get out of balance. Ie. When left to our own devices, we tend to fall into our patterns. That’s why we go to a yoga class, do our pranayama practice, or sit regularly.
Because when we don’t use our practice, these natural tools often serve to bind us— as the Spanda Karikas teach, “For those who are fully aware of God consciousness, all the organs of cognition, organs of action and organs of the intellect lead them to that supreme state of God consciousness. For those who are not aware, these same organs deprive them completely of that God consciousness. (Spanda Kārikā 1.20)” So for example, a body not used with consciousness may become injured or diseased. Our breath, when not done consciously, has been shown to tend towards hyper ventilation. And similarly, the mind and senses, when not used consciously, tend toward stress, anxiety, depression etc. As Lakshmanjoo describes in his commentary on this sutra, “Those who are deprived of awareness are pushed down into the field of ignorance. Those who possess the fullness of awareness, however, become completely elevated.”
Moving your body, breath and mind with fuller awareness of God Consciousness simply means using your practice. For example, when you are doing yoga, you are moving your body with a fuller sense of your God Consciousness, and that awareness guides you towards movements that liberate you. The same goes for our breath and our minds. When we use our minds alongside our practice, our mental energy can actually guide us towards growth. But if we are unconscious when using our body, breath or mind, these same faculties spin us in circles, depriving us of our Bliss.
As we said earlier, mantra is the asana or pranayama of the mind. It’s a method by which we direct our mind which allows the mind to guide us towards our true nature. Just like asana and pranayama, mantra should be practiced on its own, but also brought into your life. As you become more familiar with mantra on your cushion, you will naturally begin to bring it with you into your life— just like asana and pranayama. And again, just like our asana and pranayama practice, mantra is not a rejection of reality, but an expansion and harmonizing with that reality. Being conscious of your body while pulling weeds only makes your body work better, being conscious of your breath in a business meeting doesn’t distract you, but helps you stay present. In the same way, mantra isn’t a distraction, or a rejection, of our reality, but a way to begin to actually harmonize with it.
Doing mantra in your life is easier than you think. Sure, there are times when it doesn’t make sense to do mantra— when talking to a friend for example, or during complex mind oriented tasks. But you’d be surprised just how many opportunities there are everyday to bring mantra into your life— it seems that the biggest limitation isn’t opportunity, but simply our attachment to the chatter of our minds.
The chatter of our minds is natural. In fact, its an evolutionary asset that allows for incredible processing and comprehension of our dynamic daily lives. Nueroscientist Carl Zimmer describes it, “You might think that consciousness is orderly, but it is very chaotic and noisy. All of the different parts of the brain engaged in a multi-layered conversation— one of the hallmarks of the conscious brain is a conversational logic back and forth between the different parts. The thing you’re seeing creates signals in back of head, they go to the front of your head, then back again, forward and back, forward and back.” In the Yoga Sutras Patanjali describes this mental chatter as the “thought waves of the mind”. And just like the dialogue between a captain and her crew, this chatter might help us navigate our ships to our horizontal destinations, but this chatter doesn’t necessarily allow us to dive within ourselves below that surface. There are a lot of great sea captains in the world, but how many of them have that same degree of inner awareness? As Patanjali teaches, if we are caught in these thought waves, “the fluctuating states of the mind cloud the perception (1.4)”, that is we might get to port on time, but are are we happy when we land?
Again, there is no doubt that this chatter is necessary to guide our ships to the many ports of our daily lives. But there might be a lot of space between commands that could be used to guide our awareness towards the port of our heart, to calm our inner seas and allow us to feel content even while we work. This is the work of the yogi captain, navigating the waters above and below simultaneously, the very definition of Shambhavi in Sanskrit, and the first teaching of Patanjali’s Sutras when he tells us, “The main practice of yoga is to calm these thought waves (1.2)”.
For our work today I want to focus on one important part of this process— Our biggest limitation when working with our minds is not our mind itself, but our attachment to the constant chatter of our minds. A vast majority of our mental processing does not occur in perceiving our reality, but in re-acting and re-filtering those perceptions endlessly. Everyday there is some thought looping through our minds, a single thought that gets re-thought, and re-thought endlessly. The thought itself morphs and changes, and unites with other thoughts, so that we don’t recognize how much this one thought is being recycled. And in the end, most of our mental activity is really this self-chatter.
As Babaji teaches, “We have a constant commercial running in our heads about who we are, what we want, and what we need, what is going to happen tomorrow and what happened yesterday. This movie is constantly playing, and we are caught up in it. That is really not who we are. Being able to witness the comings and goings of all our mental activity is a very desirable state to achieve.” We are addicted to the experience of chatter itself, to the white noise of our minds— even if it exhausts us, which it always does.
Our work with mantra does not exist to destroy the mind, or engage it in battle, but to simply give us a way to begin to experience something other than the self-chatter, to begin to hear the space behind our thoughts, the stillness below the surface.
As Babaji continues to teach in the same satsang: “Sitting and just thinking is not meditation. Meditation involves focusing the mind. In our tradition, mantra and pranayama are ways to do that. They help us get beyond the superficial chatter of our minds that we all have to deal with to obtain some separation from our small minds. When we can do a mantra and keep our attention on it, we may not always stop thinking, but what happens is that we are able to tell the difference between our everyday minds and being focused inside. We learn to stay conscious of a particular mantra or a practice. In the end we gradually begin to reach the witness state, where we clearly observe the activity of the mind.”
The witness state is a description of the greatest depths of our mind, the still waters deep deep deep below the surface. This is described in the ancient texts as the ‘dreamless sleep’ state of our mind, as opposed to the waking and dreaming states that occur closer to the choppy surface. Science has recently shown that this dreamless sleep state is not devoid of perception— that you are still hearing sounds around you, and feeling, but that this state is actually defined by its lack of internal chatter. And it is precisely this lack of inner chatter that keeps us in the ‘dreamless sleep state’, the anesthesized state.
As —- stated in a scientific interview, “[During Anesthesia] The neurons talk but not to each other. When some neurons are talking, the others can’t listen. So there might be a lot of talking going on, but consciousness seems to be the brain talking and listening to itself.” What keeps the neurons from talking to each other, according to the science of anesthesia, is a big slow sweeping brain wave, moving through your entire brain about 1 time per second— which is really slow for a brain wave. This slow wave effectively interrupts the chatter, and like was said before, science is saying that it is literally the disruption of chatter that defines the anesthetized state.
—— described this phenomenon with a simple and fun analogy— the wave at a baseball stadium. If you’ve ever been to a stadium during ’the wave’, you might know this feeling— you see the wave coming, and when it comes you have to stop your conversation, stand up, and say “HEEEEY!” Or whatever sounds that actually is. Then you sit back down and try to restart your conversation, but by the time you remember what you were talking about, and get through a couple of sentences, here comes the wave again, so you stop, put your nachos on the ground, stand up, “HEEEEEEEEY!”, and then start over, only to once again barely get through a thought before dropping everything again.
As —- concludes, “When the wave is going on in the stadium, you can’t have a normal conversation, you can’t have a normal thought, because its coming by every couple seconds to interrupt you. That is the rationale for how these oscillations disrupt brain activity.”
The difference between anesthesia and the dreamless sleep state of the mind is that the yogi is able to go there consciously. This is obviously a very high state of being, but as we practice we are ‘going there’ little by little for sure— but this is not something that only occurs in the enlightened practitioner, it is what makes your life better as you practice.
So if our brain is the stadium, and the white noise chatter is our day to day activity— the wave rolling through the stadium is our mantra. Just like our brains on anesthesia, or ourselves at the ball park, we can still hear and see what’s going on around us, but we just aren’t chatting about it as much. And this lack of chatter makes all the difference— wow.
To think back to Patanjali’s teachings, “The main practice of yoga is to calm the thought waves. When this technique is mastered, the practitioner is able to keep a steady focus inside on his or her own true nature, the Self (1.2,1.3)”. Calming the thought waves is literally what brings you into contact with your true nature— and calming the thought waves is totally within our power, it doesn’t mean shutting yourself up in your closet, it simply means quieting the chatter, the re-actions, the constant back and forth of our thoughts— this is how we calm the mind. Our external world can exist fully outside of us, and we can function fully within it. And of course, this is the very nature of our practice in ShambhavAnanda Yoga, as the Sanskrit word “Shambhava” means to have one’s eyes open with their attention inside. So we see the world, but we don’t chit chat about it as much, and according to neuroscience and the science of yoga, this makes all the difference.