Dhyana Meditation

This is from a good friends blog, and originally from Llewellyn Vaughn Lee, a Jungian Analyst/Sufi Teacher :) I have been doing the practice consistently for a few weeks and it has many positive levels :)

Dhyana meditation connecting heart and mindfulness . .

" The heart meditation that we practiced was developed in India, where it is also known as dhyana meditation:For the heart meditation, as long as the body is relaxed the physical position does not matter: one can sit or even lie down.

The first stage in this meditation is to evoke the feeling of love, which activates the heart chakra. This can be done in a number of ways, the simplest of which is to think of someone whom we love. This can be God, the great Beloved. But often at the beginning God is an idea rather than a living reality within the heart, and it is easier to think of a person whom we love, a lover, a friend.

Love has many different qualities. For some the feeling of love is warmth, or a sweetness, a

softness or tenderness, while for others it

is peace, tranquility or silence. Love can also come as a pain, a

heartache, a sense of loss. However love comes to us, we immerse

ourself in this feeling; we place all of ourself in the love within the heart.

When we have evoked the feeling of love, thoughts will come, intrude

into our mind—what we did the day before, what we have to do tomorrow. Memories will float by, images appear before the mind’s eye. We have to imagine that we are getting hold of every thought, every image and feeling, and drowning it, merging it into the feeling of love.

Every feeling, especially the feeling of love, is much more dynamic

than the thinking process, so if one does this practice well, with the utmost concentration, all thoughts will disappear. Nothing will remain.

The mind will be empty. The state of dhyana is a complete abstraction of the senses in which the mind is stilled by the energy of love within the heart, and the individual mind is absorbed into the universal mind. The actual experience of dhyana rarely happens during the first practice of meditation. It may take months, even a few years, to reach this stage. And once we do begin to experience dhyana we may not realize it. The initial experiences of dhyana usually last for just a split second—for an instant the mind dips into the infinite and just for a

moment we are not present. There may be little or no consciousness

that this has happened; the mind may not even be aware that it was absent. But gradually, the mind disappears for longer and longer periods; we become aware that our mind has shut down. The experience can for some time seem like sleep, since sleep is the nearest equivalent we have ever known to this mindless state.

The experience of dhyana deepens as the lover is immersed deeper and deeper into a reality beyond the mind. More and more one tastes the peace, stillness, and profound sense of wellbeing of a far vaster reality where the problems that surround us so much of the time do not exist—a reality beyond the difficulties of duality and the limitations of the world of the mind and senses, into which, for a little while each day, meditation allows us to merge. Dhyana is the first stage in the

meditation of the heart. It is, as Irina Tweedie described it, “the first stage after transcending the thinking faculty of the mind, and from the point of view of the intellect it must be considered as an unconscious state. It is the first step beyond consciousness as we know it.”(6)In dhyana, the heart is activated and the energy of love slows down the mind. The mind loses its power of control and individual consciousness is lost, at first for an instant and then gradually for longer periods of time. The lover becomes absorbed, drowned in the ocean of love.

Then in this state of unconsciousness a higher level of consciousness, or samadhi, begins to awaken. The evolution of dhyana into samadhi happens “by easy degrees,” as “the highest stages of dhyana are gradually transformed into the lower stage of samadhi, which is still not completely conscious,” and this less-conscious state leads in turn to the higher state of samadhi, which “represents a full awakening

of one’s own divinity.”(7)

The experiences of samadhi cannot easily be described. They belong to a level of reality beyond the mind, to a dimension of unity in which everything is merged, where the mind, operating as it does by making distinctions, cannot get a foothold. In samadhi we begin to experience our true nature which is a state of oneness: we are what we experience. Gradually we glimpse, are infused with, the all-encompassing unity and energy of love that belong to the Self and

underlie all life. And this oneness is not a static state, but a highly dynamic state of being that is constantly changing. Also our experience of it changes: no two meditations are the same and our experience becomes deeper and richer, more and more complete. On this plane of

unity everything has its own place and fulfills its real purpose. Here the true nature of everything that is created is present as an expression of divine oneness and divine glory. In the outer world we

experience only a fragmented sense of our self and our life. Here everything is complete and we come to know that everything is just as it should be.