Kether
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@Coagvla said
"... anyone to discuss these ideas with, especially people of the calibre I've found in this forum. I have done a lot of work these past years and have found many of the answers already to the questions I've asked here. However, I think it's really helpful to check my ideas with people who are so switched on, if you don't agree with me or think I may be on the wrong track then I really do want to hear it. I'm not trying to sell anything or prove anything and I consider someone disagreeing me as valuable as someone who agrees. So, if you could explain how you think I may be on the wrong track with my ideas you would be doing me a favour (I also think that you would benefit from being able to clearly explain your ideas). And if it turns out we don't agree then so be it, individuality must always come before confirming. ..."
Just have to note that we have very similar motivations for being here, and due to that I find your position on this quite gratifying
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My take on this is ... (sorry should I repeat stuff that is common knowledge here or to some, I'm just ordering my reflections on this as I write):
Samadhi is a state of deep concentration on a meditation object. As this is the first state at which what is usually internally modelled as a perceiver and something perceived, undergo a fusion of sorts, it often happens that people can not or only partially remember or reconstruct what actually happened after the experience.
That changes if the experience is repeated often. Self-reflection can then reach a level at which some sort of meta-perception can perceive the processes of perceiving, perceived and the creation of (reality? existence?) out of these polar opposites and translate that experience "down" into everyday consciousness. That is where the "meta-samadhi's" or higher samadhi's start which are reflective levels upon samadhi, these are described in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika for example.
The highest form of Samadhi is probably Nirvikalpasamadhi, which from the way it is described is possibly having a samadhi on samadhi? I am out of my league there as I have never experienced this form of samadhi (yet?).
Building on this, from my experiences and comparisons to other's descriptions of theirs - so not entirely sure about the generalisability (is that a proper word?) - think that the HGA experience is a samadhi on one's own self. And Crowley attributed Nirvikalpasamadhi to Kether.
That would be my take, always interested myself in the experiences and interpretations of others (presuming that those interpretations are also based on experiences).
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@Simon Iff said
"Samadhi is a state of deep concentration on a meditation object. As this is the first state at which what is usually internally modelled as a perceiver and something perceived, undergo a fusion of sorts, it often happens that people can not or only partially remember or reconstruct what actually happened after the experience.
"This sounds more like dhyana. Samadhi is higher than that.
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@Patrick Ossoski said
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@Simon Iff said
"Samadhi is a state of deep concentration on a meditation object. As this is the first state at which what is usually internally modelled as a perceiver and something perceived, undergo a fusion of sorts, it often happens that people can not or only partially remember or reconstruct what actually happened after the experience."This sounds more like dhyana. Samadhi is higher than that."
Higher in what way? Which phenomena are missing from my description in your opinion? As said, I am interested in the experiences of others too, as this helps to understand and inform mine.
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@Aleister Crowley said
"Dhyana resembles Samadhi in many respects. There is a union of the ego and the non-ego, and a loss of the senses of time and space and causality. Duality in any form is abolished. The idea of time involves that of two consecutive things, that of space two non-coincident things, that of causality two connected things.
These Dhyanic conditions contradict those of normal thought; but in Samadhi they are very much more marked than in Dhyana. And while in the latter it seems like a simple union of two things, in the former it appears as if all things rushed together and united. One might say that in Dhyana there was still this quality latent, that the One existing was opposed to the Many non-existing; in Samadhi the Many and the One are united in a union of Existence with non-Existence. This definition is not made from reflection, but from memory.
Further, it is easy to master the "trick" or "knack" of Dhyana. After a while one can get into that state without preliminary practice; and, looking at it from this point, one seems able to reconcile the two meanings of the word which we debated in the last section. From below Dhyana seems like a trance, an experience so tremendous that one cannot think of anything bigger, while from above it seems merely a state of mind as natural as any other. Frater P., before he had Samadhi, wrote of Dhyana: "Perhaps as a result of the intense control a nervous storm breaks: this we call Dhyana. Samadhi is but an expansion of this, so far as I can see.""
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Hi Patrick, thanks, I did already know Crowley's description!
The latter being samadhi and the former dhyana in your quote "in the latter it seems like a simple union of two things, in the former it appears as if all things rushed together and united" that doesn't change anything I wrote as far as I can see, Crowley describes samadhi as a clearer experience of the self/non-self union than dhyana.
I was perhaps fuzzy about the Existence/non-Existence part ... the surprising thing (for me) is to find out that one still exists after observer and observed have merged. That has some quite deep ontological implications concerning the relationship of qualia and "outside world" - and the question if/how/to what extent the two are different at all, perhaps even concerning the possibility of survival of one's biological death.
The "loss of the senses of time and space and causality" is a direct consequence of the fusion of self and non-self, methinks.
Regards
Simon
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The difference between dhyana and samadhi seems to be a matter of intensity (I may, of course, be totally wrong). The initial reason I thought your first description looked more like dhyana was because it seemed to be too "shallow", while samadhi is supposed to be, you know, totally awesome and greatest thing ever.
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@Patrick Ossoski said
"The difference between dhyana and samadhi seems to be a matter of intensity (I may, of course, be totally wrong). The initial reason I thought your first description looked more like dhyana was because it seemed to be too "shallow", while samadhi is supposed to be, you know, totally awesome and greatest thing ever.
"In Qabalistic terms (rather than descriptive language), I would distinguish them thus:
Dhyana: The exact threshold between Yetzirah and Briah, here (figuratively) the veil is withdrawn. Its phenomena are those of the Yetziratic aspects of the psyche (especially intellect, emotion, and imagery) being impactedf and affected by the Briatic.
Samadhi: Abiding in Briatic consciousness.
In the model of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, dharana is standing before the veil before the Holy of Holies; dhyana is opening the veil; and samadhi is stepping within the Holy of Holies.
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@Patrick Ossoski said
"The difference between dhyana and samadhi seems to be a matter of intensity"
I agree.
@Patrick Ossoski said
"The initial reason I thought your first description looked more like dhyana was because it seemed to be too "shallow", while samadhi is supposed to be, you know, totally awesome and greatest thing ever.
"I don't know if you have personal experience with these two states, but my first dhyana which happened when I was 17 and no one could explain to me what had actually happened also had a definite "totally awesome and greatest thing ever" feel to it. I was like, WTF did just happen? It was great somehow, and totally - cleansing - of the small background thoughts babbling for weeks even after the event.
Later, my first samadhi came more gradually and with more and regular exercise and experience and more like "ah, so that is what it's like" - that is when I started to remember what actually happened "in there"
Obviously, personal experience & interpretation are subjective in and of themselves, and one needs input to find out what is objective and whatnot.
I find Ken Wilber's holon theory interesting - that every "higher" - or, from that POV, more integral - state of consciousness encompasses and includes all "lower" states, and the first experiences with a new state are usually totally awesome, later one develops a bit of a distance from a more encompassing POV and so the old awesomenesses are just possible states of mind then ...
Cheers
Simon
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@Jim Eshelman said
"In Qabalistic terms (rather than descriptive language), I would distinguish them thus:
Dhyana: The exact threshold between Yetzirah and Briah, here (figuratively) the veil is withdrawn. Its phenomena are those of the Yetziratic aspects of the psyche (especially intellect, emotion, and imagery) being impactedf and affected by the Briatic.
Samadhi: Abiding in Briatic consciousness.
In the model of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, dharana is standing before the veil before the Holy of Holies; dhyana is opening the veil; and samadhi is stepping within the Holy of Holies."
Thanks, that was enormously useful for me to connect your usage of the words yetziratic and briatic consciousness with personal experiences.
Allow me a counter-question if I have correctly connected some dots: In your language, raising the kundalini into sahasrara chakra should lead beyond the abyss and into aziluthic consciousness then, is that correct?
Cheers
L
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@Jim Eshelman said
"In Qabalistic terms (rather than descriptive language), I would distinguish them thus:
(...)
In the model of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, dharana is standing before the veil before the Holy of Holies; dhyana is opening the veil; and samadhi is stepping within the Holy of Holies."
Thanks, that's very helpful.
@Simon Iff said
"I don't know if you have personal experience with these two states,"
None at all! I already kind of said that, but I should have had made it clear. Any information I provided was purely theoretical.
@Simon Iff said
"but my first dhyana which happened when I was 17 and no one could explain to me what had actually happened also had a definite "totally awesome and greatest thing ever" feel to it. I was like, WTF did just happen? It was great somehow, and totally - cleansing - of the small background thoughts babbling for weeks even after the event."
I see. Sounds fascinating.
(I'm about to turn 17, but I don't have prospect of achieving dhyana this year. You probably had a better pace.
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@Simon Iff said
"Allow me a counter-question if I have correctly connected some dots: In your language, raising the kundalini into sahasrara chakra should lead beyond the abyss and into aziluthic consciousness then, is that correct?"
I've never been satisfied that any of the assignments of chakra openings and kundalini risings were quite right. I think they're scaled all wrong. For example, the claim that "kundalini rising to the heart is the K&C" is nuts - that particular rise happens too easily and too quickly aftert the current starts moving in the first place.
I had rises routinely to ajna, and to the edge of the sahasrara pretty routinely during my Abramelin-esque operation, and kinda lost track of it after that - in retrospect I'd have to say the final breakthrough on the last morning crossed fully into the crown, but that wasn't the focus of my attention. (That is, it's not like I was sitting and thinking, "Oh, look, the snake reached the crown.") Let's see if I can find some passages from the part of the diary of have access to remotely.
@Day 10 said
"I began to raise an energy, kundalini-like. I saw the rose pink light dance at the heart, then turn into an actual rose (the flower), which opened to disclose incredibly bright light, somewhat yel-lowed from white. It absorbed my attention almost exclusively.
I spent much time opening the heart and throat – and even, somewhat, Ajna. The real opening of the heart, the “hatching” of what is therein, was an important key to this. As it grew, and as Ajna also became the focus of energy, I spent several long periods in high-pitched silence, in virtually vibrating stillness."
@Day 15 said
"Not so potent. The energized enthusiasm wasn’t there. No clear sense of invocation per se, though I know [the Angel] is always with me. However, the higher centers opened, and the kundalini rose easily to at least Ajna. There was a tentative sense of it exceeding that rise, and verging on Sahasrara. At the end, I felt the need to lift my sword and feel the red light of Ra-Hoor-Khuit flow through it."
@Day 53 said
"The link, though not “mind-blowing” powerful, is almost always easy, sure. The energy nearly always rises to Ajna, but never so powerfully tonight as, say, to create consistent automatic rigidity. The inner silence is easy and sure, but did not “halt me in my tracks.” Good, basic, sure – hopefully increasing the link."
@Day 94 said
"All evening, the Presence has frequently, repeatedly, spontaneously made itself known. He surges through my heart and throat centers, slides through my brain, draws me tightly inward to a core of light."
A few hours later, during the climax of the operation, there was nothing written within this framework. I'm intrigued by much of the diary language - in particular, the frequency of references to "a thousand," and some of the perceptions of the world - but I wasn't thinking in chakra terms. (I was barely thinking.) Here's one passage:
@Day 94 said
"Beautiful. I am thy Bride, thy Mate, O Thou whose Silence exceeds the songs of a thousand worlds, whose Touch thrills me as the caresses of a Lover beyond lovers, whose Image is only reflected in a thousand thousand images, world without end, which are but broken up reflections of THAT which, even now before Thy beautiful face, I see not... Thou art seen in every fragmented image of every Created thing; but it is Thee, behind and beyond, Who art fully and without diminution in my heart."
I'm not sure how helpful that might be to you. It might show, at least, why I am sceptical of the attribution of the higher chakras to trans-abyssmal experience, regardless of how the body scales on the Tree.
Come to think of it... I have a theory about this. (It came so long after the period from which the diary excerpts originated, and never linked back to them. Doing so now.) The question is, Where (at what layer) are the chakras? I believe the answer is that they have physiological, neural counterparts (cognates) in the physical body, and the chakras as we know them exist in Yetzirah.
This theory comes from several scraps of observations. I'd always been puzzled by the fact that Gopi Krishna (whom I respect enormously) said he never saw a chakra at any point in his decades-long unfurling of kundalini. He didn't think they existed, that they were all superstitious. Yet I'd seen them repeatedly (more or less constantly during some periods), and could work with their energy in others quite easily. Puzzling to me...
Then, long after I'd last thought of the question, I had a practical need to train some students to work with other people's chakras directly. I realized I hadn't much seen them in years. I went into meditation and they weren't obvious until I "refocussed" my mind to a different "focal length" and, suddenly, there they were, more vivid than ever. Spending some time looking at them, then shifting my "focal length" forward and back, I realized that it wasn't (as I'd thought in the beginning) just a matter of "getting out" far enough to see them - it was a matter of looking at the exact place they were located. When used to looking at Briatic levels of reality, I missed them. I had to "pull the focus back."
This then made sense, because the kind of differentiated imagery of the chakras isn't characteristic of Briah. The "interior stars," or seven planetary energies, exist in a nonlinear relationship in Briah, one flowing into the other so that the lines between them, though conceivably clear at a given moment of witnessing, are otherwise nonexistent. (I'm sitting watching this as I type.)
So... bottom line... I think chakras as normally conceived are Yetziratic phenomena with Assiatic correlaries; so that their "topping out" only tops out Yetzirah. A deeper process of integration bridges Briah to Atziluth.
That, at least, is my current best shot at describing what it looks like from my island.
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In an ocassion in a 4chan discussion about the limits and the outsides of the universe and the Big Bang, I read a point that in some way made me thought about Kether and so on. I didn´t copied it, so it would be not exactly like it was, but he (or she, though in 4chan there are no women as they say) said that there cannot be limits in the universe, because when you say "outside", you are putting outside and inside in relation, so the "outside" became a part of the total thing. That, applied to the universe limits discussion and so on, became somehow a very good mental frame for the idea of paradoxal unity or something. But maybe it is really a used cliche thing, I don´t know. Also, I like very much the phrase "Time destroys everything" that appears in a Gaspar Noe film, though it would not be maybe so good reference in some sense.
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@Faus said
"(Jim, off topic silly question about the chakras. Are they placed over the spine or inside the body?)"
The physical correlaries are in the nervous system. The chakras themselves, though - which I think are Yetziratic - would be in the astral body, normally in about the same place in physical and astral.
They are classically said to be in the spine, and it does appear to be the case. However, their effects pass all the way through the body from back to front. (It almost looks like a round tunnel to me.) And they don't emerge "straight through" - there is back-to-front angling. Thus, though Manipura (for example) is the solar plexus, its location in the spine is a bit below this, at the thorasic-lumbar juncture. I think this accounts for those ancient pictures showing it in the stomach region, because that's what it's "behind" in the body.
In the spine, they are primarily at the centers or junctures of the various segments: Visuddha in the center of the cervical curve, Anahatta at the center of the dorsal (or thoracic) curve, Manipura at the thoracic-lumbar juncture, Svadisthana at the lumbo-sacral juncture, and Mula Dhara at the coccyx.
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@Simon Iff said
"
I don't know if you have personal experience with these two states, but my first dhyana which happened when I was 17 and no one could explain to me what had actually happened also had a definite "totally awesome and greatest thing ever" feel to it. I was like, WTF did just happen? It was great somehow, and totally - cleansing - of the small background thoughts babbling for weeks even after the event.Later, my first samadhi came more gradually and with more and regular exercise and experience and more like "ah, so that is what it's like" - that is when I started to remember what actually happened "in there"
"My experiences are very similar. Usually the awesomeness of the first experiences is what keeps you motivated to go forward (at least at the beginning) and consequently the dryness of the follow-up can be a challenge to overcome. One learns to be happy about the small things, I guess!
@Jim Eshelman said
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@Patrick Ossoski said
"The difference between dhyana and samadhi seems to be a matter of intensity (I may, of course, be totally wrong). The initial reason I thought your first description looked more like dhyana was because it seemed to be too "shallow", while samadhi is supposed to be, you know, totally awesome and greatest thing ever."In Qabalistic terms (rather than descriptive language), I would distinguish them thus:
Dhyana: The exact threshold between Yetzirah and Briah, here (figuratively) the veil is withdrawn. Its phenomena are those of the Yetziratic aspects of the psyche (especially intellect, emotion, and imagery) being impactedf and affected by the Briatic.
Samadhi: Abiding in Briatic consciousness.
In the model of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, dharana is standing before the veil before the Holy of Holies; dhyana is opening the veil; and samadhi is stepping within the Holy of Holies."
That is an interesting perspective and thank you Jim for that! It certainly helps me in putting my prior experiences better into context. However, aren't we overthinking it a little bit, I feel? I'm not sure it's all that complicated, though certainly the apparent subjectivity of experiences makes things difficult.
[:6yejgiid] Dharana = Non-distracted concentration on an object, awareness of meditation persists, separate senses of self and object remain. [/
6yejgiid]
[:6yejgiid] Dhyana = Concentration persists, awareness of the act of meditation begins to disappear and becomes a sense of being/existing, but the separate senses of self and object still remain.[/6yejgiid]
[:6yejgiid] Samadhi = The sense of self is dissolved (ego-loss) and no boundary exists between the mind and the object perceived (or perhaps indeed anything).[/6yejgiid]Dharana is simply what happens when you are no longer distracted out of meditation and is the basis for the practice. Dhyana starts seeing a modification on the sense of self, perhaps through the difficult to answer and very poignant question of "who is meditating?", as well as along with an evolving experience of the previously three distinct parts of perceived phenomena: perceiver, perceived and act of perceiving. Finally, samadhi sees a total change of sense of selfhood, like the proverbial white paper disappearing against the white background.
That does get muddied up a little bit by there being distinct forms of samadhi though, but in my view it seems to map quite well onto Jim's framework as well.
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@Deus Ex Machina said
"That is an interesting perspective and thank you Jim for that! It certainly helps me in putting my prior experiences better into context. However, aren't we overthinking it a little bit, I feel? I'm not sure it's all that complicated, though certainly the apparent subjectivity of experiences makes things difficult. "
Interesting perspective. I think of it as a simplification. The Four Worlds are pretty basic.
No, I don't think it's merely persistence that distinguishes these. There is a qualitative difference.
"Dhyana = Concentration persists, awareness of the act of meditation begins to disappear and becomes a sense of being/existing, but the separate senses of self and object still remain."
That describes a very high Yetziratic level. (Rather than "separate senses of self and object still remain," I'd say, "distinctions between two things still remain.")
"Samadhi = The sense of self is dissolved (ego-loss) and no boundary exists between the mind and the object perceived (or perhaps indeed anything)."
That's a description of the basic Briatic characteristic: Disinctions of true separation cease to exist.
I think what I said is simpler because it's not just giving a list of symptoms - it's describing the basic state of consciousness out of which those symptoms arise.
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My intention with conjuring the idea of simplification was to go toward an explanation that doesn't require specialist language or terminology. You're right, your framework certainly qualifies as a useful simplification (in the positive sense of the word), but it does require familiarity with the Four Worlds and related constructs. Of course, that's not an odd thing to assume or propose on this forum, heh.
For me personally, having had a variety of meditational experiences before having an understanding of those other concepts, which I am working on to understand better both intellectually and experimentally, it feels useful to lay it out so I can map correspondences and verify the checksum code, so to speak. So maybe I was just talking to myself!