Dharana is the point where you actually begin to experience the real nature of your consciousness. Until pratyahara you are observing the responses, the reactions, the interactions of your mind with the world, and its influence on you. In dharana you begin to experience your own self. In the practice of dharana, the focus is not only the intellectual component, but also the pranic component. In pratyahara you are observing everything, observing the thoughts. In ajapa japa, you are observing the mantra in the frontal passage, in the back passage, in the upper region, in the lower region. In chidakasha you are looking at colours, shapes, figures and images. When you come to dharana, you move away from the mental experiences into the pranic.
Hydrogen and oxygen come together to create a third evolute, water. In the same manner, logic or the subtle mental components and emotional components come together to form a pratyaya. Pratyaya is not only intellectual or emotional, it is a combination of both. Bhakti yoga manages the emotional energy, raja yoga manages the mental, subtle energy. A pratyaya which contains both needs both the principles of bhakti yoga and raja yoga to manage its own self, its own conditioning. In pratyahara you gain an ability to look at yourself, and not be intimidated by yourself. When you have that ability, you move into dharana to remove the emotional content from the pratyaya, the memory and the conditioning.
Therefore, the first level of dharana is recognizing the mood congruence of each item like happiness, sadness, anxiety, frustration, depression, kindness. They are all different emotions. If you think of happiness, there will be a group of memories which will come up, and they will all be happy memories. That is known as the happy mood congruence. If you think of sadness, all those memories which contain sadness will come up together, and it is a mood congruence. In every experience in life an emotion will always come up with its own associations, files, folders and participants in that story. You have to select one.
Suppose, as an example, I choose a happy memory. Which memory shall I look at? I feel I was very happy when my father and my friends were celebrating my twelfth birthday. So that memory is highlighted. The picture comes. I see myself standing in front of the table with the birthday cake, with my parents behind me, with all my friends around me, smiling, happy and clapping. Not only am I happy, everyone else around me is happy. I use that image. I focus on it, in the experience of happiness. Then the dharana practice begins, which is the identification with the experience of happiness. When the practice ends, take away the colour from the image of the memory, make it black and white, and let it recede into the background. That is one type of dharana.
Different literatures and scriptures have defined dharana differently. Tantra says anything can be dharana, provided you immerse yourself in that identity. You can focus on breath, on a dot, the moon, the sun, on anything. If you study Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, there are over one hundred techniques. If you study the book Yoga Darshan, there are three groups of dharanas: chidakasha, hridayakasha, daharakasha. So there are many techniques of dharana. There are less techniques of pratyahara and more techniques of dharana. This is an interesting point. Pratyahara follows a specified path. The road from Munger to Jamalpur is a specific path, and pratyahara follows that path. Dharana is not a path. Dharanas are peaks of experiences where you can establish yourself and when you are established, it becomes a dharana. You are in it. You are immersed in it.
For example, when you go to swim in the ocean, you are practising dharana. You are in the middle of the ocean on a boat, no land anywhere around you. You jump in the ocean for a swim. You swim everywhere, yet you always have your sight on your boat, and you always come back to your boat. That is dharana. When you are at the beach, you swim out a little bit, then you stand up and walk a little bit, then you cross the waters and go over to another spot. You are not focusing at one point. You can go to any point on the beach. You can start from point A, swim a little bit, walk a little bit, swim a little bit, and go anywhere along the beach. Wherever you go, the experience will be different. The visuals will be different, the surroundings will be different, the people will be different. Over there a man was walking with a dog, here three people are sunbathing, over there somebody is drinking a glass of juice or beer in the shop. At every place that you come to, you have a different experience. When all these distractions have gone and you have only one thing to focus on, the boat, and the rest is only water, then, even if you dive deep, it won’t matter because you will come back up and look around to see where the boat is. You will make sure that you are not far from the boat. That is dharana.
Dharana is fixing oneself, pratyahara is observing.
Therefore, the yogis say you can fix yourself at any point. You can fix your mind even on the breath, or on a dot on the wall. At night you can look at a star and fix your mind. Fixing the mind is one thing and experiencing the fixing of the mind naturally is another thing. If I ask you to fix your mind on a tree and practise tree dharana, what will you experience? It will be an intellectual understanding, ‘I believe that this area is the trunk. I believe that this area is the root. I believe that this area is the branch.’ You are thinking, you are bringing your intellect into play. I would not call that dharana.
Once I was travelling by road in a car as a passenger. During the journey on the side of the road, we came upon a small lake, and there were huge willow trees around the lake. Suddenly I lost my mind. I became the tree. In one moment I experienced myself as a tree, with my roots in the squishy muddy water, insects on the surface, the trunk, the branches, the leaves, the sway of the wind, the movement of the wind, the hardness of the branch, the softness of the gentle twig. All at once, it was like hundreds of experiences in one small second. That was my first experience of dharana. I don’t know how long it lasted, maybe not more than a few seconds, but those few seconds at that time felt to me like ten minutes. Even the concept of time changed. It was not the seconds of the watch face that was the time for me, but the time that I was living in myself became the time for me. Outside maybe four, five seconds must have passed. Inside my mind, going through all these experiences it was like ten minutes full of flooding the mind with information.
That is dharana, not that I think that I have become a tree, but the experience. Not only the experience, but also the shock, ‘What happened? I have become that.’ It is the shock that will denote that you are in dharana, not your logic. It is the shock that will tell you, ‘What happened? Where did I go? What happened to time? I thought I was meditating for ten minutes, half an hour, but only a few seconds seem to have gone by.’ I am telling you this so that you remember that dharana is not something that you can analyse. It is an experience that will pull you in, and if sustained, becomes meditation. The sustained experience of dharana converts itself later into meditation, the dhyana state.
11 October 2023, Raja Yoga-Bhakti Yoga, Ganga Darshan, Munger