Bask in the Sun

One way to think about meditation is that it’s like a cat basking in the sun.  Gradually our minds dissolve in the sunshine.  The sun does the work.  All we do is enjoy the warmth. The sunshine is consciousness or love.  The cat is the mind. The mind basks in consciousness or love, soaks in it, […]

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How to Stop Pain and Increase Energy Flow

In 2004 a man named Robert Harry Hover published a book that almost nobody has heard of called Internal Moving Healing. It describes a dirt-simple technique for stopping pain and promoting energy flow in the body. I tried it a few months ago on back pain that had hurt for years. After one session, the […]

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Ramana Maharshi 1

From Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi number 628: Mrs. D. said there were breaks in her awareness and desired to know how the awareness might be made continuous. A break is a lapse or absence. Awareness is a synonym for consciousness. “Breaks in her awareness” means that Mrs. D. is slipping out of consciousness and […]

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Conscious Sleep

Last summer I experienced conscious sleep for the first time. I mean conscious deep sleep, not lucid dreaming. In this article I’ll describe what it felt like. Conscious sleep is mentioned in some of the upanishads, especially the Mandukya Upanishad, which says that the three states of consciousness — waking, dreaming, and deep sleep — […]

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The Effortless Thought-Free State

In response to How To Stay Conscious 1 a friend wrote: The only question I have regarding the sadhana you have posted about is about effort. Any attempt to consciously still the mind is contrary to my nature and experience. Even repeating a mantra is for a set period of time and then I just […]

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The Emotion that Has No Name

Part 1 The folks who write advertisements often call movies ‘heartwarming’. They wouldn’t do this unless they were sure that most people know what ‘heartwarming’ means. A movie is ‘heartwarming’ if it makes you feel a certain way. If it causes a certain emotion. What’s the name of this well-known emotion? This is a trick […]

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How to Stay Conscious 2

Let’s call this tip the bouncing-tennis-ball method. I’m giving it a stupid name but as you’ll see, it’s a technique for attaining samadhi taught by Patanjali in the ancient Yoga Sutras. Sadhana doesn’t get more serious than that! I assume you’ve read my article How to Stop Thoughts and understand what it means to be […]

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How to Stay Conscious 1

I assume you know what it’s like to be conscious. If not, you can find out by following the suggestions in my article How to Stop Thoughts. The next step is to remain in that state as intensely as possible, as frequently as possible, and as long as possible. Most people find this hard to […]

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Sadhana 1

Sadhana means ‘practice’ in Sanskrit, the language of Hindu scriptures.   ‘Sadhanas’ are exercises or techniques that can help people get enlightened. I’ve named this sadhana ‘Number One’ because if you could write a syllabus for enlightenment — you can’t, of course, but if you could — this sadhana might be a prerequisite for the […]

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Sadhana 26

Sadhana means ‘practice’ in Sanskrit, the language that the oldest Yoga books were written in. It means an exercise that people can do to help get enlightened. Sadhana is to enlightenment what weight-lifting is to muscles. Sorry, no, I don’t know where you can buy steroids for enlightenment. The basic idea of the sadhana that […]

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