Dhyana

A steady continuous flow of attention directed towards the same point or region is meditation. — yoga sutras

“Meditation is to religion what the laboratory is to science.”
–Paramahansa Yogananda

The seventh aspect of yoga’s path is meditation, or dhyana. Once we have learned to practice dharana, to quiet the mind through focused effort, something else begins to happen.We can already bring our mind to one point and keep it there; we have an awareness of the mind and the object of concentration, the seer and the seen. Now dharana leads to dhyana, attention becomes effortless, there is no longer a seer, only the seen. We experience this kind of effortless absorption in love when our love for a child or partner transcends all thoughts of our personal safety or comfort. Because it is an intrinsic aspect of our nature, we also experience dhyana in our everyday activities. As a waiter, I would count the tables I was assigned at the beginning of the evening. “I have two tables”, then “I have four tables”. After long months of practice, I came to understand that I was not really working until I no longer knew or cared how many tables I had. At that point, I was simply in the flow. There was only the moment, and the next task to perform. Counting tables was dharana, and dharana became dhyana when the tables disappeared and there was only the task. — Rolf Gates, Meditations from the Mat.

Dhyana is the seventh limb of Ashtanga Yoga. Dhyana means worship, or profound and abstract religious meditation. It is perfect contemplation. It involves concentration upon a point of focus with the intention of knowing the truth about it. During Dhyana, the consciousness is further unified by combining clear insights into distinctions between objects and between the subtle layers of veils that surround intuition. We learn to differentiate between the mind of the perceiver, the means of perception, and the objects perceived, between words, their meanings, and ideas, and between all the levels of evolution of the nature. We realize that these are all fused in an undifferentiated continuum. One must apprehend both subject and object clearly in order to perceive their similarities, for a clear grasp of real identity of two apparently different things requires a clear grasp of their seeming difference. Thus Dhyana is apprehension of real identity among ostensible differences.