When The Mind Suddenly Stops
Why Stopping The Mind Is Not Just Getting Really Quiet
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What if the breakthrough you’re looking for doesn’t come from making your mind calm… but from showing it how to stop?
And what if stopping doesn’t feel like shutting down at all…but like stepping into a new world of clarity?
In my last episode, I began talking about stopping the mind, and how it was the central teaching brought down through the ages from masters such as Patanjali himself. How stopping the mind is the entry portal from which real spiritual work can begin.
But why is that? What makes stopping the mind so much different than quieting the mind? Isn't it just a matter of degree? Is stopping the mind just quieting the mind taken to an extreme?
In this episode of Seeds of Awakening, I’ll explore what makes stopping so different from quieting.
To understand this, let's turn to an analogy we all learned about in high school chemistry: phase transitions. Remember?
Apply heat to ice and it turns into liquid water. Apply more heat and that water then turns into steam.
Each of those states is its own phase. It’s not really a gradual transition to go from one to the other - it’s a sudden jump.
Liquid water isn’t ‘cold steam,’ any more than steam is just ‘hot water.’
Each state is entirely its own. All 3 states: ice, liquid water and steam are all made up of H2O, yet each is completely different than the other.
This is just like the mind. A quiet mind and a stopped mind are two entirely different states of the mind, and they are as different from one another as ice is from liquid water.
So if you think you are pursuing the goals of yoga by just getting your mind to be quiet, then you'd probably be satisfied if I brought you a cup of lukewarm water on a hot day when you asked for a glass of ice water.
But wouldn't you say - where's the ice? Would you be satisfied if I answered, ‘oh, I just didn’t wait long enough for the phase change’?
Something happens when the mind actually stops that is just like water suddenly turning into ice. It's that different. It's a complete phase transition, and that's the best way to picture why it's not at all like quieting the mind.
When the mind stops, it's finally able to completely let go of time and space in the way we normally grasp them through the active mind. The experience is not a complete shut down, because something remains online: awareness. Pure unbridled, limitless awareness. It is left shining in its glory and revealing the expanse it encounters, which is often described as the peace that passes all understanding.
The mind is like a lake, where the water is most often churned up into waves. What we're talking about with stopping the mind is like taking that water and freezing it into ice. In the colder climates, this happens gradually as winter comes on, ice forming then breaking up, then forming again - until one day you wake up and suddenly the surface is completely calm and like glass. And as the freeze deepens, you'd even be able to walk on water - to explore that frozen surface under your own power.
What becomes possible when the mind is completely silent - when we can walk all the way out onto that frozen lake? The masters of consciousness have a name for this possibility that becomes available from that jumping point. They call it Samadhi - often translated as intuitive knowledge of the highest reality.
There are many stages of Samadhi described by the sages. But we'll save that discussion for another episode. Is Samadhi the end point of the spiritual journey? Actually, just the opposite. Once my teacher, Mark Griffin, explained this to us with utter clarity: that the highest state of Samadhi is actually where the spiritual journey begins.
Is Samadhi really so different from our everyday reality?
And if so, how can we wrap our minds around that?
Let me just share with you a couple things I think about whenever I contemplate this question.
1) Swami Muktananda wrote a book many years ago which was called "I Have Become Alive", filled with insights and great stories from his amazing spiritual life. If you read the editor's preface though, you come across this startling statement: Muktananda actually wanted the book to be titled "From Dead, I Have Become Alive". Wow! Right there he's telling us what ordinary life feels like contrasted with the awakened state of Samadhi. It feels like death - no wonder the masters of meditation often end up working tirelessly in our behalves to try to share this with us.
2) Then there is this strong verse from chapter two of the Bhagavad Gita:
“That which is night to the world is day to the sage;
and that which is day to the world is night to the sage.”
At first our mind boggles to try to understand this paradox, this radical inversion of values, but really it's just what Muktananda was saying. We walk around thinking this everyday life is the all and everything - we think it's day and full of life and light. But once you taste Samadhi you realize what true fullness is, what the deep purpose of life is, what genuine wakefulness is, and then - in sharp contrast - this everyday life seems like night to you. What the world calls “something” – our actions, thoughts and desires – is seen as emptiness to the sage. The “darkness” of inner silence becomes radiant. The “brightness” of outer activity becomes insubstantial.
Now tie that back to that idea of the water turning into ice - the radical inversion from fluid to solid - from night to day - from dead to alive - and perhaps you can see why stopping the mind is not simply ‘a deeper quiet,’ but an entirely different state. It's a whole new portal that opens.
If these ideas set off fireworks inside your mind, as they always have mine, I invite you to come explore the curriculum of courses I've laid out within my school, Stop The Mind Meditation, to make the technology for accessing these radical shifts of awareness available to anyone sincerely seeking it.
We'll talk more about what's required to get through this doorway in the coming episodes of this podcast, Seeds of Awakening - see you then.
Fair Use Notice:
The cover of I Have Become Alive by Swami Muktananda appears in this video for educational and commentary purposes under fair-use guidelines. All rights to the book and its artwork remain with the original copyright holders.
