Jainism Eternal and Universal Path for Enlightenment

Author(s): Narendra Bhandari
Publisher: Research Institute of Scientific Secrets from Indian Oriental Scriptures Ahmedabad

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Jainism : The Eternal and Universal path for Enlightenment
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for bad deeds), vinay (humility or politeness), vaiy Ivacha (service to others for dissolving the effects of past bad karmas), Svadhyaya (study of self), Dhy ina (meditation) and Kayotsarga (separation of body and self). Dhyan involves remembering (smriti), returning (pratikraman) and reliving the past lives (j'tismaran) etc. With the practice of various tapas, the bonds between body and mind as well as mind and consciousness are broken and inflow of karmas is stopped. Dhy ?n (meditation)
Dhy in is the prime requirement for mental, spiritual and physical unity of self. It is the least understood of all practices and is made out to be difficult to accomplish, whereas in practice it is very easy. In fact one is meditating all the time, because mind can not stay without thought. It is only necessary to channelize the thinking. What then is dhy ?n? It begins as a kind of self-hypnosis. It is certainly not thinking, but it is convincing one self (acquiring correct darshan) and then it takes one beyond mind. The conscious mind has multi dimensional capability. It can think parallelly on a large number of topics at the same time. With thoughts, the mind is ever changing and wandering to different objects, phenomena, events, expectations, apprehensions etc in time (past and future) and space. To use the whole capability of mind on one topic is concentration. Channelising this concentration on soul is Dhy ?n. Firstly the ever changing, wandering, conscious mind is to become one mind by meditation, then the conscious and subconscious minds have to be integrated and thereafter one has to attain the state of no-mind. Any unaltered state of mind is dhy in. Since subconscious mind is mostly unutilised, a bridge between conscious and subconscious mind opens up immense possibilities. No-mind is the only permanent state of mind; once attained, can always be attained at will. And then one is able to see the soul as an observer. In a nutshell, seeing the 'tm? (soul) with the 'tm? (soul) is dhy .n. Dhy in physically means activating the pineal gland, the third eye, which is an interface between mind and tm. There are many types of Dhy 'ns and innumerable ways of achieving it; some of which are listed in Table 6.2. The fact that it can be achieved in innumerable ways implies that it is easy to accomplish.
Basically Dhy in is of four types: rta Dhy in, Raudra Dhy in, Dharma Dhy 'n and Shukla Dhy 'n. , rta Dhy 'n is when the mind is engaged in criticizing some thing or somebody and complain about it. Our mind gets so engrossed in this activity that we forget everything, including our self. Raudra Dhy 'n is about cursing some event or a person whom we think may be responsible for our miseries. When we do not consider ourselves responsible for an unpleasant event, we hold others responsible and blame