The Mountain Logs Day 6B - Yamunotri to Badrinath

The Char Dham means “The Four Stations”. Why “The Four Stations” is because it is not just a reference to the four places in Geography. It is also a reference to the four stations of artha, kama, dharma and moksha. The four stations of a well lived life namely acquiring of prosperity or means, fulfillment of desires and passions, living a life of coherence with Nature, Nature out there and one’s own nature, and finally the station of transcendence where you get established in your own sense of being. 

On this pilgrimage, the four geographical stations of Gangotrti, Yamunotri, Kedarnath and Badrinath, the pilgrimage seeks to get insight into the truth of these four stations of life through a combination of physical and mental effort, emotional aliveness, openness to the spirit and surrender to Nature. 

It’s quite beautiful, profound, intense and transforming. It’s unique as a pilgrimage, as an experience and breathtaking in its conception. 

In the following Episodes, Dr. Bharat Thakur takes you along this pilgrimage over 10 days, sharing the daily logs and some insightful blogs that will have you want to experience the Yatra for yourself.  

Transcript

Sound

Chattering loudly .. we say a lot 

Soft and deep is just the thought

Deeper is the seer .. where thought is not

And what about the sound beyond 

Of one hand clapping, the anahat naad

A journey towards happiness is not just about moving between one ‘Dham’ and the other, it is also a movement from the concrete towards the abstract.

Around the world, Meditation is being taught heavily but mostly as ‘mindfulness’, ‘focused attention’ and so on. The classical vision of Yoga is a little different. The ancients never prescribed meditation capsules but a complete protocol.

They never said practice this technique and you will be healed. They spoke in terms of protocols like ‘ashtanga’ where it became a way of life. You did many things that addressed all aspects of your being so that you could become a meditator 24 by 7.

To experience something vast and deep, it would be wise to not directly take the plunge because if the pace is forced, the experience can become too scary and that will make us respond with aggression or force us into a shell.

The intention might be to have a deep experience but in order to succeed, we will need to learn how to handle the nervous system so that it does not sabotage our efforts.

We have evolved from animal ancestors whose primitive and yet powerful brains are embedded in our brains and if we do not know the art of reining them in, we become  fearful and aggressive in spite of having the capacity to act out of wisdom and experience happiness.

So to successfully approach happiness, meditativeness, we would need to learn how to keep in ‘silent mode’. Those parts of our brain that are wired for a fear response. 

The human part of our brain responds to a feeling of safety and ease and we have to learn how to activate it.

So it’s a journey from the concrete to the abstract, not just a wild plunge into oblivion.

We have a beginning and an end.

Traveling from Yamunotri to Badrinath our goal is to put the seed of awareness in the soil of our beings and learn the process of how to grow it into a full fledged tree in our lives.

So here, let us look at our entry into the four ‘dhams’ as progressively entering into four stages of deeper and deeper abstraction.

The first of the four realms is called ‘Vaikhari’.

When we are having a dialogue, there are a whole bunch of thoughts and ideas that seek our attention but if we have to effectively communicate to another person, we have to choose one line of thought at a time because only one idea can be absorbed and processed by the listener and at a time only one idea can be expressed through the tongue and body-gestures of the speaker. This realm of communication is called ‘vaikhari’.

The advantage of this form of communication is that you can say things concretely.

This is the mode we use to say, “I need two buckets of hot water” or when we ask “aage koi chai ka dukaan hai”.

The ‘vaikhari’ mode is very good to get things done. It is completely concrete. In this mode, you can say exactly what you want. You can for example say “I want more sugar and less milk in my tea” but when it comes to expressing and experiencing softer, subtler thoughts and feelings, then we need to communicate in a different mode for which we need to enter a different zone.

‘Madhyama’, the second.

You must have seen us while sketching, many things are happening simultaneously; the music in the background or chanting, some gestural communication going on between the babas, the sound of the river, birds twittering around the artist in his zone.

Here your experience is very concrete but not as much as when you are directly being explained something. So an element of abstraction comes in, you know what is going on but if someone asks you to capture your entire experience, you might be able to explain a lot of what you experienced but not all of it.

The abstract part cannot be put in concrete terms and the element of abstraction allows each person to have his own subjective experience. It means a bit of the subject enters the picture, you enter the picture, the breath body gets awakened, you are breathing a little more easily in this state and that in turn relaxes you.

But at the same time, things are concrete enough for you to know that this is all part of the same Yatra. Your world has not changed too much, the abundant concreteness makes you feel secure which is very important to feel.

Our brain has three different areas which are wired to give three different kinds of responses; the brainstem is the oldest part of the brain called the reptilian brain. If it makes an assessment that there is an extreme threat, it will shut you down, make you go into a shell like a tortoise or a snail. You will get into what is called a freeze response.

On top of the brain stem sits the limbic system which can be called the mammalian brain or the monkey brain. This one gives emotional signals of fight or flight in response to threats that are not seen as life threatening but are considered substantial. If we feel this level of threat in the situation then the limbic system  makes you get aggressive or defensive in what is called the fight or flight response.

Right on top of the limbic system is the brain that human beings alone have in abundance. It is the massive cerebral cortex. This new part of the brain is shaped like a walnut, this part of the brain gets activated when we feel safe.

When we talk of meditation or happiness, we are interested in keeping the reptilian brain and the monkey brain quiet and activating the cerebral cortex, what we can call the human brain.

So if the pace of the Yatra is too fast for you on the surface, you might say you are ok out of courtesy but the lower brains, the brainstem and the limbic system react directly to their own assessment on the basis of the information they gather through the sense organs, the sounds and sights, the smells and so on and the limbic system’s  strength is its emotional response. It is not so well behaved. If it experiences a threat, it will create unease, body symptoms like claustrophobia, restlessness, anger, fault finding and make you want to get out of the situation even as you are saying, “it’s a nice trip”.

So we cannot plunge into an abstract experience directly. We have to take the whole being together. The animal takes a little time to get used to it. The whole trick is to calm the animal side, let that part be silent. So we cannot rush into meditation because that world is completely abstract and it can be scary to just plunge into it.

So coming back by sitting around quietly without an agenda, if you are easy, you get into a state of ease and it allows your animal side, your primitive side get familiar and experiences safety in the process of abstraction and this is a process of evolution.

The communication that happens here is not purely verbal. It is a combination of the concrete and a little abstract. It is like a ghazal or a thumri. This kind of communication is called ‘madhyama’ where a soft breeze of meditativeness enters in ‘vaikhari’ which is completely concrete. We can at best get relaxed but here in ‘madhyama’, we go a little further than that.

So let’s remember, when we say ‘I’, we have to become aware of the human. The creative side capable of happiness is one, the emotional and the instinctive side are the second and third, we need to keep the animal nature relaxed, at ease to create a feeling of safety. It is then that we awaken the part of our being that is wired for happiness.

The adepts do Chardham on foot and their route is very different. In some segments it is shorter but the climbs are steeper and terrain more rugged. They are basically narrow tracks not roads.

It is good that we travel every day a little by road because though we are traveling in a fair amount of comfort and for sure are very protected. The real exposure the nervous system feels comes from the openness we develop by entering greater states of abstraction while we might enjoy the scenery. The brainstem and the limbic system keep on assessing the situation in terms of whether there is danger and to them sudden exposure to the mountains and the elements is for sure dangerous.

Pashyanti, learning to see.

Back home, we tend to live with our shutters down and here all the barriers are down because here there are no relationships, no news channels, no office, no inputs of aggression and stress. So the defenses are not required. We might be absent minded and not notice the rawness of nature but the nervous system is registering even sub liminal sensations. Subliminal means those sounds and sights you don’t even know you are seeing and hearing.

All our fears, of lack of strength and endurance and of the cold, is actually the fear of exposure which we feel acutely. The vulnerability we feel is because we are in an abstract state. We are able to register the presence of the mountains acutely because we are in a more open state.

It is not just the concrete form of the hills that we experience, it is a much more abstract experience. A far deeper experience of the energy and form of the mountains which includes not only the rivers, the rock formations, the colors, the trees, the wind, the mud, the light, the clouds but much more which we cannot say in words. This more intense level of abstract experience and communication is called ‘pashyanti’ which means ‘to see’ here the abstraction is totally lost.

The ‘seer’ is called ‘drishta’ and is defined as pure consciousness. It is like there are no ego boundaries between the experience and the experiencer. It is in this state that you feel that you can talk back to the mountains, the rivers, the fire, the night.

It is in this level of abstraction that you begin to commune with the fire. Fire is about awareness. The ancients considered attention as the fire within and meditation on the dhuna. One fire lights the other, one fire strengthens the other, boredom is just the inability to find meaning and to be able to be still and unmoving doing very little, you need to be able to find meaning in the silence.

But yes! There is a great deal of preparation needed to tame the nervous system to allow such things to  happen and that is why the ancients always talked about preparation and that is why we have the eight steps of ashtanga in Yoga.

We are not taking the hard core old route where you walk sometimes above 4000 meters, the drive in the comfort of our cars is good as it relaxes the animal side of our nervous system, familiarizes us to the mountains. Before we get full exposure to them and start walking on them by doing this, we are able to allow ourselves to experience nature more intensely while walking and bathing and that is why one keeps coming back. As these kinds of changes towards complete abstraction are very deep changes and it takes time.

Experiencing abstraction also means that we are ourselves becoming more abstract in the process. The ‘I ’identity is less concrete. This is the very process that culminates in meditation and ‘samadhi’ corresponding to the state of ‘para’, the realm of the beyond where the abstraction is complete, where there is only a complete dissolution of the meditator.

More of that later.

Bharat Thakur