Tag: Prana and Chakras

Vrindavan Within: How Cows, Prana, and Self-Awareness Open the Door to Nirvikalpa Dhyana

Vrindavan Not as a Place but as an Inner Field of Self-Awareness

The understanding began very simply and very directly, not as philosophy but as lived seeing. Vrindavan appeared to me not merely as a sacred town associated with stories and devotion, but as a field of self-awareness inside. This inner Vrindavan is not created by imagination; it is discovered when awareness becomes calm, spacious, and naturally present. In this field, nothing is forced and nothing is rejected. It is a place of inner softness, where awareness rests in itself without struggle. The idea that Vrindavan exists within is not symbolic poetry alone; it reflects an actual experiential landscape that becomes available when attention settles into its own source.

Cows as the Senses and Grass as Subtle Bliss

Within this inner Vrindavan, cows reveal themselves as the senses. Senses are often treated as enemies or distractions, but here they appear gentle, habitual, and innocent, just like cows. They move toward nourishment naturally. The nourishment they seek, in a meditative inner state, is not gross pleasure but subtle, blissful, calm, and peaceful thoughts. These thoughts feel like grass—soft, tender, refined, and non-violent. Grass is nourishment that does not agitate; it sustains without intoxicating. When blissful and sattvic thoughts arise in meditation, they are like this grass, feeding the senses without disturbing awareness.

From Inner Grass to Outer Grain and Worldly Activity

Grass, however, does not remain grass forever. When it grows outward, when it matures and hardens, it becomes grain. Grain is useful, productive, and necessary, but it is denser and harder. In the same way, subtle inner bliss, when expressed outwardly, becomes worldly activity. The outer world is not wrong or inferior; it is simply condensed sensory awareness. What is soft and fluid inside becomes structured and solid outside. The gross world is like hard grain, while the inner field remains like living grass. This distinction is crucial: it shows that worldly life is not separate from inner awareness, only a different density of the same reality.

Cow Grazing as Calm Sensing Without Disturbance

When cows graze peacefully, they do not fight the grass nor cling to it anxiously. They simply eat. Similarly, when the senses function calmly, without craving or resistance, sensing continues but does not bind. This is the meaning of cows grazing in the inner Vrindavan. Sensing happens, but awareness remains untroubled. There is no suppression of the senses and no indulgence. There is only relaxed participation. In this state, life flows smoothly, and awareness remains intact.

When grain is shown and fed to cows, they struggle to get it, fight with each other, and eat it with craving and attachment. They appear disturbed and restless. This disturbance also affects the cowherd, because he now has to actively control them.

Similarly, in the outer world, the senses behave like furious animals rather than grazing cows. They no longer move calmly but rush toward objects with craving and competition. This agitates self-awareness as well, because it must struggle to restrain and manage the senses instead of resting naturally in witnessing

The Cowherd as Witnessing Self-Awareness

The most important presence in this inner scene is the cowherd. The cowherd does not graze, does not become the cows, and does not consume the grass. He watches, guides lightly, and remains free. This cowherd is witnessing self-awareness itself. It is not effortful observation and not mental vigilance. It is simple presence. When witnessing becomes strained or intentional, the inner Vrindavan turns into a field of discipline. When witnessing is natural, it becomes play, or līlā. Awareness simply remains aware.

Krishna as Self-Awareness Itself

At this point, Krishna appears not as a mythological figure but as the very essence of self-awareness. Krishna is not mind, not personality, not an individual doer. He is the effortless center of attraction that awareness naturally has when it rests in itself. That is why Krishna never forces anything. He does not command the cows; they come on their own. Self-awareness does not push the senses inward; alignment happens naturally when conditions are right.

The Flute as the Subtle Body and the Seven Chakras

Krishna’s flute reveals another layer of lived understanding. The flute is empty inside, just like the subtle body must be empty of egoic tension to function as an instrument. It is helped by nonduality. Its seven holes correspond to the seven chakras of the body. Without holes, there is no sound; without chakras, there is no expression. The body itself does nothing. It becomes music only when prana flows through it under the presence of awareness. This emptiness is not absence but readiness. Prana flows through different chakras, invoking different expressions and emotions. It is as if different sounds are emerging from the flute.

Playing the Flute as Natural Prana Flow

Krishna playing the flute is awareness breathing prana through the subtle body. This is not forceful pranayama and not controlled breathing. It is natural breath, unstrained and effortless. Awareness does not blow hard; it simply allows prana to pass. Because of this alignment, the sound produced is irresistibly harmonious. In yogic terms, when awareness and prana align, the entire system becomes coherent. When awareness and prana align means prana becomes so subtle that it is equal to void-like awareness. Its subtle music is so refined and harmonious that the senses, which are feeding on grain in the gross outer world, leave it and move toward inner Krishna playing the flute in inner Vrindavan, to graze again on grass. As the breath passes through the flute and becomes almost zero-like, even the grazing senses calm down so deeply that they themselves dissolve into void.

Cows Leaving Grass as Entry into Nirvikalpa

When the flute sounds with feeling of breathlessness, the cows leave even the grass and move toward Krishna. This moment carries the deepest yogic meaning. Grass itself represents subtle bliss and sattvic pleasure. When cows leave the grass, it means the senses abandon even refined enjoyment. They are not suppressed; they forget themselves. This forgetting is nirvikalpa. There is no object, no experiencer, no claim of bliss. Even the thought “I am experiencing bliss” disappears. There is only absorption.

Why Nirvikalpa Cannot Be Held

This state cannot be maintained by will. The moment a thought arises—“I am in nirvikalpa”—the absorption breaks, and the senses return to grazing. Awareness does not mind. Krishna keeps playing. Self-awareness does not cling to states. It allows coming and going. That is why nirvikalpa often lasts only moments, yet leaves deep understanding behind.

Direct Experience in Riverbeds and Flood Plains

These insights are not theoretical. Repeatedly, I sit near a riverbed spread across vast flood plains. The ground is covered with stones of varied sizes and shapes, naturally polished and layered like a welcoming carpet. The openness of the land, the silence of the space, and the slow rhythm of nature create a natural inner stillness. In these places, stray cattle often roam and graze freely.

The Presence of Cows and Effortless Nirvikalpa Dhyana

In these environments, nirvikalpa dhyana arises easily, without effort. This repeated experience reveals something important: cows grazing are not only symbolic representations of yogic processes; cows themselves have a direct effect on the mind. Their presence calms the nervous system. Their grounded, non-aggressive energy supports inner silence. The mind mirrors what it perceives. When awareness rests among beings who live without inner conflict, awareness recognizes itself more easily.

Sages composed scriptural stories in such a way that they carry both physical and symbolic meanings, though the symbolic meaning is primary. The physical layer is not accidental; it supports and strengthens the inner teaching. For example, if grazing alone were the message, other grazing animals could have been chosen. The cow was chosen specifically because of her physical qualities as well—her calmness, non-violence, nourishing nature, and her ability to transform rough grass into sustaining milk. These physical characteristics make the symbolic teaching visible and experiential, ensuring that the metaphor is not abstract but lived and understood through everyday life.

Nature, Animals, and the Support of Awareness

The river, the stones, the open plains, and the grazing cattle together create an environment where prana flows smoothly and awareness remains uncontracted. This shows that yogic realization is not only an inward practice but also a resonance with living nature. The outer landscape reflects and supports the inner landscape.

Vrindavan as Awareness at Play

Ultimately, Vrindavan reveals itself as awareness at play. Senses graze on subtle bliss without agitation. Worldly action emerges naturally from inner calm, just as grain emerges from grass. Prana flows like flute music through an empty body. The senses abandon even bliss when alignment deepens. Awareness remains the silent cowherd, untouched and free. When awareness breathes through emptiness, the senses dissolve into silence, and nirvikalpa appears effortlessly. This is not mythology, not imagination, and not borrowed doctrine. It is direct yogic physiology lived, seen, and expressed through the timeless language of Vrindavan.

Chapter 24: When the Atom Dissolves the Ego

The exploration that began with matter and moved towards the self now reaches another doorway. Matter has been seen not as something separate but as a reflection of the self. The body has been observed not as a lifeless machine but as a field of consciousness woven through atoms, molecules, tissues, and energies. Now comes the most delicate and mysterious turn in this journey, where the very atom itself reveals the illusion of doership and quietly melts the ego away.

Every atom is endlessly active. Within it, protons and neutrons are bound in ceaseless dance, while electrons whirl around with unimaginable speed. Yet in all this activity, never does an atom declare, “I am the doer.” There is no self-assertion in its functioning. It simply acts because action is woven into its nature. The atom never claims ownership of creation, and yet without it, nothing can move. In this silent humility of the atom lies a mirror for the human being. The body, built of countless atoms, also functions in the same way. Breath rises and falls, blood circulates, thoughts appear and fade, but nowhere within does the body say, “I am the thinker.” Thoughts are not manufactured by the body; they are ripples in the vast lake of mind.

Ancient wisdom had already noticed this truth. In the Gita it is said that the gunas act upon the gunas. Forces of nature act upon forces of nature. Fire burns because it is the nature of fire to burn, wind blows because it is the nature of wind to move. Likewise, actions emerge from the body and mind because it is their nature to act. The witnessing consciousness remains untouched. The illusion of ego is nothing but the mind’s mistaken identification with this flow of actions. Ego believes, “I am doing,” whereas in truth action is happening through the gunas, just as rain falls or a flower blossoms.

Science, too, has begun to echo the same insight in its own language. Physics shows that before any particle is observed, it exists in superposition, holding many possibilities together. Only in the moment of observation does one outcome collapse into being. In the same way, before a thought arises, the mind is filled with infinite possibilities. Each thought is like a quantum collapse, a crystallization from the field of potential into the world of form. Prior to thought, there is only a vast dark stillness, a zero point where every possibility cancels itself by its opposite, leaving nothing but unexpressed energy. This state of unmanifest mind is experienced in meditation as a deep darkness, an ocean without ripples.

When one emerges from samadhi, there is often no immediate storm of thoughts. First, the still energy is felt, like a dark silence holding everything within it. Only afterwards does the chain of thoughts begin to rise, one by one, each collapse giving birth to the next. Ancient yogic language called this process vyutthana, the return of the mind from samadhi. The modern physicist calls it the movement from superposition to collapse. The meaning is the same: from pure potential arises form, from silence arises sound, from stillness arises motion.

During meditation, scattered traces of thoughts may appear like clouds on a clear sky. The seeker need not fight them. Simply allowing them to pass keeps the mind open to the vast akarnava, the boundless ocean beyond. Sometimes a gentle mental chanting of akarnava itself helps link the mind with this endlessness. And when thoughts grow heavy, the ancient method of neti neti offers a simple key. Neti means “not this.” At intervals, when a thought appears, it is quietly dissolved by remembering, “not this, not this.” The thought fades back into the void. Yet even this practice must remain subtle, for if repeated without pause, it turns mechanical and loses its power. Used occasionally, it creates sudden dips into stillness, where breath slows and relaxation deepens.

In deeper meditation, when the awareness is extended to the entire sitting body, something extraordinary is noticed. The body itself becomes a gateway to the cosmos. Every chakra within the body is a hidden archive of universal patterns. Within the heart lie echoes of cosmic emotions, within the throat the seeds of all expression, within the brow the visions of countless worlds. When the whole body is kept in gentle notice, the entire cosmos hidden within begins to open. Thoughts connected with the universe itself may arise, only to dissolve in the same silence.

Yet sometimes meditation feels blocked. Energy stuck at certain chakras creates a sensation of suffocation or heaviness. Breath automatically begins to focus on that region as if the body is trying to heal itself. This is not for oxygen but for prana, the subtle energy required by that chakra. Until these blockages are released, meditation remains shallow. Breathlessness is the sign of release. When, after working through the chakras, breath is naturally held at the end of inhalation or exhalation, a depth opens where suffocation disappears. The once-blocked chakra now feels free, or at least so subtle in its lack that it cannot stop the energy from rising. From this breathless stillness, meditation enters its deepest flow.

Actually, after mastering prāṇa through repeated yoga practice, one can hold the breath at will and focus on an energy-deficient chakra. That chakra then feels “hungry” for breath, producing a sharp, suffocating sensation. In reality, it is not hunger for air; it is hunger for prāṇa. When attention is placed on that sensation, the energy in the suṣumṇā naturally floods that chakra and satisfies it, even while the breath remains stopped or nearly absent. When all the chakras become fully nourished with prāṇa, a breathless and deeply satisfied state appears, which is wonderful and naturally leads to a mindless dhyāna-like stillness.

Seen in this light, the discoveries of Sanatan Dharma appear less as religious imagination and more as profound quantum insights in disguise. The sages saw that everything in existence is conscious in its own way, and thus they worshipped every element as divine. Stones, rivers, trees, animals, all were held as manifestations of the same conscious field. Idols and mandalas were not superstitions but symbolic mirrors to the cosmic order hidden within the atom and within the self. Today, quantum scientists too are beginning to wonder if consciousness itself plays a role in the collapse of possibilities into one outcome. The ancient and the modern are slowly meeting on the same ground.

Science shows the structure. Biology reveals the process. Matter, in its endless forms, presents the illusion of separation. But Sharirvigyan Darshan, the direct seeing of the body as a field of consciousness, dissolves ego through pure vision. In this vision, it becomes clear that the self is not an atom, not a cell, not a body. The self is the field in which all these arise and into which they dissolve. Ego may pretend to be the doer, but the atom has no such illusion. Ego may take ownership of thought, but thought itself is only a quantum ripple arising from silence.

The final freedom is nothing dramatic. It is the melting of ego, the end of false ownership. When this happens, silence itself shines forth, not as something achieved but as something that was always there. The self remains, untouched, unbroken, ever luminous. The journey through atoms, body, mind, and cosmos ends where it began, in the pure witnessing that needs no name.

Thus the story comes full circle. The human being entered the investigation thinking of himself as a separate doer and knower. He examined matter, cells, energies, and mind. He discovered that the atom does not claim doership, the body does not think, the mind does not own thoughts. The gunas act upon the gunas, and he is only the witness. In that recognition, the atom dissolved the ego. The silence behind all action became visible. That silence is the self, radiant and free.

And here ends the adventure of Sharirvigyan Darshan as Quantum Darshan, not in noise but in a quiet flowering. When the atom is seen as innocent of doership, the ego cannot survive. When the body is seen as a field of energies, the mind cannot cling. When thought is seen as a ripple in the quantum ocean, the self shines as the boundless sky. This is the final realization, simple and astonishing: the self was never hidden, only the illusion of doership covered it. With its melting, the journey finds its destination, and the seeker finds himself where he always was—free, silent, eternal.