Meditation

Antar mouna (Inner silence)

Antar mouna

In our daily life our mind is continuously bombard with information from the most obvious like the weather to the most subtle like publicity. Specially in this era of omni present technology, Television, radio, fast connection internet, cell phone or media of any kind we proceed million of data every day. Most of those input are unnecessary garbage and rubbish. Without doing anything we accumulate them and slowly they become part of us our existence. Like a swimming pool left without care become paradise for jumping frog our mind become a mind become pond for jumping thought.

Ancient techniques of meditation are becoming very indispensable in not necessary tools to help us deal with the contemporary situation and regain a certain control over ourselves.

Antar mounan (inner silence) is an ancient yogic technique of meditation, and is a fundamental part of Buddhist practice known as vipassana( a slightly different method).  Antar mouna is a very systematic technique which has for goal the purging of those mental garbage accumulated in our subconscious and unconscious mind.

In the first stage of the practice we learn to shut down the input from the outside environments. Like closing the tab before trying to empty a pool. Here we will direct our attention to the physical senses, specially using the sounds, the touch and the breath. After a while the mind will unconsciously get tired of this practice and will automatically reverse it attention inward. (Kind of shut down the water tab)  The second stage consists at observing our spontaneous thought, looking at the pattern of thought. Letting the imprints of the past experiences to reveal their forms. Like looking at the water condition of our pool. Realising that, it is maybe a bit greenish filled with algae and other things because we forgot to put the chlorines and remove the accumulated dirt over the years. You look at your mind and realise that it filled with so many thought, desires, anger, joy, even thinking about TV programs, or complete non-sense happening. Realising that it just cant stop. So many year went by without trying to clean it up.

Then the cleaning process really starts, you try to find a way to clean your pool, try to see how you should process to take of the dirt. You don’t really see what is in the pool so you try to guess what is in it, how can we take this dirt out.  For our meditative practice we create a thought and follow its course of association, after dwelling on it for sometimes we change for another thought. During this process we don’t reject any association, we even encourage the most strange and more wild thought to associate with our primary focus. They give us good clew on what is in our pool.  The idea behind it is to stay very aware of our mind content to realise that this is part of our mind and those seemingly insignificant thought have a significant role in our daily life. Those thought or mind pattern always interfere with our reality.

The next process for cleaning our pool is no more to guess what is in it but to really put our hands in it and find what is really there. In this stage of the practice instead of creating a thought on our will we let the thought create itself. Then we try to follow it to its source, by reflecting on it until it exhausted itself. Here we have to be careful not to allow the process to shut down itself by fear of going deeper in the association process, which is a very normal defence mechanism, but instead we try to be a perfect witness detach from the emotion attach to the thought and become completely aware of the existence a this certain happening. This is not always a easy process we understand this completely but not less a necessary step in our development

Then  we let another chain of thought coming to the surface and again reflect on it. After some time will have found a few big piece of dirt, we’ll have look on them and found how they got stuck in and found a way to release them or at least work on it and understand what and how they were. The process of clearing and emptying the mind will slowly become more efficient and easy.

The last stage will be to try to have no more water or crystal clear water in the pool. In this stage there is no more thought, we only need a focal point to gaze on and stay on it without any mind disturbance.

This entire process take time, we can practice the two first step at the beginning, for maybe a month, learning to shot down our senses and to take a witness attitude, then when we have master those two first step we can start to clean our pool. For a few week by trying to figure out what is in it and then a few more week or months to put our hands in. Then when we feel ready we can start to look at our focal point, if the thought process start again then we have to go back to the cleaning process and try to understand a little bit more what is in the pool that tarnish the water all the time.