Nyams I have known and loved
In this note I’m going to talk about meditative absorptions — special places in one’s mind that a meditator can visit. I will call them nyams using, probably rather loosely, Tibetan terminology. Nyam literally means experiences or meditative experience and is described as intense psychophysical sensations. Most meditators that accumulated enough hours of silent sitting will have encountered some extraordinary experiences. Maybe you have experienced a sudden rush of emotion that overwhelms you or there is a bright flash of light. Some of these experiences can be unpleasant or even scary — nausea, disorientation and pain can occur. However, most of these experiences are fleeting and are encountered only once. The nyams that I want to talk about here are states you can visit reliably, maintain, explore and sometimes even travel between. This post gives an overview of nyams that I have known and loved so far, without going into too much detail. I hope reading this will excite fellow psychonauts to explore their minds knowing that there are a lot of beautiful and wonderful places to discover. This note will give a general overview of nyams, while I plan to explain some of them in more detail in future notes.
Basic navigation
Nyams are the states of meditative absorption. Absorption is a very distinct experience, like orgasm or being in a very hot sauna for ten minutes or bungee jumping — whatever experience you are having, you are fully with it. The depth of the meditative absorption is proportional to how much you can give in to the phenomena. The meditator has to release control and let themselves be taken over. It is easy to be taken over by a bungee jump since it is a very intense experience. Nyams on the other hand, are absorptions by mentally generated phenomena, like the sensation of pleasure in your body, an emotion, an image in your mind’s eye. To get absorbed by them one needs to have the right quality of concentration, sometimes called access concentration (AC). Once AC is reached, the meditator can become absorbed in a particular phenomenon in their experience and enter a corresponding nyam.
In AC, the mind is both focused and relaxed, which in turn allows the meditator to drop the effort. When we relax our mind all sorts of thoughts and emotions come up — “I need to respond to this email.”, “I’m angry at my dad.”, “It smells bad here.”. If we push them away we get tense, not relaxed. Or we can switch off and become sleepy, but then we have no energy or focus. The goal is to be energised and relaxed, open and focused all at once. We have to be emotionally sensitive and tender to be open so that we can relax, yet not reactive so we can maintain our focus. When something swims up to the surface of our mind we can fully feel it without grasping or aversion. This requires a degree of courage and training. You have to trust in your basic goodness and have confidence, be ready to face whatever your mind will fish out of your subconscious and simply invest enough hours of silent sitting to be able to work with your mind. Another important aspect of improving concentration is working through your conditioning — fears, insecurities, internal conflicts all come up to the surface when we try to relax our mind. So we have to clean them up by facing them, otherwise they will make us reactive and disturb our focus. The good news is that the more concentration you have, the easier it is to clean up. Being able to enter some of the nyams can also turbo-charge the cleaning up process, like switching from a broom to a hoover. I plan to make a separate post about that.
There are numerous books on the topic of building one’s concentration to the required level. I have studied with The Mind Illuminated [1] and highly recommend it. In the 9 stages of samadhi presented there, stage 7 would roughly correspond to being able to get into access concentration, but for some meditators it can come earlier. AC does not mean perfect concentration, so do not be discouraged to try practising nyams. But it is also not optional — access concentration is like a channel from a sea into the ocean, which your ship has to go through.
Jhanas
The first nyams I discovered were Jhanas. These are probably some of the best documented nyams. Their descriptions are part of the Pali canon, which is the oldest collection of Buddhist scriptures. Supposedly, the historic Buddha had practised them. There are in total eight Jhanas. The first four are material and the rest are immaterial or formless. Books have been written on Jhanas and I won’t go into precise details, but I’ll give a high-level overview of their wonderful world.
The exploration always starts from the 1st Jhana. There are several entry points into the 1st Jhana from AC: pleasure, light, emotion and other. I used the pleasant vibrations in the body in the beginning of my encounter with them. These vibrations are what relaxed emotional energy turns into in AC. They are called Piti in Pali. Getting absorbed in them is a very intense experience. This is not a mild or subtle experience. If you are not sure you are in a Jhana — you are not in a Jhana. It feels like being a jet engine or an explosion, it makes you want to jump up and tell everyone what happened.
Once you find and stabilise the 1st Jhana you can start going deeper and explore the rest. As you start getting used to the 1st Jhana, you notice more details and subtler tones of the experience. You can then get absorbed in the more subtle aspects of the experience. It is like climbing down a ladder into the subconscious and as you go down, coarse layers of experience fall off, revealing subtler ones underneath. The energetic ecstasy of the 1st Jhana subside, letting the joy and happiness of the second one to come forward. Then the joy and happiness peel off to release the contentment and peace. The last material 4th Jhana has only the quality of tranquillity and equanimity.
Using different phenomena for the initial absorption generates slightly different, but principally the same experience. It starts with intensity and buzz and is refined with each step of the ladder. You can start with an emotion, pleasure in the body, nimmita — a luminous phenomena in your sight when you close your eyes and possibly other phenomena. There are always four steps and they always end with the tranquillity and equanimity of the 4th Jhana.
Once you reach the depth of the 4th Jhana, you reach an ocean floor from where you can travel further. Having your mind equinomous and tranquil allows you to look directly into the very subtle aspects of cognition, where subconscious processes touch the conscious experience. This is the original “intended use” of the Jhanas — using the refined mind for insight into Mind. You can also go exploring the four immaterial Jhanas from here, which are in themselves insight experiences. You can read more about them in [1,2].
Jhanas are beautiful mental states. They can charge your life with pleasure, joy and contentment. The pleasant buzz from the morning sitting usually remains for the rest of the day. I’ve spent more than a year with Jhanas as my core, regular practice. Finding out that I can bathe myself in happiness and joy at will was in many ways life changing.
It was also a “holy cow, this whole thing is for real!” moment. After that my interest in Buddhism became a lot deeper and I have acquired a certain conviction and certainty — the dharma is real, the practice works. Jhanas also serve as a boost to the efficiency of the practice, increasing the speed of a meditator’s progress much like a booster pad in Mario Kart.
For those of you who want to explore Jhanas, I recommend the book by Leigh Brasington “Right concentration: a practical guide to Jhanas” [2] as well as the appendix in The Mind Illuminated [1].
Ne-pa — gYo-wa
The nyams I discovered next were a pair: Ne-Pa and gYo-wa. They stand in opposition — Ne-pa is the nyam of emptiness and gYo-wa is the nyam of form. These nyams are from a much later branch of Buddhism called Vajrayana, more specifically Tibetan Dzogchen. I learnt most of the technique from my meditation teacher Rin’dzin Pamo , to whom I’m tremendously grateful.
Usually, meditation involves a focus on a particular object — breath, loving kindness, a visual anchor. The mind is pointed at something, like an arrow. The base of the arrow is where we feel our agency, centre of experience, point of control. Normal, day-to-day mind is always pointed at something: making dinner, winning an argument, avoiding pain, getting what you want. But could your mind be without any direction, not even a reference point in the experience? What does it feel like not to be focused on anything, yet to still be concentrated? Ne-pa is the absorption in the referencelessnes.
This place is very different from Jhanas. Jhanas are intense and ecstatic, they are like a drug trip. Ne-pa, on the other hand, is a very sober experience. Imagine that you have just woken up, you are well rested and there is no trace of dreams in your mind. You haven’t opened your eyes yet, but you can hear the sounds around you and feel your body. There are no thoughts or self-talk and your attention is not holding onto anything. The mind is open and bright. Everything can pass through, but nothing sticks. This is what Ne-pa feels like. Very open, restful and free.
Unlike Jhanas, where the outside world is shut out, in Ne-pa you still hear sounds and feel your body. You can even open your eyes and see your surroundings. What is absent is the interpretation, conceptualisation and labelling of the experience. If you would hear someone speak, you would perceive it as pure sound without the linguistic content. The mind becomes like a still, clear lake.
Now that we’ve looked at Ne-pa, let’s explore gYo-wa. gYo-wa is Ne-pa’s opposition. If Ne-pa is like a clear, still lake then gYo-wa is like a flow of a powerful river. It is the meditation on the moving mind. It is a hallucination, a trip, almost a delirious state. It is like a cartoon where the scenes are constantly morphing into each other. The entry point into the absorption can be anything — visual, auditory, even meaning and concepts can be used, but this is for “advanced users only”. The classic move would be to start in Ne-pa and allow the mental flow to emerge. The trick is to get absorbed in it without associating with it, without feeling you are in control. Instead of feeling like you are thinking the thoughts, the thoughts are now thinking you. If you ever had hallucinations on psychedelics then you will recognise this state very well. The technique for accessing this state is called Lha-tong and I plan to write about it separately. It is one of the hardest practices that I know, since it is very easy to trip over and just get caught up in your normal, everyday self-referential thinking.
gYo-wa and Ne-pa are special among nyams as they can and will occur spontaneously once you establish them well in your meditation practice. For me, mastering them marked an important shift in my relationship with reality. When they start breaking through the normal flow of self-referential thought the world becomes mysterious, weird and magical. I started feeling a lot more as part of the happening of the world, rather than its observer. I get surprised by my own thoughts and words. I feel both relaxed and excited.
There are two more nyams that naturally follow Ne-pa and gYo-wa — Nyi-med and Lhundrup. Nyi-Med is a nyam in which Ne-pa and gYo-wa alternate and in Lhundrup they merge into a whole — their non-dual nature is realised. Talking about them deserves a note of its own, if not a whole book. Moreover, this is the edge of my practice, so I will leave them for the future.
If you want to learn more about these nyams, I recommend taking a look at works by Ngakpa Chogyam. A good start is Roaring Silence [3] or Shock Amazement [4], the latter is the most laconic explanation of Dzogchen that I have ever encountered.
Falling in love as a nyam and pair practice
One very special nyam that you might have experienced already is falling in love. Here, the object of absorption is the person you are in love with. Remember the intensity and intoxication of falling in love — the other person takes over the totality of your experience. It makes the world magical and wondrous and makes you the best version of yourself. Early on, the absorption is happening naturally, all you have to do is to remain open to it and let it happen. Maintaining this openness and absorption over the long term is much harder. A great book on Vajrayana view of romantic relationships is “Entering the heart of sun and moon” [5]. The book itself doesn’t describe any particular meditative practices, so my partner and I had to improvise, using it as an inspiration and with advice from Rin’dzin Pamo.
This is probably one of the most intense and wild practices I have done, especially in terms of how quickly and directly it works. Being able to maintain falling in love dynamics in the relationship in the long term (potentially perpetually) is probably as good as it gets for a couple. It also has its challenges and dangers, as most Vajrayana techniques do. Due to this and since it requires two adept meditators to make it work, I will plan to make a separate note (maybe more than one).
Here be dragons
What is presented above is hardly an exhaustive list of nyams, but these are some highlights from my travels. The ocean of Mind is vast and full of wonders and terrors. My advice to fellow psychonauts would be to explore with courage and curiosity. Be ready to confront your fears as beyond the treasures lie. Don’t be greedy and seek nyams for thrills and pleasure — nyams are not a cheaper replacement for recreational drugs. They are precious tools of self exploration and spiritual growth.
Reference
- “The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness.” Culadasa, Matthew Immergut
- “Right Concentration. A Practical Guide to the Jhanas.” Leigh Brasington
- “Roaring Silence. Discovering the Mind of Dzogchen.” Ngakpa Chogyam, Khandro Dechen
- “Shock Amazement.” Ngakpa Chögyam, Khandro Déchen
- “Entering the Heart of the Sun and Moon.” Ngakpa Chogyam, Khandro Dechen
