Recognition

Dhāraṇā 78 · The middle between pleasure and pain

Throw the mind neither into suffering nor into pleasure; know instead, O Bhairavī, the Reality that remains standing in the middle between them.

The mind spends its life being thrown — flung into pleasure to grasp it, flung into pain to fight it. Both throws are the same motion. This dhāraṇā withholds the throw, and asks a question instead: what remains in the middle, when the mind goes to neither pole?

The method

The verse uses two violent verbs and denies them both: na cittaṃ nikṣipet duḥkhe — do not cast the mind into pain — na sukhe parikṣipet — do not fling it into pleasure. Casting and flinging: the mind's normal relation to feeling is ballistic, an immediate hurling of the whole of attention into whatever hurts or delights. The practice begins the moment a strong feeling arrives, of either sign. Let it be fully present — nothing is suppressed — but do not leap. Attention remains at home while the feeling stands before it.

Then the verse turns from instruction to invitation, addressed to the Goddess herself: bhairavi jñāyatāṃ madhye kiṃ tattvam avaśiṣyate — let it be known, in the middle, what Reality is left. The middle is not a compromise or a mild average of the two feelings. It is a position never normally occupied at all, because the mind is always already at one pole or the other. Stand there, and something is discovered standing there already.

Madhya — the centre as doctrineमध्य

The middle is one of this tradition's master keys. Between any two — two breaths, two thoughts, two steps, and here two valences of feeling — there is a joint that belongs to neither, and at every such joint the current of consciousness stands exposed, unclothed by either alternative. The Pratyabhijñā Hṛdaya makes madhya-vikāsa, the unfolding of the centre, a direct means to the bliss of consciousness. Pleasure and pain are the widest and most compulsive of all the pairs; whoever finds the middle of that pair has found a door that opens in the thick of any experience whatsoever.