Manonasha

A Meditation Designed to Find Clarity and Overcome Overthinking

Manonasha (मनोनाश): The left-handed version of Manonasha is a fascinating Tantric Laya Yoga practice. The subject matter is intriguing:

Where is the memory of your life truly stored? Is it within your brain, or at a point outside of it—the Chidakasha (चिदाकाश) point—located in front of your third eye, Trikuti (त्रिकुटि)?

Why, in the left-handed Tantric tradition, is this sadhana—primarily known only to Vedanta monks—concluded with a sensual, rhythmical dance?

Video transcription:

We are working in Forbidden Yoga with the left-handed version of Manonasha.

So, does this tell you anything? Probably not.

You know, sometimes I like to talk about the actual system of Tantra, of the left-handed tantric tradition—the systems, the practices, the vocabulary, the language, the different Lego pieces this Tantra is based on.

Manonasha, if you translate it, “Manas” means the mind, and “Nasha” means destruction or annihilation. It means something like the destruction of the mind process. So, it is a practice that is supposed to do that—the destruction of the mind, in a good way.

I only know the practice in other schools, like the Advaita Vedanta school, which talks about Manonasha. But I actually do not know how they work with it.

In the left-handed tantric tradition, Manonasha is done between two people, and it is a fascinating journey into the realms of Chidākāsha.

So, the idea of Chidākāsha is that this is just an idea, right? It is the memory of your life, or even of your lives, not actually stored inside of the brain, but outside of the brain, in a point about this distance in front of your Trikuti. Trikuti is here, in about this distance, there is supposed to be a point. This point is the Chidākāsha point.

So, what we do in Manonasha is you’re focusing like you actually do Trataka. You stare at this point in front of your Trikuti, but you do this in very different ways.

So, there is movement involved, movement of the head, rhythms, rhythmical movements. And it’s done with two people sitting in front of each other. There are different variations of how you’re getting into that Chidākāsha point.

Usually, I never really thought about talking about it because, you know, in Forbidden Yoga, I usually was recording the workshops from the outside and not so much talking about the techniques themselves.

So, we’re thinking about consciousness, you know. What is consciousness? Where is consciousness stored? What makes something conscious? It’s now a big topic in artificial intelligence—when does artificial intelligence become conscious?

I’m always so fascinated when I do Manonasha, when I practice Manonasha myself with someone, to even study, you know. I study myself, I study myself like a scientist, observing what is happening during this practice.

So, this is a left-handed practice. What does it mean, a left-handed practice? It means you do it with the opposite sex. The man does it with the woman, the woman does it with the man. But they don’t do it together. They’re like even distracting each other, doing Manonasha, because they are so close to each other. They sit so close to each other, and they have to concentrate on trying to concentrate on their own Chidākāsha point.

So, the Chidākāsha point is something like, what does the unconsciousness release if you do Trataka on this Chidākāsha? What is the unconsciousness doing? So, I’m using the term unconsciousness in a broad sense. The Indians, like the Tantrics, haven’t used the word unconsciousness as such; it’s terminology invented by Sigmund Freud, and I’m speaking here right now in Vienna. So, I’m using the term unconsciousness. In the tradition, you would eventually call it objects. Right, you would call it the objects of the mind. What is the mind coming up with or releasing while you do Manonasha?

So, I have actually never myself experienced the destruction of my mind, of the mind, of my mind, doing Manonasha. It just becomes so trippy that you do this for a few hours. Sometimes I’m not going through every part of it.

And then there is this second part of Manonasha, which is actually done in the nude and where you are doing some weird dance practices together, which reminded me a little bit of Osho’s Dynamic Meditation, but it’s not Osho’s Dynamic Meditation, because actually, Osho also took it from some tantric shastras. We don’t know where this is coming from, but it’s a little similar in the second part.

But the interesting thing about Manonasha is the self-inquiry. So, it’s not the kind of Tantra where you do something with someone. You just need the other person. You need the—like in Taoism, you would say—the yin needs the yang, and the yang needs the yin. The practice makes sense. It’s like you’re downloading some cosmic puzzle pieces because the practice itself, if you read it, is quite dry. It reads very dry, like Bahir Antar Shambavi, Bahir Bahir Chidākāsha—it just uses this terminology of Bahir (outside), Antar (inside). Then there is terminology of Shambavi or Chidākāsha, or sometimes it’s Shakti involved, like Shakti Chidākāsha would be moving when you move, right, with your head a little bit or with your torso, but you still have to be in Trataka on the Chidākāsha point.

So, this is Manonasha. I have no idea if this interests anyone because when we do it during the rituals, during the practices, during the Sensual Liberation Retreats, it always works because we have these people, and I just put people into the practice, like, okay, today we do this and that. So, I’m not actually talking about the theory.

But for me personally, the theory interests me a lot. The theory of Tantra is not discussed anywhere. So, the only people who discuss a little bit of the theoretical aspects are the Advaita Vedanta Society in New York, which I came across on YouTube. These people are super into discussing definitions of words, you know. What does Shambavi, Jana Yoga mean? What does Bhakti mean? All this kind of stuff. But they are not going that deep into terminology. But I’m very much interested in that. I just never had the idea to really speak about it because, okay, who is interested in it? But maybe I should try to speak more about these foundations, like the pillar stones, which set this tradition so much apart from what I call the Namaste, the hugging Tantra, right?

There are millions of these people out there, but I am interested in tantric traditions. I don’t know everything, of course. Nobody can know everything because India is a big continent, right? And they have thousands and millions of different variations of working with the ultimate reality.