Stillness · “Stillness Reveals”
The Empty Black Screen
Achieve passive concentration — the deliberate emptying of the mind of all images, words and emotions — by holding a featureless black field, then dissolving even that into formless, colourless space.
Ex. 5: after holding the spinning disc, remove it — rest on the bare black field, silent, 10 min, fully awake. Ex. 7: lighten the black to grey → clear-as-water/ice → “nothing at all,” only infinite formless space (brief whisper “infinity ever receding.” to tune, then drop it). Never force emptiness — it is the result of single-pointedness, not a means. Practise as often as you can; later (7/7A) with eyes open.
What it is
This is the hinge of Sadhu’s whole course: the turn from active concentration (holding a created image) to passive concentration — “the complete cleaning of the mind of all thoughts and emotions.” Having built and controlled the spinning disc, in Exercise No.
5 you remove it: “imagine only the black background, but this time without a white disc or point on it,” and hold that featureless field for ten minutes in “the full silence of your mind.” In Exercise No.
7 the field itself is dissolved — lightened “to a lighter [shade]. finally becoming as clear as water,” then to “the infinite, bottomless space,” and at last to “nothing, absolutely nothing.” Sadhu is emphatic that emptiness is earned, not forced: “Freedom from thoughts is a result and not a means!” — and that reaching it by trying to expel thoughts “only creates a vacuum.” It is approached, instead, by so completely occupying attention with a single object that thought has no room, then quietly letting the object go.
The Method
No. 5 — the empty black field (passive concentration):
- After the usual preparation (Green Pranayama), on “a day when you are feeling well composed,” imagine the familiar black background with no disc or point on it. Visualise it “in the full silence of your mind, for ten minutes.”
- If you cannot hold ten minutes at first, “repeat as often as needed.” Watch your state: if done rightly “you most certainly must have utterly forgotten everything except your object of concentration — the silent, nameless, black screen.” You were “neither asleep nor in a swoon. awake, but deliberately and consciously in quite a different way.” (No. 6 repeats this with the senses progressively opened.) No. 7 — dissolve the field into formless space:
- From the black field, “by an effort of will, gradually lighten the colour” — dark-grey, medium, light, “finally becoming as clear as water,” like “a wall of perfectly pure and transparent ice.” Hold ten-minute sessions for a week or two.
- Then “simplify the proceeding still further. When you close your eyes, try to see nothing, absolutely nothing. only the infinite, bottomless space before and round you.” As a tuning aid you may briefly, mentally whisper: “Infinity before me: infinity always receding before my sight; the emptiness, the colourless infinity of space.”
- After a week or more “this too must cease, and there remain only space without forms and verbalized thoughts.” Sadhu advises practising “not only once or twice daily, but as often as you can.” (No. 7A repeats it with open eyes under any surroundings.) Governing rule: never reach for emptiness by suppression. Earlier in the course Sadhu gives the lawful approach — substitution, occupying the mind with one wholesome sound or sentence — precisely because forced expulsion fails. Passive concentration here is the ripened fruit of that, not a beginner’s blanking.
Source & Lineage
Chapter XIX (Exercise No. 5) and Chapter XX, “Fifth Series (Final Exercises)” (Exercise No. 7) of Concentration (Allen & Unwin, 1959). Sadhu frames the goal in Advaita terms — “the only real and eternally existing ‘thing’ is consciousness in its essence” — drawn from Ramana Maharshi and Shankara, while the staged technique is his own.
His warning that freedom from thought is “an attribute of a very highly developed consciousness. closer to the end of the path than to its beginning” (Ch. XV) governs the whole. Mouni Sadhu (1897-1971). → (sadhu mouni).
Common refinements
Forcing the blank. The cardinal error Sadhu names: expelling thoughts creates a rebounding vacuum. Earn emptiness via single-pointedness and substitution, not suppression.
- Attempting it too early. It is a Fourth/Fifth-Series exercise; without Nos. 1-4 mastered “it will not work.”
- Sliding into sleep. The state is fully awake; drowsiness means posture/alertness has slipped.
- Grasping at the formlessness. Even the tuning-whisper “infinity.” must eventually cease; let the space be, don’t narrate it.