Mansik Yajna

Background

Yajna (fire offering) is an important part of most mantra sadhanas. As per The Ancient Science Of Mantras book, the science of mantras requires that one should make fire offerings (Ahutis) equivalent to 10% of the amount of japa one commits to do for a sadhana.

However, it’s not always possible for a sadhak to do yajna due to various reasons. Hence there’s a provision that allows one to skip yajna by doing 20% additional japa.

Why Mansik Yajna?

It may seem a nice alternative but, practically speaking, if you’re already committed for a daily sadhana of multiple hours (say 3+), having to do 20% more may become daunting.

Various challenges including physical (body pains, tiredness) and mental (sleepiness, exhaustion, restlessness) are encountered during the course of intense sadhana, if one is doing it with sincerity and quality. It would seem that our mind and body have conspired together against us and are determined to break our resolve.

Faced with such struggle, completing the required amount of japa with quality becomes challenging, let alone doing more.

If we’re doing yajna itself, we don’t have to do it immediately after the japa, so that gives us time to recoup. However, what if we can’t do yajna daily due to practical challenges like living in an apartment where lighting the fire would raise smoke alarms.

In my case, the challenge has been visual impairment – which means that I need someone to help me in managing the firepit. For a day or two, I can easily arrange some family member to help me out but, making them ready for the yajna at the same time daily for weeks would not be fair. I try to follow my sadhana schedule strictly, but having such dependency may invariably cause lapses, which ends up irritating me. Maintaining bhava (devotion) then becomes difficult during yajna, and without that, yajna becomes mechanical which is not desirable.

I’ve found mansik yajna as the best solution to above challenges.

What Is Mansik Yajna

Mansik yajna is performing the fire offering mentally – in your mind – with the help of concentration and imagination.

ON the canvas of your mind, you manifest the entire yajnashala with havankunda, firewood, patras, spoons, samagri, deepak etc. You even manifest yourself and offer ahutis with your imagined hands.

Certainly, it requires a great deal of one-pointed concentration. However, in my experience, even if you can’t imagine the whole thing with great details, if your concentration is good, even limited imagination can bring great results.

Being visually impaired, I can’t imagine things exactly the way they are because I haven’t seen them with full sight. In fact, for a decade or so, I’ve not been using my limited sight much due to being accustom to operating computer with just audio output.

So, I lack exposure to how most things look and thus my mind ends up creating visuals of things based on its own notion.

That said, where there’s a will, there’s a way. By divine grace, I’ve found a way to compensate the limited visuals in my imagination. It even makes the whole yajna more engrossing. More revelation about it will be in the next part of this writeup.

Inspiration

My method of mansik yajna has been inspired by Nava Khanda Sadhana. It was my first Mansik Yajna done in Ashram guided by Swamiji during Devi Bhagavatam Katha in April 2019.

Since then, I’ve performed multiple Nava Durga Sadhanas and other sadhanas with mansik yajna exclusively.

I’ve been blessed with multitude of experiences during such sadhanas, one of which I plan to share in the next part of this writeup, which was received while doing the mansik yajna itself.

Prerequisites

Here I’m assuming you know the steps of yajna, if not, read The Ancient Science Of Mantras book, as I’ll refer to the step names the details of which are in the book.

It’s very important that you’ve memorized all the steps along with shlokas to perform mansik yajna. If you’ve to look at the notes in between, there’s a break in concentration which reduces the quality of the same IMO. It’d also be a bit weird to open your eyes on earth for your notes while you are likely imagining the yajna in some other place including on a different planet :).

How to do Mansik Yajna?

Finally, we’ve arrived to the most awaited section of this writeup: how exactly can we do mansik yajna? So here we go:

1. Sit in your meditation pose and perform purification while you’re here on the Earth both physically and mentally. I prefer to use actual water to perform this very first purification during sadhana; you may choose to do it mentally if you so wish.
2. Now in your imagination, visit your preferred place like Chinta Mani palace. Well, you can also imagine a forest, cave or whatever you fancy.
   Wherever you are, it should at least include a yajna kunda built on the ground.
3. If your imagination includes place of your Ishta, you can also imagine your Ishta sitting majestically on a throne. Offer your pranams and receives their blessings for the yajna.
4. Take your seat in front of the kunda.
5. Imagine manifestation of the ingredients (you can mentally speak while manifesting them) like purification patra with water, deepak, ghee with its patra/spoon, a big plate like vessel containing samagri, a small plate to put samagri through which you’d offer ahutis, a bigger spoon to mix additional ingredients (like sesame seeds, raisins) within the samagri, etc.
   The idea is that you manifest everything in your imagined world that you’d use if you were doing the yajna physically including utensils. However, please note that most of these things you manifest need not remain in your sight throughout; your inner eye would only look at an item when you’d need it.
6. Now you can begin the yajna. You’d follow all the steps exactly starting from purification.
7. Once done with the Purna Ahuti step, you can unmanifest all items except deepak and yajna kunda. You can now do pradakshina (circumambulation) around the kunda.
8. Once you’re done with the closing steps, if you had imagined your Ishta as in the 3rd step above, you can now walk up to them, perform shashtang and receive their blessings.
9. Eventually, you come out of your imagined world by stopping the imagination, turning the focus on your body and feeling the heaviness of your body. Take about three long deep breaths.

Next Part

In the next part, I’ll share some tips related to concentration, managing time and visualization etc. Also, I’ll likely share an experience I got while doing mansik yajna recently.

Sriman Narayan

Featured image attribution: Wikimedia Commons