Samadhi
Some other important
words, which recur from time to time in the Yoga-sutras, need to
be understood, though there are no exact English equivalents. As
they must be used to avoid clumsy circumlocutions, it is necessary
to explain them. It is said: "Yoga is Samadhi." Samadhi
is a state in which the consciousness is so dissociated from the
body that the latter remains insensible. It is a state of trance
in which the mind is fully self-conscious, though the body is insensitive,
and from which the mind returns to the body with the experiences
it has had in the superphysical state, remembering them when again
immersed in the physical brain. Samadhi for any one person is relative
to his waking consciousness, but implies insensitiveness of the
body. If an ordinary person throws himself into trance and is active
on the astral plane, his Samadhi is on the astral. If his
consciousness is functioning in the mental plane, Samadhi is there.
The man who can so withdraw from the body as to leave it insensitive,
while his mind is fully self-conscious, can practice Samadhi.
The phrase "Yoga
is Samadhi" covers facts of the highest significance and greatest
instruction. Suppose you are only able to reach the astral world
when you are asleep, your consciousness there is, as we have seen,
in the Svapna state. But as you slowly unfold your powers, the astral
forms begin to intrude upon your waking physical consciousness until
they appear as distinctly as do physical forms, and thus become
objects of your waking consciousness. The astral world then, for
you, no longer belongs to the Svapna consciousness, but to the Jagrat;
you have taken two worlds within the scope of your Jagrat consciousness--the
physical and the astral worlds--and the mental world is in your
Svapna consciousness. "Your body" is then the physical
and the astral bodies taken together. As you go on, the mental plane
begins similarly to intrude itself, and the physical, astral and
mental all come within your waking consciousness; all these are,
then, your Jagrat world. These three worlds form but one world to
you; their three corresponding bodies but one body, that perceives
and acts.
The three bodies of the
ordinary man have become one body for the yogi. If under these conditions
you want to see only one world at a time, you must fix your attention
on it, and thus focus it. You can, in that state of enlarged waking,
concentrate your attention on the physical and see it; then the
astral and mental will appear hazy. So you can focus your attention
on the astral and see it; then the physical and the mental, being
out of focus, will appear dim. You will easily understand this if
you remember that, in this hall, I may focus my sight in the middle
of the hall, when the pillars on both sides will appear indistinctly.
Or I may concentrate my attention on a pillar and see it distinctly,
but I then see you only vaguely at the same time. It is a change
of focus, not a change of body. Remember that all which you can
put aside as not yourself is the body of the yogi, and hence, as
you go higher, the lower bodies form but a single body and the consciousness
in that sheath of matter which it still cannot throw away, that
becomes the man.
"Yoga is Samadhi."
It is the power to withdraw from all that you know as body, and
to concentrate yourself within. That is Samadhi. No ordinary means
will then call you back to the world that you have left.[FN#4: An
Indian yogi in Samadhi, discovered in a forest by some ignorant
and brutal Englishmen, was so violently ill used that he returned
to his tortured body, only to leave it again at once by death.]
This will also explain to you the phrase in The Secret Doctrine
that the Adept " begins his Samadhi on the atmic plane "
When a Jivan-mukta enters into Samadhi, he begins it on the atmic
plane. All planes below the atmic are one plane for him. He begins
his Samadhi on a plane to which the mere man cannot rise. He begins
it on the atmic plane,
and thence rises stage by stage to the higher cosmic planes. The
same word, samadhi, is used to describe the states of the consciousness,
whether it rises above the physical into the astral, as in self-induced
trance of an ordinary man, or as in the case of a Jivan-mukta when,
the consciousness being already centred in the fifth, or atmic plane,
it rises to the higher planes of a larger world.
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