part 3 two

Swami Vivekananda demonstrates samadhi

    Day after day, when Swamiji would give the lecture, there would be no chair in the place where he was accustomed to stand. One day before the lecture he asked Goodwin to put a chair there. And the evening lecture began. He started to talk a lot about samadhi and the different forms of it. The audience was absorbed in this new topic. The higher samadhi was brought up. He said that in this, all the external nerves became actionless and the inner ones awakened: in other words, all the external mental waves are suppressed. “All vrittis become stilled and the gross body and causal body separate and the mind plunges into the depths. The gross body becomes totally motionless and vibrationless and the subtle or causal body becomes activated. Samadhi is not sleep nor any kind of intoxication nor the drowsiness of basking in the heat. When one’s sleep breaks and one wakes up, one returns to one’s previous mentality; there is no particular change. Drunkenness brings a kind of stupor, but afterwards the mind is lower; not so in samadhi. A fool or ignoramus coming out of samadhi would be a wise person. His path would open and he would manifest a new expression which he would never have known before. Ignorant persons would become sages, as it were, weak-minded persons, persons of mental power; knowledge would appear before them.
    “In samadhi mind leaves the sense-bound world and goes to the supersensuous where it sees truth directly. One touches it with one’s hand and oneself becomes truth. So when one returns to the gross body, one is a free soul, one’s whole attitude becomes one of freedom – the look on one’s face, the glance of one’s eyes – all become changed.” Swamiji would often say, “The fool becomes a sage, without book-learning. Truth has to be seen, to be dug out, to be realized.”
    In this way the lecture went on for about forty-five minutes. The audience had been able to understand a little of this topic, but it was mere hearsay; they had not seen it. Somehow they had been able to get some idea of it. Now Swamiji brought up the chair, and sitting in lotus posture with straight spine became totally absorbed. His face altogether changed. His eyes were half-opened and the pupils turned up. Swamiji’s eyes were by nature larger than most people’s; often the pupil would seem to be very prominent. But in this samadhi a portion of the white of the eyeball was clearly visible.
    Everyone was struck on seeing this samadhi. Many of those sitting at a distance stood up to stare at the new sight. Goodwin stopped writing and turning around in his chair, looked fixedly at Swamiji’s face. It was something new to all. There was a bit of a stir, but no commotion; all were surprised and awed. Swamiji remained in this condition for three or four minutes, not moving, not breathing, like a living image made of flesh. Then he brought his mind down, gave out a long breath, which (because the room was hushed), was clearly audible. Then he got up from the chair and pushed it behind him and again began to speak on various matters concerned with samadhi.
    “When I used to study spirituality,” he said, “at the feet of a great soul, he would always be going into samadhi. His would be of a very high order and he would be in it much of the time: he could not keep his mind in the sense-bound world for very long. I am a small man – I have been able to understand only a very little of him and his samadhi. That day people were so overwhelmed that they had no courage to make any special conversation with him. There was no question period and Swamiji, too, seemed more tired that evening, or perhaps more serious and disinclined to talk or company. [A footnote is given: at Baranagore Math in the first stage, in the rainy season one afternoon, Swamiji’s savikalpa samadhi was observed. Because of his practice of samadhi he could have it while walking – but there was no body-consciousness. He had had it several times at Cossipore Garden too. But having this samadhi at lecture time and many persons seeing it, is particularly worth mentioning (or “remarkable”). They could clearly see and understand the topic.]

Details of meditation and prayer

“By fixing the mind on a spot between the eyebrows, or on some object of meditation, if one can keep it there, the outgoing tendency of the mind is reversed. It is quite difficult at first, but by some days’ practice, the mind can reach the incorporeal state. In the corporeal state of gross body, the mind takes on various fickle moods, but in the incorporeal this is greatly lessened and the mind stabilizes itself.
“I am the giver of my own blessing.” In the course of the a lecture it came up that if we make sincere prayer or restless demand of the Lord, our desires are fulfilled – even to the extent of getting direct counsel. How does this come about? Swamiji said, “By thinking uninterruptedly about one thing and combining devotion to the Lord with that, the mind itself goes upward and often becomes forgetful of body, time, place etc. Going further it is conscious only of itself as truth; no other awareness is there. Its own truth becomes reflected in the cidakasa and in this reflected state becomes the light of consciousness. Often it is evident that the higher mind, observing in the light of consciousness the entreaties of the gross body, satisfies these and give reassurance – in other words, one’s own subtle or higher condition has taken a certain form and the gross body is as if asking the prayers. Of itself this high state blesses the gross body. It is not that as soon as one prays, one’s prayers are answered; the causal body determines whether or not the prayers will be answered. Normally we go on thinking that some god or heavenly being is hearing our inmost prayer, and he, condescending through his grace, is fulfilling it. This is the popular idea, but if our mind goes higher, it can be clearly seen that I am granting my own boons – that is, the subtle ‘I’ is blessing the ‘I’ which is in bondage.

Despicable “sadhus”

“Sadhus and ascetics go wandering in different places. So they do not keep much with them in the way of belongings. Many, ignoring the proprieties of sadhana, take recourse to various kinds of austerities. Some sit on a plank of nails. Others do pancatapa with fire on four sides and the sun overhead. Others smear themselves with ashes. All these practices have gone on for ages. What is more, there is one class of sadhu who declare themselves unclean sadhus. On their bodies there are vermin, and of course they smell bad. They are afraid lest any living creatures be killed, so when one falls off their bodies, they will put it back on. These care so much for the life of any living thing, their own odor and the spreading of vermin and disease does not trouble them. This kind of ‘sadhu-behavior’ is a reprehensible and should be forbidden. It should not be tolerated as it is a menace to society.”

Past, present, future

In one lecture Swamiji said that where past and future become mingled, there is samadhi. We are always thinking of the past and the future; it is the present which forms the center of things. But so swiftly flow the currents of our thought, that in thought itself the present becomes fragmented into past and future. So the mind dwells on the future and can understand that, but cannot hold on to the isolated present. When the simple present or existent is the center [of attention?] one experiences one’s own nature, and there past and future become one; and that is samadhi.

Vedantic relativity

    Theory of transition. One day he said in the lecture: “Body is a stream of matter entering into one end and coming out the other, and the name of this transition is body. Thought too is being endlessly transformed. As far as we can imagine or see, there is change in everything. If mind too is always changing, then after death there will not be anything remaining which we can call existence. In that case our future existence or permanent existence cannot be. The Self would be lost. For one mass in the form of the universe is arising with all its ingredients; if the ingredients get changed, the whole, too, will be ruined. So the Atman would dissolve.” (This is Buddhistic and a conclusion not desired by us.)
    Swamiji gave the illustration of the sun. “That Reality is One, but when the mind reaches a higher state, we see the Reality as larger and larger and we go from vast to vaster. From earth we see the sun as a rather small bright object, but we can easily imagine that if we rise very high in the sky we shall see it as immense and much, much larger than our own earth. It is the center around which not only Earth but other earths revolve. When our mind is constricted we see the petty qualities of a thing; when it is expanded we are able to catch its innumerable aspects. He was very fond of this illustration and used it often.

    Up and down relativity. Swamiji spoke on this in a very beautiful way. “We always gauge up, down and the directions, but this relative idea of ours is not based on permanence, but on certain conventions; but if these conventions are trespassed, the truth based on them no longer holds good. When we look around on this earth, we use ‘up,’, ‘down,’ ‘east,’ ‘west’ and such words, and here all these are meaningful, but leaving earth and rising into the Great Void or eternal space in which the earth is revolving, no such directional words are applicable. Where a comparison can be made between one thing and another, such directions are meaningful.”

Substance and quality

    At one evening lecture he began with a deep and commanding voice.
“Substance and quality! We speak of the qualities of all these objects we are looking at; in the domain of the sense-bound world we explain the qualities of things. According to one view (Buddhist) as an aggregate of accumulated qualities an object is created. This bundle of qualities is called ‘reality’. There cannot be anything behind it; and if this aggregate disappears, no reality remains.” Pointing to the wall on his left, he said, “We are seeing this wall; its color, its length etc. – all these are names of its qualities. Because they have become combined, we call this a wall. And so with everything else: certain combined qualities we call a table, others a gas lamp etc. In this view, it is the qualities which are the basic entity and beyond them there is nothing. Aggregates of qualities creates. And so long as all those qualities stay together, we understand that object, but in time, when the collection of qualities one by one disappears, then inversion occurs and when all the qualities disappear it is destroyed.
    “This would all be true of the mind as well. After the death of the body, so long as our subtle or causal body remains as a bundle of qualities, so long is there personality or personal existence, but not thereafter. This is called Nihilism. There cannot be any permanent substance called Self. When we say ‘self’ we are thinking of some quality or other. We cannot think without qualities, such as stability, existence, indestructibility. So self or any such thing must break up some time or other. Everything dissolves into the Void, where there is no quality. That is the only noumenon. If you speak of God, the Creator, it simply means taking certain quality-bundles; we project some imaginary being whom we call God, who in time will also perish.”
    Everyone was fooled by this exposition into thinking this was his view, unanswerable. After a little while he raised the question, “But there are several objections to this. Do the qualities belong to the substance, or the substance to the qualities?