What is Knowledge :- 10-14.

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13/04/2018
10.The Stages of Samadhi-14

The final point is that in the last onslaught of meditation, the presence of this principle of eternity is recognised in everything else, particularly in the object of meditation, not by the means of a thought thinking an object, or much less the sense conceiving it, but by the soul that contemplates. True meditation is a performance of the soul, and not merely a thought of the mind. We are not merely thinking something in meditation, we are ‘being’ something; and we know very well how different our ‘being’ is from the way in which we think. Our ‘being’ is what we call our soul, and we embrace that object as a soul in itself. As we have a status of our own, the object also has a status of its own. We called this status the soul of the thing. It is soul entering into soul. What do we mean by the soul? It is, to repeat once again, that very thing which we consider as something which cannot be regarded as involved in space and time.

Anyone can imagine how difficult this feat is. It is difficult, no doubt, but the difficulty arises due to the prejudices of our mind. We have inborn traits of thinking which we have taken for granted as the only real ways of thinking. “I have been born and brought up in this way of thinking; this is the only way of thinking, and there is no other way.” There is some other way, and this has to be known first and foremost.


The instruction in regard to meditation on the object prescribed according to the system of Patanjali is the grasping of the object as such by that which we are essentially. That is, our total being is engaged in a process of total awareness, and not engaged in perceptual activity or the thought as a sort of concept. Meditation on an object is not a concept of the object, much less a percept of the object. It is a ‘being’ contemplating a ‘being’, whereby we may be said to be actually contemplating that object as if we are that object itself. This would be the result that may follow, finally. In the heights of meditation, we are told that a consciousness of the object reaches such intensity of experience that one does not know whether it is ‘A’ meditating on ‘B’ or ‘B’ meditating on ‘A’, whether we are contemplating the object or the object is contemplating us, because that thing which we originally called an object ceases to be an object.

Why the object should cease to be an object in meditation will be known to us if we go back to the earlier lessons, wherein we learned that the universe is an interrelated completeness, an organic totality, where nothing can be regarded as an object, and nothing is a cause, nothing is an effect. So, the idea that one part of the organism is an object of another is not a correct idea of the object. And meditation, according to the system of yoga, is therefore an endeavour of consciousness to reach up to its cosmic level of the interrelatedness of things – wherein, in which condition, nobody is a thinker of anything, and also nobody is a ‘thought-of’. There is a cosmic interconnectedness, so that the whole universe stands supreme as a single awareness. This is what is called Universal Being – the aim of yoga.

Om Purnamadah Purnamidam Purnat Purnamudachyate
 Purnasya Purnamadaya Purnamevavasishyate
 Om Shantih Shantih Shantih

THE END
Swami Krishnananda

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