Presaging This Ability

Have we any examples in common life of occurrences or acts presaging this ability? Yes, we often 'lose ourselves'. We peep into someone's office or study, and tip-toe away, whispering to our companions, 'He is lost in thought.' I knew a man who used to lecture frequently, on subjects requiring much thought. He told me that he had acquired the power to put himself out of mind - completely forget himself - at the commencement of a lecture, and look mentally at his subject-matter like a map on which he was following a route, while the spoken words flowed in complete obedience to the successive ideas which were being looked at. He told me that he would become aware of himself perhaps once or twice during the lecture, and at the end of it, as he sat down, he would find himself surprised that it was he who had given the lecture. Yet he fully remembered everything; only 'himself' (the common idea or picture of self) being absent.

It is incredible to those who have not had the experience that man can thus enjoy life beyond mind. To make a comparison, it is incredible to the body that the mind can manipulate inside itself (in imagination) thousands of facts, arid similarly it is incredible to the mind-self (pictured, as it is, as one of those facts) that consciousness can be enjoyed without it. The truth is that 'I' is not then eliminated, but is revealed to itself as no object. That is what our 'I' always is, but the mind clothes it in thought, and looks at it from the outside.

There are certain conditions which go against this attainment. In his Vedanta Sara (Essence of Vedanta), Sadananda Swami has called them the four enemies of samadhi a sleepy heart, attachment to anything but Brahman, human passions, and a confused mind.

One must not here, in the chapter on mind-process, go into the full discussion of Self or I.

In the standard descriptions of samadhi, or contemplation, two kinds are usually mentioned, and described as:

(I) with consciousness of an object (samprajnata), and

(2) without consciousness of an object (asamprajnata).

The former of these two is an earlier stage of attainment than the latter. Still, it is not only a step on the way to the latter. It is definitely a platform of conscious living, and has a definite ability of its own. While the latter is concerned with meditation about what is beyond subject and object, the former is concerned with things known in the world. In the course of this perceptive form of meditation and samadhi there are two stages:

(a) Inspectional (vitarka), and

(b) Investigational (vichara).

The inspectional is concerned with objective things as known in time and space, and therefore often described as dense or gross. The object of this state is to get a clear image in consciousness of the object chosen for meditation at any given time.