February 7

The Essence of Yoga

Let us talk a little about samadhi. In the yogic sense, we are talking about the transcendental state of enlightenment. But in India, normally if you say, “He has attained Samadhi,” that means he has died and is buried. That is the normal connotation for that term. In a way, samadhi is like that. You are dead, yet you are alive. My Master Sri Swami Sivanandaji used to sing this song: “When shall I see Thee? When ‘I’ ceases to be.” He was asking this question of the Lord. “Lord, when can I see You? I know that will be when ‘l’ ceases to be.” That means that if the ego or “I” dies, you can truly live. If the egoistic “I” goes away from you, you are free from the ego. You are clean, pure. At that stage you are fit to go to heaven, to experience the highest knowledge or the highest truth. That is what we call samadhi. This is the essence of all spiritual teachings and practices, no matter what the label. One can be a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or of any religion. Even if you don’t have any faith at all or don’t believe in any organized religion, it doesn’t matter. That is not the criterion to have this realization. All you have to accomplish is to see that all selfishness goes away. Where does the “I” dwell? In ego. Where does the ego live? In the mind. The ego is, in a way, the very source of mind. All the expressions of the ego, thinking, feeling, willing, could be put together under one term, “mind.” If the mind gets completely purified, then it’s no longer an obstruction to your experience of the Truth. When it is clean and clear, the mind doesn’t color the appearance of the pure Self. It becomes a pure reflector of the Self to see its own true nature. That is the essence of spirituality. Perform bulk operations on your HTML document on any HTML tag. Choose to replace, delete the whole block, delete only the tag or delete the tag attributes only of the selected tags.