Secrets of Samadhi

Patanjali Yoga Sutra Knowledge Sheet 41

Samadhi is that state where you feel you can stay like that for a few million years. Samadhi is a state where the mind freezes. It is like you put the vegetables and fruits in the refrigerator to freeze and they stay fresh forever. Samadhi is the refrigeration of your life. It is the:

Secret of youthfulness,

Secret of bubbling enthusiasm,

Secret of renewal of life.

Samadhi is Steadiness

Yet all of us have wrong concepts of samadhi. We think that samadhi is going underground, not breathing. People become very skinny, have ashes all over their body. Very funny ideas about samadhi! Every experience of your senses, what you see becomes very bright, colorful and complete in samadhi. Keenness of observation. You know what usually happens when you are happy? You feel expanded. Have you observed how do you feel when you are happy? You feel you are bloating. Something in you is expanding. You don't feel the body but you just feel an expansion.

What happens when you are sad? You feel tied up, sorrowful, contraction, tightness, reduction. Also, when we feel expanded, when our awareness is expanding, we tend to fall asleep. We don't seem to have keenness of awareness. We seem to be more uptight and not relaxed.

See, if you have to thread a needle, it requires good alertness to do that, right? A half-sleepy person or somebody who is drowsy or one who is a drunkard cannot do that. If they have to string some very small, tiny pearls, they cannot do it. Do you see what I’m saying? To do a very minute thing, you need keenness of awareness. There are many people who are doing such skilful jobs, knitting and what not. Making jewelry out of tiny little pearls. They do it with a lot of sharpness of awareness. They can carve and do all this on one grain of rice!

At the same time, when the awareness is expanded, there is no keenness of awareness. When there is keenness of awareness, there is no relaxation, there is no expansion of awareness. The combination of both of these where you are totally relaxed, happy and expanded, and at the same time where you have the sharpness of awareness, sharpness of intelligence, that is Sabeeja Samadhi.

Your senses become so clear that they can perceive better, see better, think better, hear better. You know, 95 percent of the population in the world does not hear properly. You tell people something and ask them to repeat later. You can bet that they will not repeat the same thing. Or, if you talk to them for 15 minutes and ask them to say whatever you said in those 15 minutes, they can hardly repeat whatever you said for 15 seconds or 1 minute at the most. The other 14 minutes of whatever you have spoken has simply escaped in the wind, in the space! People have not heard it. Many people who repeat the Basic Course (Art of Living Part 1 Course) four or five times say, “Oh? This was not told during the first time.” The teachers would have experienced this, “I don’t remember if I have done it before!”

The same thing with seeing. People do not see. You can get many such instances. You can do many such experiments to prove this fact that people do not see things as they are. We are insensitive to people. This is another thing because we don’t see or hear properly; we are totally insensitive to people’s feelings. Samadhi is being sensitive to others’ feelings too. When you become sensitive, when this instrument here becomes sensitive, the world, the nature becomes sensitive to you. Nature listens to you. How can this happen? What is the condition?

<< Mind and Senses Become Steady in Samadhi Steadiness, in spite of being in any sensory activity, is Samadhi >>

(This is part of a series of knowledge sheets based on Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar's commentaries on Patanjali Yoga Sutras.)