Sabeeja samadhi

Chapter 6 - Steadiness In Samadhi 

Day 44 

For a few moments, keep your body and your eyes steady and you will see, almost immediately, the mind will so become steady. If you stand still, the mind will become still and the breath will become steady. 

This is when the time stops, death stops and immortality begins. You wake up before time swallows you and before this earth gulps you. Then, you swallow time. This is samadhi. Samadhi is that state where you feel you can stay like that for a million years. 

It is a state where the mind freezes. It is just like things remaining fresh, if they are put in a fridge. Samadhi is the refrigerator of your life. It is the secret of youthfulness, the secret of bubbling enthusiasm and the secret of renewal of life. 

It is steadiness but we have the wrong understanding of samadhi. We think it means going underground and not breathing. People in samadhi fast and become skinny. They apply ash all over their body. They have wrong ideas about it. When you are in samadhi, every experience of your senses becomes very bright, colourful and complete. 

When you are happy, you feel expanded. You feel as if you are bloated. Something in you is expanding. You are not aware of your body, but you feel an expansion taking place. And what happens when you feel sad? You feel uptight and sorrowful. There seems to be a contraction, tightness or reduction in you. 

And when you feel expanded and your awareness is expanding, you tend to fall asleep. And when you want to have a keenness of awareness, you seem to be more uptight and not relaxed. It takes alertness to thread a needle. A drowsy or drunk person cannot do it. If they have to string very small pearls, they cannot do it. 

It needs keenness of awareness to do something very minute. There are many people who are very skillful. They can carve things on one grain of rice. They have a lot of sharpness of awareness. 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 is sabeeja samadhi - when you are totally relaxed, happy and expanded and when, at the same time, you have that sharpness of awareness and sharpness of intelligence. Your senses become so clear that it can perceive better, see better, think better, hear better. 95% of the population in the world cannot hear properly. If you tell people something and ask them to repeat it, you can bet that they will not be able to do it. 

Or, if you talk to them for 15 minutes and ask them to repeat what you said, they will hardly be able to repeat what you said for one minute at the most. What you had said in the rest of the time has just passed them by. They have not heard it.

This happens with sight too. People are not able to see things as they are. We are insensitive to people's feelings because we do not see or hear properly. Samadhi is being sensitive to other's feelings too. When you become sensitive, the world and the nature becomes sensitive to you. Nature listens to you. How can this happen? What is the condition? 

Patanjali says, "Ksheena vritti." When a these five activities that we have dealt with before, when these vrittis, the activities are subdued.

Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankarji 

PATANJALI YOGA SUTRAS