Samadhi and The Supraconscious States

Almost all human beings spend their lives and lifetimes revolving between these three states of awareness. Even most higher spiritual experiences - that is to say experiences that a person has in meditation or through prayer, or just spontaneously - we would class as having occurred in the waking state, or in the dreaming state, because while you are having a spiritual experience of some type - suddenly you're feeling ecstasy, suddenly you feel yourself merging with the light of God, your awareness has quadrupled, you're seeing into alternate realities, you're feeling a deep peace, joy, power, whatever it may be - there's still a sense of you are the one who's having the experience. Without that sense of you, there's no one to relate the experience, to remember the experience. So that's why we class your higher spiritual experiences in a waking state. Of course you can have them in the dream world too.

The dream world is a real world, as real as the waking world. It's a different plane of awareness. We call it the astral worlds, in which you can create, just as someone can make a movie and can create a world in that movie with scenery and lighting and actors and actresses, scripts and so on. So each night when you go to sleep you do the same thing, and actually you do the exact same thing when you're awake. There is really very little difference between waking and dreaming. But more on that another time.

In a person's cycle of incarnations, after you've had many, many lifetimes, and you've moved into the third cycle of incarnations, the higher spiritual incarnations, a person will have a continuous flow of spiritual experiences. They've dedicated their lives to self-discovery. They're meditating each day and going deeper within themselves. They're learning to find a deeper purpose and meaning to life. But a time comes when a person begins to experience the fourth state of awareness, the fourth bardo of consciousness, the fourth level of ecstasy.

The fourth level of ecstasy is samadhi. The first level of ecstasy is the waking state, the second level of ecstasy is the dreaming state, the third level of ecstasy is the deep sleep state, the fourth level of ecstasy is samadhi and the superconscious states. Samadhi is not simply meditation. Samadhi is absorption, absorption in eternity. There is no difference between samadhi and the superconscious states. Various spiritual teachers and enlightened persons have discussed and classified the samadhis. Some say that there are four samadhis, some say that there are five. Some say that there's something beyond samadhi called nirvana.

Now to begin with, you must understand that when we discuss the samadhis and the superconscious states, that it's really impossible to pin down what they're like, because when we're discussing them we're looking at them from the point of view of this world. That is to say, you are listening to what I say, and as you listen to what I say, you are analyzing, feeling, weighing, trying to come to grips with it, as you should be. So the perspective that you have in your examination of the samadhis at the moment is that of a perceiver. You, the ego, the "I" consciousness, are turning your fields of attention in the direction of the samadhis. But it's impossible to really understand the samadhis through the ego sense. However, the ego sense, your sense of "I," needs a description, which is why of course I'm making this recording, because the mind has to have some idea of what lies beyond itself so that it can go beyond itself.

You've gone someplace on a wonderful vacation. You went to Hawaii, maybe you went to Maui or Kauai, and you saw the volcanoes, the rain forests, you felt the tropical winds blowing in at night as you sat on the balcony of the hotel. You listened to the surf crashing. You've had a beautiful experience. Now you've come back to try and share that experience with your friends because you felt it was worthwhile, but your friends are deaf and your friends are blind. They've never seen, they've never heard. How are you going to try and describe the beautiful experiences that you had in Hawaii? They've been blind all their lives, so it's not as if they've ever seen a palm tree, it's not as if they've ever seen the stars at night. So you can't do it through Braille, because even if you could, they have no sense of what you're talking about. They can't hear, so how can you describe what the surf sounds like or the tradewinds, the tropical winds as they blow at night, the sounds of the birds, the night birds calling? This is what it is like to try and describe samadhi and the superconscious states to someone who has not experienced them. It is like trying to describe this world to one who has no senses.

But still, it's necessary to paint a picture. The picture is important, because it gives us at least an intellectual appreciation of why we're engaged in the process of self-discovery. An old parable is told sometimes in trying to explain this point: Three friends were out climbing a mountain, and one, the one who was in the lead, reached a very high ledge above the other two. He looked down to the others and said, "God, this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," and then he went over the ledge and he was gone. The other two didn't know what to do at first, so one of them, the next one in line, climbed up and peered over the ledge and said, "Oh my God! This is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," and then disappeared. The third person had to decide if they wanted to see what was over the ledge. They had to climb up themselves and see, or they could just go back down the mountain without knowing. Of course, no one knows what that third person did, but we can assume that he came back down, since we have the story.

So, you can observe a person go into the superconscious states. You can watch them dissolve. They can't explain to you what it's really like, but if you sit and meditate with someone who's in samadhi, who goes into the superconscious states, a field of energy is generated around their being that is so strong that you will experience to some extent what it's like. You'll get a feeling for it. Or, if you can meditate well, you can meditate on someone who is enlightened, who goes into these states of awareness - even if you are quite a distance away - and access that consciousness and light. But before we get into how you go into samadhi, let's take a look at the different samadhis.

As I suggested earlier, Patanjali and some others have said that there are a number of different samadhis, and there's no exact agreement on how many there are, because there's no way to describe them. Where one begins and another ends, it is very difficult to say. So some say there are three, some say there are four, some say there are five.

I have a very simple system for explaining the samadhis. I feel that there are two samadhis, only two. One samadhi is salvikalpa samadhi, the other is nirvikalpa samadhi. Salvikalpa samadhi would include all of the lesser samadhis, because I don't think they're really all that different. Nirvikalpa samadhi, however, is qualitatively different. I find this much easier, but choose whichever system you prefer. All of them are imperfect ways of describing that which is indescribable.

Now, salvikalpa samadhi means the following: when you enter into salvikalpa samadhi - that is, any of the lesser samadhis, not that they're very lesser (Rama chuckles softly) - you merge with eternity, you become God. In most advanced states of meditation, a person meditates on God or truth, light, joy, nirvana, the Buddha, the Christ, whatever it may be. As they meditate, they have experiences, but there's always the sense of being the enjoyer: "I am enjoying eternity, I am experiencing the ecstasy of existence. It's all-pervasive and there's an awful lot of it. There's a reservoir. It's filled with wonderful, clear, pure water, and I'm sitting here drinking it. Some days I drink more, some days I drink less." That's meditation. Advanced meditation is drinking a lot of this pure water, which is more than most people do, who don't drink at all, or don't even know that there's pure water to drink, or run away from it, or shoot those who drink it and oppress them.

Salvikalpa samadhi means not simply sitting around drinking lots and lots and lots of this water, which has a purifying effect on one's life and one's being and gives you strength and clarity. That is advanced meditation and it occurs after many, many years and lifetimes of practice. Salvikalpa samadhi, in other words, doesn't just mean having a really high meditation where the room fills with light and everything is bright and shiny and you feel one with the dharma and the flow. That's not Salvikalpa samadhi, that's a high meditation.

Salvikalpa samadhi means that you lose your individual awareness as a person. You no longer have a name, an address, you're no longer in this world at all. There's no sense of the earth, time, space, past history, future possibilities. All of that goes away. All of that is completely erased. You dissolve, but in your dissolution you become something. You become God. You become eternity. There is a sense - not in the human sense, not in the way of thinking, "I'm God," or "I'm eternity," if you're thinking these thoughts you're not in salvikalpa samadhi - that you are the all-pervasive existence, that existence has an awareness, which cannot be described in words. That is salvikalpa samadhi.

In other words, you are no longer drinking the water. You jumped in the water and dissolved in it, and now you have the sense - not as you did as a human being, not through thought or understanding - that there is an awareness that permeates all of eternity. That is what you are. Thou art that. That thou art. That sense of that timeless perfection, which you are - again, not from a human point of view - that's salvikalpa samadhi. You have become God, in other words, you have become eternity, and you're conscious of that, not again in the way that most people are conscious.

Remember, this doesn't mean that today you sat down and had a wonderful meditation and you just felt ecstasy everywhere, that you felt the pure joy of perfection, that light was everywhere, there was nothing but light. That's not it. As long as you're still having these types of perceptions you're having very wonderful and very advanced meditations and that's quite fine, but you haven't come near the samadhis yet. In the samadhis there is dissolution and undifferentiated reality. There's no sense of light, there's no sense of joy, there's no sense of God, there's no sense of perfection, there's no sense of bliss, there's no sense of peace. All these are experiences that are had by an individual, but you are no longer individual. Your individuality melts and merges with eternity.

Some people fool themselves, and they think that they're going into samadhi, but one thing I can tell you about samadhi is it's not pleasant. It's not happy. It's nothing to look forward to. It just is. Nor is it unpleasant. Nor is it something not to look forward to, but people seem to think that samadhi, in the spiritual life, is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and it's not because there's no rainbow and there's no gold, but that there's no you when you're in samadhi. There's no way to describe it.

Some people think that, "Well gosh, in samadhi there's no emotion, there's no joy, there's no light." And that's true. But nor is there a lack of emotion, a lack of joy or a lack of light. There's simply no way to describe it. All I can say is that in salvikalpa samadhi, that essence that you are, is aware of being an essence. That's salvikalpa samadhi. That's a very advanced spiritual state. If you are capable of going into salvikalpa samadhi in this life, if you attain that, then I would say that you were enlightened. Partially enlightened. Partially enlightened.

Nirvikalpa samadhi is beyond that. The only way I can describe it for you at all in words and images is simply to say that nirvikalpa samadhi is an end to everything and a beginning to everything. Nirvikalpa samadhi means that there will be no "I" sense at all, even of "I am God." You will not even have the conscious awareness of being undifferentiated reality. It's beyond the knower and the known, it's beyond the subject and the object. There's no way you can describe it. Anything that you can say about it can't possibly be it, because if you're saying something about it, you're still in the mode of a perceiver. It's only when the perceiver goes away completely that nirvikalpa samadhi exists.

Nirvikalpa samadhi means the seedless state. That is to say, nothing grows from it. If you have a seedless orange, you can't grow an orange tree from it. Nothing comes forth from it, there are no karmas, whereas in salvikalpa samadhi something comes forth from it, because there's still a sense of perception. Perception generates karma, but in nirvikalpa samadhi, there's absolutely nothing, nothing whatsoever.

So nirvikalpa samadhi is nirvana. I see that the terms are interchangeable. Nirvana is basically a Buddhist term, which means the extinction of the self, which does not necessarily mean death as we have come to know it. Some people think that nirvana means an end to all things, an end to all life, sort of perpetual oblivion. But perpetual oblivion is just another idea. Perpetual oblivion is another thing that someone could experience. That has nothing to do with nirvana or nirvikalpa samadhi - I use the two terms interchangeably.

The only way that you can possibly come to have any understanding, in my estimation, of salvikalpa or nirvikalpa samadhi, is to meditate in person with someone who's enlightened. A partially enlightened person - we would say a saint - is someone who experiences salvikalpa samadhi. A fully enlightened person, someone we would say is self-realized, is someone who enters into nirvikalpa samadhi. When you enter into nirvikalpa samadhi, you never come back.

In order to enter into nirvikalpa samadhi you have to walk into the ocean, and you're made of powder, and when you walk into the ocean, you dissolve. There can be no possibility of coming back, because there's no you to return. This is where it gets a little tricky to understand, because that doesn't mean that if you're sitting in meditation and you go into nirvikalpa samadhi, that an hour from now you won't be out mowing the lawn or driving your car. But it won't be the same you. Each time you go into nirvikalpa samadhi, you dissolve the glue that binds the aggregates of the self together, and a new being forms.

The same is true to a lesser extent of salvikalpa samadhi. This is why they're useful. The reason we seek to enter into salvikalpa samadhi and nirvikalpa samadhi is because they make us what we really are. Each one of us really is eternity, but we're caught up in a human form, we're locked into an idea of ourselves and reality, which is developed over countless lifetimes. In order to become enlightened, to achieve perfect perfection, to go away from all the misery and suffering of human life, it's necessary to go into samadhi.

Again, samadhi is the culmination of lifetimes of spiritual practice and meditation. It's nothing that you will experience after four or five years of meditation. After many, many years of meditation you will begin to experience salvikalpa samadhi, if you've had many years of meditation in other lifetimes. If this is your first lifetime meditating, then it is extremely unlikely that you will experience samadhi, in this lifetime. You'll experience very, very advanced states of awareness, blissful beyond description, ecstasy that's unfathomable, knowledge that's impossible to describe. So don't feel that if you're not entering the samadhis that you're missing anything, exactly. It's not that way. Just to move into the advanced states of meditation takes many lifetimes and many years, and if you never went further than that, that would be more than enough. I mean, you'll experience ecstasy.

The samadhis are beyond that. They are beyond. The samadhis are like the highest peaks in the Himalayas. You can have climbed many, many mountains and enjoyed all the mountains and had wonderful experiences and feel your life is complete. The samadhis don't make your life complete, they're beyond life and they're beyond completion. The way you learn about them is by sitting and meditating with someone who's in those states. That's how you learn to go into samadhi.

It is possible to go into samadhi on your own. Let's say this is an incarnation in which you're meditating, that you've meditated in other lives, but you have not experienced the samadhis. Now this is the first life that you're going to enter into salvikalpa samadhi. It's unlikely that in this life that you will also enter into nirvikalpa samadhi. It might take you another hundred or a thousand lifetimes of passing through salvikalpa samadhi. It is possible to do it in that same life, but that isn't what usually happens. Usually there are many lifetimes of entering into salvikalpa samadhi before the final entrance into nirvikalpa samadhi, into nirvana. There are many lifetimes of being a saint before you become a perfected being, or before you've perfected your being. Actually, I don't think there are any perfected beings, I think everyone's a perfected being no matter where you are or what you are, we're all perfected beings. Perfect at being what we are now, which is all there is.

But that perfected consciousness, that lack of awareness of all that is transitory, is samadhi. It's of great advantage to someone, because the reason that you suffer, the reason that you are deluded in maya, in illusion, that you have all kinds of problems, is largely because of what they call the samskaras. The samskaras are the past life tendencies. These tendencies are not so much habits in the sense of, "Well, for the last 50 past lives I've always gotten up on the left-hand side of the bed. Now, in this life, I do the same thing because I'm drawn to do that." Habits of the personality are something that develop within an individual lifetime. The habits that you now have are habits that really developed within this life. Phobias and fears and all these sort of things, in most cases, occur in this life. Once in a while there is a carryover. Once in a while a person might have a fear of drowning or tidal waves or something like that, because in a past life they had an experience where they drowned or went through a tidal wave or something like that.

But this is pretty rare, to be honest with you, because there is very little memory, even subconsciously, of the past lives. A lot of people today are interested in past life therapy, and they think that it's kind of an extended Freudian analysis. They think that if they can simply look back, not only to their childhood, but to their past lives and see what they did, they'll come to understand why they do things now. This is quite popular and I don't think it's exactly true, because there is not that much of a causal effect between individual actions in one lifetime and another. There is an effect and a connection between states of awareness. In a past life you had a certain awareness, and that awareness will give rise to an awareness in your next lifetime. That is true.

The samskaras, then, are not the things we did in an individual lifetime, but it was the way that we thought, the tendencies, the way the aggregates are formed. A human being is not made up of one self. You have many, many selves. So the old motto "know thy self," in my estimation, should be changed to "know thy selves," because you're made up of many, many beings. The Buddhists sometimes talk about the anatman, meaning that a person does not have a soul. In the Hindu tradition and the Christian tradition we talk about a soul, or an atman, a self, the same self that incarnates from lifetime to lifetime.

Now, in most forms of Buddhism, the Buddhists don't feel that there is not a self. What they're disagreeing with is that the self is fixed. Buddha indicated that the self, that part of you that incarnates from lifetime to lifetime, was causal. That is to say, there was a connecting link in each lifetime. It wasn't as if there was a being that was there in one lifetime and then in the next lifetime there was no connection. In his own case, when he discussed his past lives, he was certainly implying that there was an essence that incarnated from lifetime to lifetime, but what he was trying to suggest was that most people have a concept of the soul that is almost like a personality. What he said was, rather than that, the soul is composed of aggregates. It's like saying that there are seven or eight basic colors, and we can put those colors together in varying combinations. Perhaps there are seven musical notes and we can put those notes in varying combinations and produce different melodies.

So in each lifetime the notes re-form in a slightly different pattern, but that pattern is an outgrowth of the pattern that was in a previous life. Imagine that in the first few incarnations, the aggregates, the essences that make a person - almost like the atomic structure in a nonphysical sense - are very loose. There isn't much to it. It's like a very simple atom, like an atom of hydrogen, as opposed to some of the more complex atoms that have more protons, neutrons, electrons and valances. As incarnations go by, the atom gets more complex. That is, your being, the part of you that reincarnates from lifetime to lifetime, the aggregate, grows thicker and denser. And while this is good and it stores up knowledge and power, at the same time there's a problem with it, because it means that a person becomes more fixated. The more lives you have, the harder it is to change, yet the stronger you are. It's a kind of funny dichotomy.

So, that's good in development. It's important that one become more and more fixed, but then you reach a point in higher spiritual development where what you want to do is erase everything that you've been. It's as if all your past is written on the blackboard, and if we could erase it, your past would no longer exist. So what we're going to do is erase what's written on the blackboard. The way you do that - the only way you do that - is in samadhi. When you go into samadhi, either salvikalpa or nirvikalpa, what happens is you erase, you loosen, the aggregates. You simplify them. The way that you're able to go into salvikalpa samadhi is through spiritual refinement. After many years of meditative practice and many lifetimes of meditative practice, you gradually loosen the ties that hold you.

Imagine that you are a balloon, the big balloons that people ride in, with a little basket underneath. You're sitting, waiting to take off, but you have all these sandbags, and they're so, so heavy, there's no way the balloon can take off, try though it might. So gradually you unload the sandbags one after another after another. Each time you meditate, this is what you're doing - you're unloading the sandbags that hold you down to the ground. Let's say that the sandbags come in different sizes. The first ones weigh 100 pounds, then there's some that weigh 50 pounds, 20 pounds, 10 pounds, 5 pounds, 2 pounds and so on.

So let us say that the initial ones weigh the most. Once you get rid of those, then you start to float up a little bit in the air. Then, in order to go higher you drop some of the ones that maybe just weigh 20 pounds or 15 pounds. Then in order to go higher, you drop some of the ones that weigh 10 pounds, then 5 pounds and so on, until all you have left is the balloon and the basket itself. Then you drop away the basket and hold onto the balloon. And then if you go high enough, the balloon disappears and you with it. Gone, vanished without a trace. No one can say where, which doesn't mean that there isn't a where, it's just not visible to the human eye.

So, in meditation, when you meditate now and in other lives, what you do is you get rid of the gross obstacles that hold you down, the biggest ones. Once you've gotten rid of those, then you can begin to meditate more freely and you'll experience more light and perfection in your life. Then you have to start to work on the 20 pounders, which you do in advanced meditation. Once you work through those, then you've just got some very, very light ones and then you have the basket. When you drop the basket - the thing that you ride in, the personality form - that's salvikalpa samadhi. And then there's just the balloon and you're soaring at an incredible rate, and then when the balloon dissolves completely, when it's gone, that's nirvikalpa samadhi.

The things you're dropping are idea forms and aggregates from your past lives - ways of seeing, believing, feeling, ways of looking. In other words, states of consciousness that you've fixated on. The samskaras, then, are the ways that we have evolved through series of lifetimes to deal with the world and existence. These were good and fine ways to deal with existence, but then we reach a point where those ways are no longer applicable to who we are and what we are. In other words, it was necessary for us to learn a certain art, a certain way of dealing with life and the world and reality that has caused us to reach where we are now. But those very tendencies and methods, which hithertofore helped us and aided us in our self-discovery, can ultimately become a hindrance, and so we have to pass beyond them.

So samadhi is useful from the point of view of this world, from a functional point of view in that cause. I don't think it has to be useful; it is a refulgent reality itself, but in terms of the linear evolution of a being, when you start to go into samadhi, you cast off all the things that you've learned, all the selves that you've been so that you can become what you truly and really are. That, you might say, is the purpose of entering into samadhi, aside from the pure experience itself, the experienceless experience.

The superconscious states, which is what we experience in samadhi, and then beyond them, which is nirvana, which is indescribable, are the essence of reality. You might say that it's like a house. A person builds a house; they build a home, and they build different rooms in the home - bedroom, kitchen, living room, each room has something special about it, has something special to offer, a special beauty, a different feeling, a different ambience, a different atmosphere. But that which is the space within all the rooms, the backdrop, the pure essence from which all those rooms have come forth and to which they will all return, and the essence that is space within them, is the superconscious.

The superconscious and the void are interchangeable terms, as are full enlightenment and self-realization, in my estimation. Enlightenment - we could just say enlightenment itself, which would imply full enlightenment - and self-realization or God realization are interchangeable terms. These all mean the same thing. It means that a person has integrated their consciousness with existence until there's no longer a separation.

The void is the superconscious states. The void is the backdrop in which all of the worlds exist. All of the different realities and lokas - both physical worlds, in other words, and the nonphysical worlds, form and formlessness - exist in something. The house was built in a certain space and dimensional plane. The house comes into that dimensional plane and occupies it for a while. One day the house will dissolve, but the space will still be there. So the void or the superconscious states are the space in which existence is. Existence and nonexistence are like houses, or rooms in houses, they come and go, but the void is the backdrop, the superconscious states. Nirvana is beyond that, down the street and to the left.

So, as you reach into the superconscious you find the meaning of life, the purpose of existence, all the things that you've ever looked for are in the superconscious. They're also in physical, in the finite. They're also in the waking state, in the dreaming state and the deep sleep state, but they come into their absolute fullness in the superconscious. All the knots of existence are untied, everything is clear and becomes what it truly is in the superconscious.

The way that you enter into the superconscious is, of course, as I've suggested. For many, many lifetimes one just evolves through the basic incarnations. Then you move into a set of incarnations in which you're seeking spiritually, praying, meditating, things like that. Then there'll come an incarnation where you will find and study with an enlightened teacher. The enlightened or self-realized or God-realized teacher, interchangeable terms, is someone who teaches you how to enter into the superconscious. The way they do that is really not so much by teaching you how to enter into the superconscious, that's part of it, but the first part of the training really is to teach someone how to let go of all the weights. The weights are the attachments.

It's very difficult to describe or explain this, but a self-realized teacher, such as myself or someone else who does the same things, has the power, or the power operates through them, to bring a person into the superconscious. Let us say, for example, that Susan wouldn't have been able to go into the superconscious states for 50 more incarnations at her current rate of evolution. But if Susan comes to see an enlightened teacher, a fully enlightened teacher, if Susan is receptive and meditates and has somewhat of a developed consciousness to begin with, the enlightened teacher can project Susan, can lift Susan, temporarily into the superconscious.

If you're at a football game and you're a child and everyone's standing up and you can't see, your father or brother can lift you up, and even though you're not tall enough to see, and it might have been many years before you'd grow that tall to see over the others, your brother or father can lift you up or put you on their shoulders so that you can see. Then you'll understand.

So what the enlightened teacher does is to lift the student up so that they can see. Then the student has to go through all the various stages and steps of letting go of all those weights. No one can do it for the student. The teacher can point the way, but the student has to do it themselves. The ability of the teacher to project the student into the alternate realities, into the superconscious states, is dependent upon the student's receptivity.

So if I'm conducting a public meditation, let's say, and 500 people come, and I'm meditating on all of them and trying to do my best for all of them, there may be 5 or 10 people who have meditated a great deal in past lives or in this life who are very, very receptive. It's very easy for me - because they have already let go of a lot of the weights - to move them into the superconscious. For some people who are just enshrouded in maya, and they have nothing but weights, it's harder. You can give them a glimpse, but they won't see as much. So what you do as a teacher with your students is you give them constant glimpses. You move them into the alternate realities constantly. Each time they advance, each time they let go of another weight, another attachment, another way of seeing things, you can take them a little further and show them the next step. So it's really a two-party process then.

It is possible to do this yourself without a teacher, but it is extremely difficult, because there is no one to lift you up and show you the next step. But it can be done.

Another thing that the teacher does in this process is help you dissolve some of those samskaras. If you'll remember that when you enter into salvikalpa or nirvikalpa samadhi, it just dissolves these weights. Each time you go in, it dissolves more weights. Enlightenment doesn't occur all at once. There isn't one day when suddenly you achieve full enlightenment. Enlightenment has occurred over a period of time.

In Zen we talk about satori and experiencing satori. Satori is salvikalpa or nirvikalpa samadhi, but the idea is that after many years of meditation one day you have a flash of intuition, you see life in its true essence, you go into salvikalpa samadhi. Just one experience in salvikalpa samadhi will change your life. You'll never be the same. The old self will dissolve and you'll experience a rebirth. In this life, you'll be reborn and transformed.

Once, though, is not enough, as Jacqueline Susann told us. You may change and develop one new self, you may have one rebirth, but it's necessary to have that experience repeatedly, to dissolve yourself again and again in the white light of eternity. Each time you do that a more refined self will return, until finally the self is just a thin film, just enough self to exist in this world and transact with the world and no more, so that you are conscious of your eternality in a waking state. In other words, as time goes on, as you go in and out of samadhi repeatedly, over a period of years or lifetimes, you reach a point where there's not much difference between the superconscious state and the waking state. After a while they start to merge.

In my own case, I had achieved enlightenment, or enlightenment occurred, in past lives. When this happens, at a certain age you'll just start to go into samadhi. Certainly you'll be drawn to spirituality beforehand. So I spent eleven years meditating and being part of a spiritual community and working for the welfare of others constantly, which I was drawn to do without knowing why. I went into samadhi several times, into salvikalpa samadhi, over those years, but I never really knew what it was, per se. They were just those enlightenment experiences that come and go.

But then after eleven years, suddenly I started to go into samadhi every day, starting really in 1980. I had no choice. It was not something I could choose. I couldn't say, "Well, today I'm going to go into samadhi." It would just happen repeatedly. I'd sit down to meditate and I'd go into samadhi. In the evening I'd just be sitting at home and I'd go into samadhi.

It would never occur - it never does - at an inappropriate time. Eternity takes care of everything. If I needed to do something to function in the physical world, if I had to drive a car or talk to someone, it wouldn't occur. But it would occur again and again and I just watched myself dissolve and reform again and again. I was a new person constantly, sometimes many times a day. As this happened over a period of years there was less distance between the enlightenment that was within myself from past lives, we might say - this is a way, of course, of trying to describe something that's really impossible to describe - and that which I was in a waking state. Now I'm always in a perpetual state of enlightenment, but for me the process hasn't ended as of the making of this tape on the tenth of September, 1982. Still many of the powers that I developed from past lives, and just the integration of that enlightenment, is continuing so that each day there's less difference for me between the waking state and samadhi. There really is almost no difference now, but any differences are gradually being wiped out.

You see, when you start to go into samadhi, in my estimation anyway, it's not something you choose. The entrance into samadhi is something that only happens to a few people out of millions. Those people are not any better than anyone else, that was just the dharma or destiny. It does happen to everyone who meditates, eventually, but most people in this particular world are not very advanced spiritually, or their advancement is buried very deeply. In other worlds, samadhi is a common experience. Nirvikalpa samadhi, of course, is not common at all. Salvikalpa samadhi is common in the other worlds, the other planes of reality. Nonphysical beings go into salvikalpa samadhi all the time. They exist in it, many of them, but nirvikalpa samadhi, full enlightenment, is rare, because then the world dissolves and eternity dissolves, life dissolves, death dissolves, God dissolves.

So when this starts to happen to you - which it will one day - you won't be able to start it or stop it. It's kind of like a terminal disease. Your old self is dying completely and it happens in stages. To reach that point though, to get the process going, it's necessary to find an enlightened teacher, because when you work with an enlightened teacher it's kind of like a mini-samadhi. Let's come back to the analogy that I was using before: being held up by your older brother so that you can see above the crowd. Well, it's like that, but it's a little more. It may take Susan 50 more lifetimes before she starts to go into samadhi, just meditating every day, but if she meditates with an enlightened teacher, she may do it in this lifetime.

Now, the only reason that Susan would have an enlightened teacher is owing to past births. In past lifetimes she's done pretty well spiritually. That's why eternity would direct her to an enlightened teacher, and she'd recognize an enlightened teacher in this lifetime and work with him. When someone is in samadhi, absorbed in nirvana, there's a parameter of energy that's projected around them for a certain distance, almost a radiation. If you can meditate with them physically to start with, once or twice a week, and be in a room where they are, in that field of energy, and if you sit in that and meditate, if you can make your mind quiet and absorb that, it's as if you yourself were going into the superconscious. It brings you into the superconscious just to sit in that light. It doesn't really matter whether the teacher is formally meditating or not, because the teacher is always projecting that light, it's always coming through them, if it's a truly enlightened person. If it's a truly enlightened person, they're not making a big deal out of themselves. They just accept it, they're just an instrument of eternity and that's that.

But nevertheless, there's an operable result. If you can access that energy, it is to your advantage if you seek enlightenment. The more you can meditate with them the better for you, because just to be around that energy causes tremendous transformation. It helps loosen the glue of the self that's binding you to this world and this life, to the attachments and all that stuff. But some people think if they just sit with an enlightened teacher, that's all that's necessary, which is nonsense. That will make it possible for you to make your changes. It will make it easier. You can do them more quickly, but still you have to work out your own liberation. That is to say, you have to go through all the experiences. You have to learn and grow and develop.

So when the time is right, when a person is really ready to begin the higher study, the graduate school of self-discovery, they will find an enlightened teacher and work with that teacher. As they work with the teacher, as they spend time with them, as they're around the teacher when the teacher is in the state of awareness, they'll make very fast spiritual progress.

Then they learn to develop an inner connection with the teacher. That is to say, after spending a couple of years doing that, let's say four or five years, a person is then able to inwardly contact that state of awareness. You may be a thousand miles from the teacher, but you've grown so close in your hearts, there's so much love between the two of you, that you can be with them inwardly, regardless of where you are. It's just about as strong. In other words, you'll be able to access that energy that flows through them, and then, of course one day you learn to not have to go through the teacher as a source, but to deal directly with eternity, without going through a form. That happens when you become enlightened, and then you'll reflect the light of eternity to others, or just shine.

So samadhi and the superconscious is all there really is. It is the fourth level of ecstasy. It's that which you seek, that which you'll become. It's inevitable, it's your destiny. It's just a question of when, but if you wish to make time stand still, as it were, then you should follow your heart. Be not concerned with the things of this world, because they are transitory. Find that teacher who you can love the most and go and be with them. Listen to what they say, but more than what they say, because they just try as best they can to explain to the blind and deaf things that can't be explained.

And there can be all kinds of misunderstandings if you pay too much attention to their words, because remember, they're just ad-libbing most of the time, they're just trying to wing it, and say, "Hey, folks, there's no way to really explain this. I'll explain it one day one way and I'll explain it another day another way and if you compare both days, you may say 'Well, gosh, he or she, they're contradicting themselves.'" Not really, there was no way to explain it accurately on any day, so you just do the best you can, depending upon the receptivity of the audience, what's at hand, the culture you're in and so forth. But don't really worry about what they say so much, listen to what they don't say, and not only to the teacher, but to eternity itself. The teacher's just a direct form for you for now, kind of a surrogate who helps you just become aware of what you really are. The teacher isn't really even there much anymore. They're just dissolution in manifest form.

So samadhi and the superconscious - not really much you can say about it, except you can definitely direct a person towards it, point the way, give encouragement, correct things that will not lead to enlightenment. And of course, if one is enlightened, you can just be a channel of that light of samadhi, that perfect bliss, that fourth level of ecstasy, so that others can come into that light, and like a moth to the flame, be burned up.