Yoga Sutra

THE PERCEPTION GAINED IN NIRVICHARA SAMADHI TRANSCENDS ALL NORMAL PERCEPTIONS, BOTH IN EXTENT AND INTENSITY.

These two words are very meaningful: ”extent” and ”intensity”. When you see the world through the senses, brain and the mind, the world is very dull. It has no luminosity in it, dusty, and soon it becomes boring, and one feels fed up: the same trees, the same people, the same actions – everything just a rut. It is not so.

Sometimes in LSD, or marijuana or hashish, suddenly the tree becomes more green. You have never known it, that the tree was so green or the rose was so rosy.

When Aldous Huxley first took LSD, he was sitting before a chair. Suddenly, the chair became one of the most beautiful things in the world, and that chair has remained in his room for years and he had never looked at it. It was like a prism, many shades, many colors coming out of it; it was like a diamond. The chair was no more the same chair. Huxley was fascinated with the chair. He couldn’t believe what happens when somebody takes a drug.

Drug is a violent effort to awake the idiots. So you shock them, and just they open their eyes a little, and just they look... ”Yes!” And yet, the world become so beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, and then you are hooked, because then you think that it is because of the drug that the world is so beautiful. Now, when you are back and the trip is over, the world will look even more dirtier and more dull than ever, because now you have a comparison in the mind. For certain moments it had become a beautiful phenomenon; it was paradise itself. Even a person like Aldous Huxley got mixed up, and he started thinking that this was the samadhi Patanjali is talking about, and Kabir attained, and Buddha, and all the mystics of the world this is the samadhi.

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Drugs can give you a false sense of samadhi, but you are still in the prison. Only because of the drug shock your mechanism functions with alertness, but this alertness will not be for long. More and more if you use it, then the quantity of the drug has to be raised higher and higher, because with the same amount you cannot shock the idiots again. They become attuned to it, then more and more quantities are needed. Drugs work only just like this.

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With no thoughts, you are nude. With no thoughts who are you? – a Hindu, a Mohammedan, a Christian, a communist? Who are you without thoughts? – a man, a woman? Who are you without thoughts? – religious, irreligious? You are nobody without thoughts. All clothes have dropped. You are simply a nudity, a purity, an emptiness. Then the perception is clear, and with that clarity comes extent and intensity. Now you can look at the vast expanse of existence. Now there is no barrier to your perception; your eyes have become infinite.

And intensity: you can look into any event, any person, because things are no more there. Even flowers are persons now, and trees are friends, and rocks sleeping souls. Now intensity happens; you can look through and through. When you can look through and through to a flower, then you will be able to understand what mystics have been saying, and poets.

Tennyson says that ”If I can understand a flower, a small flower in its totality, I would have understood all.” Right, absolutely right! If you can understand the part you will understand the whole, because the part is the whole. And when you try to understand the part, by and by, unknowingly, you will have moved to the whole, because the part is organic to the whole.

THE PERCEPTION GAINED IN NIRVICHARA SAMADHI TRANSCENDS ALL NORMAL PERCEPTIONS BOTH IN EXTENT AND INTENSITY.

From everywhere vastness opens, and from everywhere, the depth... Look into a flower, and there is abyss. You can fall into a flower and disappear. It has happened. It will be absurd but it is true. It is up to you to believe it or not.

It happened in China that the Emperor asked a great painter to come and do some painting in the palace. The painter came and he painted a view of Himalayas, very beautiful. Years he took, and he won’t allow anybody to see unless it is complete. Then one day he told the Emperor that, ”Now it is ready and you can come.”

And the Emperor came with his ministers and generals and the court, and they were simply wonder-struck. They had never seen anything like that – it was so true. The peaks were exactly real, and there was a winding path around the peaks and the path disappeared somewhere. The Emperor asked, ”Where this path leads?” The painter said, ”I have not travelled on it, so how I should know?” But the Emperor insisted that it was not at all a question of travelling: ”You have painted it!” So the painter said, ”You wait. Let me go and see.” And it is said that he went and disappeared into the picture, and never came back to tell the story where it leads.

It cannot happen, that I know; but in nirvichara it happens. In a flower is the abyss. Because of your intensity, you look into the flower and there is the depth, and you can fall into a flower and disappear forever. You look at a beautiful face with nirvichara and there is abyss in beauty, and you can be forever and forever lost; you can fall into it. Everything becomes a door, everything! With your intensity of look, all the doors are open for you.