Friday, August 10, 2007

Samadhi and Meditation - Zen Master Rama

Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz;

www.ramaquotes.com

"The wisdom of samadhi is quite different. Higher level wisdom cannot be written down. It cannot be spoken. True wisdom is the knowledge of the universe that is beyond physical expression.

Samadhi is an experience of such depth, such joy, such indifference and such love, that nothing else is really like it or worthwhile in comparison, yet it gives shape, color and meaning to everything.

Samadhi is perfect absorption to the point where there is no sense of being absorbed, not the consciousness of knowing that you are having an experience.

Real samadhi is off the game board, friends. It is not something you are even aware of.

Reality is perfect light. It frees you from the limitations of this world, from the ugliness, from the unhappiness of limited perception.

How do you know you were in samadhi? You know when your awareness returns to the plane of self and ideation that you have been beyond it.

When you go into samadhi there is no breath at all. The kundalini is perfectly stabilized. Usually it stabilizes in the solar plexus area.

You're going to merge your mind with the mind of eternity that goes on forever; that is not easy. It's very intense. I mean sitting on Mount St. Helens when it went off would have been small talk.

When you stop your thoughts, you stop the world. When the world stops, time stops. When time stops, matter stops. When matter stops, self-consciousness stops. When self-consciousness stops, there is nothing. Nothing left to stop, start, begin or end. The person who did all of these things has gone away, vanished without a trace in the ecstasy of existence.

When you stop all thought, the battle is won. Everything is still and peaceful. You will come to see the eternal voidness of all things. You will see that nothing is,really.

The light of the supra-conscious, of salvakalpa and nirvikalpa samadhi, is not connected to this world at all. It passes through this world but it is not part of this world, in a way of speaking...

Let's say you dissolve and become infinite light. There is this sense of being light even though the mind is not thinking it, one feels it, which indicates that one is still there - at least half of one.

When you sit and meditate and begin to experience expanded states of mind, you will be afraid. The light makes most people very, very afraid. The only way to overcome the fear is walking down into the light.

The mind is afraid of its own dissolution. Life always seeks life.

I respect self-giving and I've tried to lead my life with that as the ideal. But real self-giving is when we take our being, that which is most precious to us, and we throw it into eternity with a total sense of offering.

It is implicit in the self that the self will automatically evolve if you can dissolve it. It re-patterns itself after archetypal formations that exist deep within the mind.

Dissolution means envelopment in Eternity.

Advanced meditation is facing the immensity of eternity, embracing that which terrifies you and frightens you and loving it because it's God. You are God.

You are all dirty and grungy. You go step in the shower and you come out clean. When you enter into the white light, it does something to you.

Samadhi is not going to take away your humanity. It will give it to you. You will become more cosmopolitan, more conscious, and more infinite.

The average individual spends many, many lifetimes meditating and seeking and chewing bubblegum and doing things like that to attain the experience of samadhi.

Eventually you will go into samadhi. Samadhi is a very advanced meditation. You dissolve into the clear light of eternity again and again.

As you go into light for longer and longer periods, as you progress in your meditation practice, you transform, you become illumined, you overcome all limitation, all sorrow, all pain. You learn not to be bound by desire, and eventually you transcend death.

Salvakalpa samadhi is absorption in eternity to the point where there is no real concept of self but there's still a karmic chain. Nirvikalpa samadhi is absorption in nirvana; concepts of self and no-self go away completely.

If a person sets out to practice meditation in this lifetime and they have a little bit of spiritual evolution behind them and they're quite dedicated, it really is not at all an impossible task to enter into salvakalpa samadhi in this particular lifetime.

For years and years you enter into samadhi every day in order to attain liberation. Eternity fashions a new self which you find yourself with when you come out of samadhi. Each time you come out a little less, you might say, or your real self comes out a little more

Salvakalpa samadhi is a tremendous acceptance and liberation, but it is not complete absorption in nirvana, in that consciousness.

The final entrance into Nirvikalpa Samadhi, into nirvana, God-realization, when you become the absolutely best friend of God, can only come when your love is completely pure.

Nirvikalpa samadhi is another matter. I don't feel that's really up to us. That happens at a certain time when our being has gone through countless changes and refinements.


There is a big difference between the lower samadhis and the upper samadhis, like the difference between the Sierras and the Himalayas.

Salvakalpa samadhi is like a sea of perfect light; nirvikalpa samadhi is no light, no darkness, no way to describe it. Absorption is complete, that's nirvana.

The teaching process becomes most interesting for spiritual seekers once they've managed to hit the lower samadhis. However at that point many seekers become very egotistical.

They reach the point where they feel: "I can go into samadhi now, I can do everything on my own." And that's exactly where they stay, in the lower samadhis. There are many, many people on this earth who can go into salvakalpa samadhi.

Once you become very powerful and advanced, you must be willing to go back to school and start over, and go to a wise person who will show you the way. Very few people are willing to do that.

That's why their realization is not integrated and complete, and they must go through many, many lifetimes very often before that acceptance will take place.

Nirvikalpa samadhi is another matter. In order to enter into nirvikalpa samadhi, you must have a great deal of humility.

Nirvikalpa Samadhi means that you've gone off the board; you've gone off the map. There is no way to describe it. You have attained liberation and are no longer bound by the cycle of existence. You just are, and yet you're not, at the same time.

Nirvikalpa samadhi is a state of no mind, beyond the ten thousand states of mind, where there is nothing but perfection, where the self no longer exists...the ego dissolves into immortality.

Nirvikalpa Samadhi means you are sitting in meditation and you go beyond the planes of light to nirvana. Then you come back and here you are “back in the saddle again”.

Sahaja samadhi means that you have just gone back and forth so many times that there is no back and forth. All you see is enlightenment in this world and the other side. There is no other side anymore. It means that you are wakeful.

Even to the sage who's doing Sahaja Samadhi, the great guru, I'd say, "Hey buddy, you know, I like the robes and everything, but remember, you're only touching infinity. And if you claim to be doing more, I think you're pretty much in the senses and the body and the mind because infinity is endless.”.

You can go to India and you can see gurus go into samadhi. But when they come out of samadhi, they're nasty. They're egocentric. They don't have a deep regard or understanding of what life is. It's just a little trick they can do, a one-trick pony.

To be fixated on Sahaja Samadhi is to be fixated. To be fixated on the idea of being not fixated is fixation too. All these ideas and definitions about enlightenment become silly.

Once we've achieved perfect meditation, we're terribly trapped because that's an illusion. Any enlightenment that seems ultimate is an illusion.

The best meditation I ever had, I haven't had yet. It's in the future, which as anyone knows doesn't exist -- anyone who meditates knows. But yet, I will have it someday."

- Zen Master Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
www.ramaquotes.com