be effected—we turn back and say, “No, goodbye” to the object. There is a peculiar
fear, a suspicion and an adamantine self-affirmative attitude which recoils upon itself
and puts upside down, as it were, all the effort that has been put forth up to this
time.
There are many good friends who go on talking with us as very intimate comrades,
agreeing with every opinion that we express, and are amenable to us in every respect.
But when we come to a very crucial point, they refuse to accept it. At the last moment
they say “no”, so all this preparatory friendship is not of any avail when the crucial
hour comes. “A friend in need is a friend indeed,” as the old adage goes. What comes
to our aid at the hour of doom is a real friend; and what idea strikes our mind at the
crucial hour, that is our real idea; and what step we want to take at a moment when it
looks that it is the last step that we take in life and nothing more remains, that will be
a most considered step. Hence, there can be nothing more crucial than the entry of
consciousness into the object of meditation, which is called samadhi.
When this hour comes, there is a complete reorientation of attitude and the ego
stands adamant, as a very hard object, impenetrable and impregnable. The self-
consciousness refuses to allow the entry of the characteristics of the object into its
own consciousness. That means to say, “I want to maintain my own individuality, my
status and my peculiar independence of attitude, even in ‘being’,” is asserted at the
time when it has to be abolished. This is the point which Patanjali would like to bring
to the forefront in his definition of samadhi: tadeva arthamātranirbhāsaṁ
svarūpaśūnyam iva samādhiḥ (III.3). He has made it very clear that in this absorption
of consciousness in the object, you cannot know whether you are meditating on the
object, or the object is meditating on you, because there is a parallel movement of the
two, on an equal footing; that that which appeared as the object does not any more
appear as an object, as a concrete substance, but it becomes a feature of
consciousness itself. Or we may say, to use the language of Vedantic epistemology,
the pramatra chaitanya becomes one with the vishaya chaitanya, prameya
chaitanya.
The prameya, or the vishaya, is the object—though there is a consciousness hidden
behind it—and pramatra is the subject. Normally, the undercurrent of consciousness
that obtains between the subject and the object is not known, and a kind of difference
is struck between the subject and the object in all types of perception. But when the
subject that meditates sinks into itself, which is the purpose of this practice towards
communion, it recognises at once the consubstantiality of its own nature with the
nature of the object, just as if a wave in the ocean sinks to the bottom, it will
recognise the common substratum that is connecting it with every other wave, even if
it be a thousand miles away. But if this sinking is not done, every wave is different
from every other wave. The wave that is dashing against the shores of New York is
far, far away from the wave that is near Bombay; that is very clear. But this distance
is maintained only if the wave looks at the other wave as a crest, distinguished from
itself by spatial distance. But when it sinks down it becomes one with the wave which
is thousands of miles away—just as distance is abolished in the organism of the body
though there is a peculiar distance between the head and the toes. Though there is a
distance of five feet or six feet, as the case may be, there is no distance for the
organism itself. There is a continuity of feeling which at once abolishes the very sense
of distance. Though mathematically and spatially there is a distance between the
head and the toes, we do not feel the distance, as we are a complete organism.