us with this paradox. It is the most essential, real, and present feature
of every moment of our lives, and yet it remains the most mysterious.
How can we reconcile this fact within our practice? How do we relate
Professor Hawking's theories on the macrocosm to our practice in the
microcosm?
When we are in the suspension of breath in the deepest meditation,
a spontaneous, as it were, God-willed retention, we enter the black
hole, the vortex of nothingness, the void. Yet somehow we survive. The
curtain of time, time that inexorably brings death, is parted. This is a
state of nonbeing, but living nonbeing. It is a present devoid of past or
future. There is no self, no meditator, no longer even any breather.
What comes out of that black hole, that nothingness? Information.
What is the information? The truth. What is the truth? Sarnadhi.
Samadhi
In effect what I have just said is that the mind is a bottomless pit, like
a black hole. Stop trying to fill it as it cannot be filled. Go beyond the
bottomless pit to realize the soul. For the beginner, sarnadhi is an al
luring subject. But there are reasons not to get fixated on it. The be
ginner can only conceive of sarnadhi as a glorification of the self he
knows. In the same way, every beginner who picks up a tennis racquet
dreams of winning Wimbledon or the U.S. Open. Often beginners in
yoga indulge in fantasies of an easy sarnadhi, and there are those who
are only too ready to take advantage of their gullibility.
Sarnadhi has to come on its own. It is inexpressible. You cannot
even ask someone who has been in meditation, "Did you meditate for
two hours?" How could he know? It is a state outside time. Medita
tion is going from the known to the unknown, and then corning back
to the known. It is impossible to say I am going to meditate, or I med
itated for two hours. If we know it lasted two hours, we were in the
II. K. s I Y 1'. N l; A It