Having cleared the ground to a certain extent let us now proceed to consider I-
42 which throws some light on the technique of splitting open the ‘seed’ of ‘Sabija’
Samadhi. This Sutra deals with the mental processes involved in the very first stage of
Samadhi and may best be understood in relation to a concrete object having a name
and form. We are so used to taking all things which come within the range of our ex-
perience for granted that we never pay any attention to the mysteries which are obvi-
ously hidden within the simplest of objects. Every physical object which we can per-
ceive through our sense organs is really a conglomerate of several kinds of mental im-
pressions which can be sorted out to a certain extent by a process of mental analysis on
the basis of our knowledge of sensuous perception and other facts discovered by Sci-
ence. Let us take for the sake of illustration a siittiple concrete object like a rose. Our
knowledge regarding a rose is a mixture in which facts like those given below enter:
(1) It has a name which has been chosen arbitrarily and has no natural rela-
tionship with the object.
(2) It has a form, colour, odour etc. which we can perceive through our
sense-organs. These will vary from rose to rose but there is an irreducible minimum of
qualities which are common to all roses and which make a rose a rose.
(3) It is a particular combination of certain atoms and molecules (or elec-
trons at a deeper level) distributed in a certain manner in space. The mental image
which is formed in our mind on the basis of this scientific knowledge is quite different
from the mental image derived from the sense-organs.
(4) It is a particular specimen of an archetype, all roses which come into be-
ing conforming to this archetypal rose.
A consideration of some of the facts given above will show to the student how
mixed up our ideas are regarding even common objects with which we come in contact
every day. Our true knowledge with regard to the real objects is mixed up or confused
with all kinds of mental images and it is not possible for us to separate the pure
knowledge from these mental images by ordinary processes of mental analysis or rea-
soning. The only way in which this can be done is by performing Samyama on the ob-
ject and fusing the mind with it as explained in I-41. The pure, real, internal knowedge
regarding the object is isolated from the mixed external knowledge and the Yogi can
then know the real object by making the mind one with it.
It is obvious that there must be two stages in this process of ‘knowing by fus-
ing’. In the first stage the heterogeneous knowledge regarding the object must be sepa-
ben green
(Ben Green)
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