' Nirvikalpa Samadhi '...

Why be afraid of this declaration: that the final goal is to merge in the Absolute?

Is it because it promises the same as death--annihilation?

Yet whenever deep sleep is entered this merger happens.

The ego with its thoughts, desires, and agitations, is gone; the world, with its relativities, is no more.

Time, space, form, memory are lost.

Yet all reappears next morning.

So it is not a real death.

It is pure Being.

Meditation tries to reproduce this condition, to achieve a return to deep sleep but with the added factor of awareness.

In the final phase--Nirvikalpa Samadhi--it succeeds.

Man dissolves but his divine Source remains as the residue, as what he always and basically was.

This is why philosophy includes meditation.


- Paul Brunton