' Samadhi '...

By Michael Comans, PhD

THE WORD SAMĀDHI became a part of the vocabulary of a number of Western intellectuals toward the end of the first half of this century.

Two well-known 1 writers, Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, were impressed by Eastern and specifically by Indian thought.

Huxley made a popular anthology of Eastern and Western mystical literature under the title The Perennial Philosophy (1946), and in his last novel, Island (1962), words such as mokṣa and samādhi occur untranslated.

In both these works, Huxley uses the words “false samādhi,” implying that the reader was already conversant with what samādhi actually is.

Isherwood wrote an account of the life of the nineteenth-century Bengali mystic Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa, Ramakrishna and His Disciples (1959), and he published as the second part of his autobiographical trilogy an account of the years he spent with his own guru, Swāmī Prabhavānanda of the Rāmakṛṣṇa Order, in My Guru and His Disciple (1980).

Why these writers were drawn toward Eastern spiritual thought, and to the Vedānta teachings in particular, is not the subject for discussion here.

But perhaps one significant reason is that with the decline in organized religion after World War I, these writers found in the Vedānta, as presented to them by the followers of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa and his disciple Swāmī Vivekānanda, a spirituality which emphasized the authority of firsthand experience as the only way to verify what was presented as the Truth.

The Vedānta, as they saw it, was a “minimum working hypothesis,” which could be validated through cultivating a certain type of experience, and that experience was seen to be a mystical, super-conscious state of awareness called samādhi.

Isherwood edited a book of articles titled Vedānta for the Western World (1948).

In his introduction he emphasizes the centrality of having a direct, personal experience of Reality, which, he says, the Christian writers call “mystic union” and Vedantists call “samādhi.”

Isherwood raises the question as to how Reality can be experienced if it is beyond sense perception, and he answers the question in terms of samādhi experience: