How does a regular person strive to reach these enlightened states?
“The only way that you can possibly come to have any understanding,
in my estimation, of savikalpa or nirvikalpa samadhi,
is to meditate in person with someone who’s enlightened. “
The way you learn about the enlightened states is by sitting and meditating with someone who’s in those states. It’s this phenomenon known as “transmission of the lamp” that helps accelerate the process of going into samadhi.
For many, many lifetimes beings simply evolve through the basic incarnations. Then they move into a set of incarnations in which they are earnestly seeking spiritual advancement. One may practice prayer, meditation, things like that.
There will come an incarnation where you will find and study with an enlightened teacher. This is very fortunate, as an enlightened teacher is someone who teaches you how to enter into the superconscious states of samadhi.
The way the teacher does this is really not so much by teaching you how to enter into the superconscious. Well, that’s part of it. But the first part of the training really is teaching someone how to let go of all their weights. The weights are their attachments.
A self-realized teacher, has the power – or the power operates through them – to bring a person into the superconscious.
For example, let’s say Susan wouldn’t have been able to go into the superconscious states for 50 more incarnations at her current rate of spiritual evolution.
But if Susan comes to see and study with a fully enlightened teacher, and if Susan is receptive and meditates and has somewhat of a developed consciousness to begin with, the enlightened teacher can lift Susan temporarily into the superconscious, again and again with regular practice.
Or put another way, let’s say you’re at a football game and you’re a child. Everyone’s standing up and you can’t see. Your father or brother can lift you up, and even though you’re not tall enough to see and perhaps it would have been many years before you’d grow that tall to see, now you can.
The enlightened teacher lifts the student up so that they can see higher, further, and wider than they’ve ever seen before. Then the student must diligently go through all the various stages and steps of letting go of all those weights that keep them from being able to stay in those heightened states that were experientially proven to exist.
No one can do it for the student. The teacher can point the way, but the student has to walk the path firsthand. The ability of the teacher to project the student into the superconscious states, is dependent upon the student’s receptivity.
Some people who’ve meditated a great deal in past lives or in this life tend to be very, very receptive. It’s very easy for the teacher to deal with them — because they have already let go of a lot of the heaviness and blocks — so they can more easily move them into the superconscious.
For some people who are deeply enshrouded in maya, (illusion) it’s harder. You can give them a glimpse, but they won’t see as much.
So what a teacher does with a student is the teacher gives them regular glimpses. And moves them into the superconscious numerous times throughout the student-teacher relationship.
Each time they advance, each time they let go of another weight, another attachment, another way of seeing things, the teacher can take them a little further and show them the next part of the progression.
So it’s really a two-party process!
But is it possible to go it alone, without a guru?
It is possible to go into samadhi on your own, without a teacher, but it is extremely difficult, because there is no one to lift you up and show you the next step. But it can be done.
Another thing that the teacher does in this process is help you dissolve some of those samskaras.
When you enter into savikalpa or nirvikalpa samadhi, it dissolves these weights. Each time you go in, it dissolves more weights.
Enlightenment doesn’t occur all at once. There isn’t one day when suddenly you achieve full enlightenment. Enlightenment is a metamorphosis that has occurred over a dedicated period of time.
In Zen we talk about satori and experiencing satori.
Satori is savikalpa or nirvikalpa samadhi, but the idea is that after many years of meditation, one day you have a flash of intuition. You see life in its true essence, and you go into savikalpa samadhi.
Just one experience in savikalpa samadhi will change your life. The old self will dissolve and you’ll experience a rebirth. In this life, you’ll be reborn and transformed. You’ll go back into your routine patterns of awareness, but something about you is different.
You may change and develop one new self, you may have one rebirth, but it’s necessary to have that experience repeatedly, to dissolve yourself again and again in the clear, warm light of eternity.
Each time you do that, a more refined self will return, until finally the self is just a thin film, just enough self to exist in this world and interact with the world and no more, so that you are conscious of your eternality in a waking state.
In other words, as time goes on, as you go in and out of samadhi repeatedly, over a period of years or lifetimes, you reach a point where there’s not much difference between the superconscious state and the waking state. After a while of this step-by-step process, they start to merge.
When someone is in samadhi, absorbed in nirvana, there’s a perimeter of energy that’s projected around them for a certain distance, like an energetic radiation.
If you can meditate with them physically to start with, once or twice a week, and be in a room where they are, in that field of energy, and if you sit in that and meditate, if you can make your mind quiet and absorb that, it’s as if you yourself go into the superconscious.
It brings you into the superconscious just to sit in that light. It doesn’t really matter whether the teacher is formally meditating or not, because the teacher is always projecting that light. It’s always coming through them, if it’s a truly enlightened person.
Keep in mind, if they are a truly enlightened person, they’re not making a big deal out of themselves. They just accept their enlightenment, and carry on as an instrument of eternity. But nevertheless, there’s a significant, appreciable result if you can access their energy physically. It is to your tremendous advantage if you seek enlightenment.
The more you can meditate with them the better for you, because just to be around that energy causes incredible opportunities for transformation. It helps loosen the glue of the self that’s binding you to this world and this life, to the attachments and all that stuck energy and baggage.
But some people think if they just sit with an enlightened teacher, that’s all that’s necessary – which is nonsense. It will make it possible for you to make your changes. It will make it easier. But having an enlightened teacher is no reason to be lazy. The student must still work out their own liberation.
So when the time is right, when a person is really ready to begin higher study, i.e. the graduate school of self-discovery, they will invariably find an enlightened teacher and work with that teacher. As they study with the teacher and spend time with them, and as they’re around the teacher when the teacher is in samadhi, they’ll make very fast spiritual progress.
They also learn to develop an inner connection with the teacher. That is to say, after spending a couple of years doing that, a person is then able to inwardly contact that superconscious state of awareness.
You could be a thousand miles from the teacher, but you’ve grown so close in your hearts, and there’s so much love between the two of you, that you can be with them inwardly, regardless of where you are in the world.
You’ll be able to access that energy that flows through them, and then, of course, one day you learn to not have to go through the teacher as a source, but to deal directly with eternity without going through a form. Should you choose to, you can then reflect the light of eternity to others as well, as your teacher did for you. Or just simply shine.
So to summarize..
The enlightened teacher is like a surrogate who helps you become aware of what you really are. The teacher isn’t really even there much anymore. They’re really more of a force of nature. They are the dissolution of the ego in manifest form.
Samadhi and the superconscious states — there’s not really much the teacher can say about it, except they can definitely direct a person towards it, point the way, give encouragement, and correct the habits and beliefs that will not lead to enlightenment.
And of course, if one succeeds in dropping all of those weights of attachment and ego-clinging, one can be a perfect channel of that light of samadhi, that perfect bliss, that fourth level of ecstasy – so that others can come into that light, and like a moth to the flame, be burned up in the purifying fire.
“I was a new person constantly, sometimes many times a day. As this happened over a period of years there was less distance between the enlightenment that was within myself from past lives, we might say—this is a way, of course, of trying to describe something that’s really impossible to describe—and that which I was in a waking state. “
– Dr. Frederick Lenz, Rama
