This experience is super-physical and super-psychic, even. It is not the mind that experiences the joy, not even the intellect, not anything that is psychological. The spiritual root in us effloresces and reveals its own nature to its own self. The revelation is not to somebody else. It is not like sunlight falling on someone's face. It is the Sun shining on himself and becoming aware that he is shining upon himself and feeling an immense satisfaction born of the very luminosity and resplendence of his being.

There is a Universal Self-Awareness at this stage of the satisfaction that arises from consciousness in its essentiality. This joy-experience is sananda-samapatti. The Self-Consciousness which is attending upon this joy universal is sasmita-samapatti. Here the efforts of the individual do not continue. One need not have to struggle to meditate. There is no effort on the part of a person, because there is no person at all. Individuality is carried by the current of the universe, of God Himself, if we would call it so. One is possessed by a Power that is super-individual.

One is no more oneself, and therefore one has no responsibility over oneself. Hence, there is nothing that one can or need do. The very question of 'doing' ceases, as the individual is not there as a person. There is no agency in action. There is no doership. There is no individual performer of actions. There is the pure sense of Being, that which sometimes we are told about as the condition of 'I-Am-What-I-Am', or 'I-Am-That-I-Am'. Words fail here. Speech is hushed. The mind is transported into an inebriating cosmic sense.

This is the ultimate union of the soul with All-Being and this is the final stage, practically, of samapatti, where the river has entered the ocean and does not any more exist as the river. One does not know in the ocean which is Ganga, which is Yamuna, which is Amazon, which is Volga. No one knows what is where. Everything is everywhere at every time in every condition. One becomes the centre of the Being of all things, the heart of everything. One becomes the Immanent Principle of the cosmos. This is God-Experience, in the language of religion. This is the realisation of the Absolute, brahma-sakshatkara. Here the consciousness reverts to Itself and stands on Its own status. It has not become aware of something. It is aware only of Itself.

The Drashta, or the Seer, becomes himself. As one proceeds higher and higher through these Samyamas or samapattis, one becomes more and more oneself in the true metaphysical significance of Selfhood. When the samapattis grow intense and rise higher, one becomes less and less the object that one is, and more and more the subject that one has to become, until the Pure Subject as an all-inclusive experience is realised.

In the sananda and sasmita stages, consciousness becomes the Whole Subject, without even the least trace of objectivity in it. This Pure Subjectivity of experience cannot be designated even as subjectivity, because the human mind has a prejudice on account of which it regards subjectivity as something counterposed to objectivity. But this is not the logical subject that we are speaking of, but the metaphysical subject, the spiritual Being-in-Itself. It is subject, no doubt, because of the fact that it is aware; but of what is it aware? It is a subject which has no object in front of it and, so, it cannot be called even a subject as known to human thought. There is a complete melting away of even the sense of cosmicalness of consciousness in that Being-Qua-Being. When all ideas melt into Being and the very seed of Self-consciousness ceases, the experience is called nirbija samadhi, or the seedless 'Communion'. The seed referred to here is the potentiality to revert to individuality. This seed of experience phenomenal is burnt up in this Supreme Transcendence. The tree of samsara or world-consciousness will not grow any more from this seed which has been fried up in the fire of wisdom. There is no more bondage in the form of entanglement of any kind. This ends in moksha, final liberation.

Liberation is not an attainment in the future, for to think of the future is to think of time, once again. We have already decided that the notion of time has to go. So we cannot say that this is something that will come afterwards, because the idea of 'afterwards' is the idea of time. Moksha is eternity, and we cannot think what eternity is. We can only utter some words, and they cannot convey any proper sense to us at present. Eternity is not endless duration, it is durationless existence, the very absence of time itself.

This is the state of the purusha, according to the Samkhya, and the Yoga of Patanjali. It is the state of Brahman, according to the Vedanta philosophy. It is the state of the Absolute, as the philosophers explain. It is the liberation of the Spirit, the nirvana that one hears of. This is the Goal of life, and when this stage is reached, it does not remain as a stage any more.

Moksha, known also as kaivalya, or Absolute Independence, is not one of the stages of experience. It is all-experience melted into one mass of Being. All that was there earlier will also be found there. It is not that the earlier stages are forgotten and one has gone to some new thing altogether. We may wonder where are all these physical objects, these trees and mountains, these friends and relatives, this wealth and status, all these wonderful and beautiful things in the world. Where are they? Have they been left out somewhere, down below? No, not so is the truth. They have not been left behind. They have been transformed into the 'reality' that they are, and they will be seen as they are, and not as they appeared earlier. This is the great solacing message to all Doubting Thomases who imagine that they, perhaps, lose something valuable as they reach God, or attain liberation.

Friends! You do not lose anything. Rather, you gain everything, and even that which you have apparently left will be found there in its true form, as great thinkers like Plato are never tired of telling us that the 'Ideas' are the realities. The Archetypes are there, the shadows of bodies are not the realities. These things that we see here are the reflections cast by the eternal 'Ideas' or the Archetypes, which may be found there, in the cosmic realm. We ourselves are shadows. The so-called 'you' and 'me' here are the shadows cast by realities which are in that Supernal Realm, so that when we look at ourselves, we are not looking at our real selves; we see only our own shadows. Our reality is in the heavens. We are there, as angels, in our true forms. The form that we experience in dreams is not our true form.

The things that we see in the dream-world are not real things. The true things are those which we see in waking, whose shadow is cast, as it were, in dream. So is this world. It is a shadow which we are pursuing unnecessarily, under the impression that something will come out of it. It cannot be pursued with advantage. It will keep you always in tenter-hooks, because you cannot pursue the shadow. It will run ahead of you, as the horizon recedes as you move towards it. The original is somewhere and the reflection is somewhere else. We are under the wrong impression that we are located in the reflection seen in the mirror. This is what the great teacher Acharya Shankara mentioned in an image. When you see yourself in a mirror, you see yourself, of course; but do you see yourself really there?

Suppose you wish to decorate your body by looking at yourself in a mirror, do you decorate that thing which you see inside the mirror? Suppose, then, you want to put a beautiful mark on your forehead by looking at your face in the mirror, do you put it on the mirror because you are there? You want to dress yourself. Do you dress the mirror? You dress the original, rather. When the original is decorated, the reflection is automatically decorated. You need not worry about the reflection at all. You concern yourself with the original rather than the reflection. But, in this world, unfortunately, we are after the reflections, the shadows. We are trying to satisfy and please and decorate and beautify the reflections that we are, and things are, and forget the original. Here is our sorrow, the malady of all life on earth.

Man is not going to be happy with his boasted knowledge. Human enterprises in this world are a pursuing of the shadow. The reality is elsewhere. This is a message which all the great philosophers, saints and sages have given us through the ages. The original, again, is not somewhere far away. This is another misconception that has to be removed from the mind, for the original is not even as much removed from the reflections as our face is from the mirror. The two are juxtaposed, and stand self-identical. The Great Reality, the Archetype, is inseparable, spatially and temporally, from the reflection.

God is here, and not in the heavens above. The Absolute is just here, under the very nose of ours. The eternity that we are going to experience, the moksha that we are to realise, is not merely an original Archetype that is removed in space. Again the idea of space comes in, and the notion of time persists in our minds. The Goal is not outside in space, and is not to be reached tomorrow as a future of time experience. All this is difficult indeed for the human intellect to understand. One becomes giddy when thinking about it. But, God loves you more than you love Him, and you are bound to achieve this glorious consummation of life.