2.2 Samadhi

To achieve the unparalleled and unlimited freedom from all burdens which is the natural experience of mind in its fully enlightened state, you must learn how to rid your mind gradually of the ignorance of its own nature accumulated throughout your previous incarnations. Chapters 3 to 6 of this book teach you, step by step, how to shed the layers of ignorance obscuring direct experience of the mind in its natural state. This process of shaking off ignorance of the true nature of reality and of abiding, at first with great effort but eventually effortlessly, in direct experience of that, is known in most Eastern implicate technology systems as samadhi.

Samadhi begins spontaneously with the most intense period of concentration you will have encountered to date. Chapters 3 to 6 of this book will guide you from that raw and unstructured first experience of samadhi through a detailed set of yoga exercises which will awaken you to the true nature of your mind. At the end of your practice of these exercises, provided that you work within the guidelines given, you will realise the full, final and absolute stage of enlightenment. Regardless of the conditions of your life, your experience will be of limitless freedom and effortless activity.

This chapter teaches you how to live your life in such a way that samadhi begins spontaneously. You cannot force the beginning of samadhi. Samadhi will only occur spontaneously and in a mind which has been prepared for the experience through a life lived in harmony with the moral purpose inherent in karma.

If it is your natural inclination to work within a religious model of reality, rather than this secular Implicate Technology model, you can readily adapt these exercises to devotional purposes. The practice of the exercises remains the same for religious or secular purposes. The goal, if you are religious by nature, is not realisation of the Godhead-mind in its unconditioned state-rather, to the religiously inclined person, the goal is achieved through realising one’s inherent unity with God. In Implicate Technology terms, this is the realisation that all of this is one and inseparable.

The distinction between realising the unconditioned state and dwelling in the love of God is simply one of individual preference and perspective. Chapter 5, The path to the final stage of enlightenment, teaches where the meditations end if your goal is full realisation of your devotion to God. Appendix 1, How to recognise a fully developed model of reality, clarifies the differences between the devotional path to understanding reality and the path to knowledge of reality.

All the conditions of life – including birth, ageing, suffering and death – can be transcended through the practice of samadhi, the clear setting face to face with reality. The capacity to experience samadhi, and so to be able to rise above and transform the conditions of life, is only given to a person who is in harmony with the evolutionary purpose of karma. This chapter teaches you how to live an ordinary life, in the midst of conditions, which takes you towards the priceless gift of samadhi – a still, clear mind perceiving this in its true nature as that.