Book 4 (Part I)

8r magical powers; or so he says. These need not be debated here. Any one who wants magic powers can get them in dozens of different ways.- Power grows faster than desire. The boy who wants money to buy lead soldiers sets to work to obtain it, and by the time he has got it wants Something else instead—in all probability something just beyond his means. Such is the splendid history of all spiritual advance! One never stops to take the reward. We shall therefore not trouble at all about what any Samadhi may or may not bring as far as its results in our lives are concerned. We began this book, it will be remembered, with considerations of death. Death has now lost all meaning. The idea of death depends on those of the ego, and of time; these ideas have been destroyed; and so “ Death is swallowed up in victory.” We shall now only be interested in what Samadhi is in itself, and in the conditions which cause it. Let us try a final definition. Dhyana resembles Samadhi in many respects. There is a union of the ego and the non-ego, and a loss of the senses of time and space and causality. Duality in any form is abolished. The idea of time involves that of two consecutive things, that of space two non-coincident things, that of causality two connected things; These Dhyanic conditions contradict those of normal thought; but G