The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE EQUINOX Hydrogen is gone. It is not that the Heart has become Vishnu, or that Vishnu has filled the heart. The heart is gone, just as the Chlorine is gone. There is the tube, and it is full of HCl out of all relation to its elements, through the result of their union. (I purposely take the “elementary chemistry” view of the matter.) Samadhi is therefore with the Hindua result, the result of results indeed. There are higher and lower forms. That called Nirvikalpa-Samadhi, when the trance results from banishing thought altogether, instead of concentrating on one thought, ‘is the highest kind. But, with the Buddhist, Samadhi, though the state of mind meant is the same, is not an end, but a means. The holy-man-of-the-East must keep this state of mind unimpaired during his whole life, using it as a weapon to attack the Three Characteristics (the antithesis of Nibbana) even as one uses one’s normal dualistic consciousness to attack that dualism. But I must observe that this idea is so tremendous that I almost doubt its possibility, and tremble as to my own under- standing of it. Samadhi twelve seconds in duration is a phenomenon to shake the soul of a man, to uproot his Kamma, to destroy his Identity—and Bhikku Ananda Metteyya cheer- fully talks of practically perpetual Samadhi as the first step to attainment ! The Hindu, too, asks this question. biography of a Mystic would run: foetus, babe, child, boy, youth, man, 418. There is no personal identity as a link between the man who is on the brink of “attainment” and the Being who arises in him, annihilating him, and Whom he subsequently remembers as his “Genius,” 78