Yogananda’s Description of Samadhi
Paramahansa Yogananda describes his blissful intimacy with the universe that was revealed to him as a boy by his guru, Sri Yukteswar. After a tap on the heart by his master, Yogananda’s vision of reality become forever changed:
My body became immovably rooted…Soul and mind instantly lost their physical bondage, and streamed out like a fluid piercing light from my every pore…My sense of identity was no longer narrowly confined to a body…The whole vicinity lay bare before me. My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive…All objects within my panoramic gaze trembled and vibrated like quick motion pictures. My body, Master’s, the pillared courtyard, the furniture and floor, the trees and sunshine, occasionally became violently agitated, until all melted into a luminescent sea; even as sugar crystals, thrown into a glass of water, dissolve after being shaken. An oceanic joy broke upon the calm endless shores of my soul. The Spirit of God, I realized, is exhaustless Bliss; His body is countless tissues of light. A swelling glory within me began to envelop towns, continents, the earth, solar and stellar systems, tenuous nebulae, and floating universes. The unifying light alternated with materializations of form, the metamorphoses revealing the law of cause and effect in creation…The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing into galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras.
