Observations placeholder
Paramahansa Yogananda - Heart tapping
Identifier
000759
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The experience of having heart and hand nadis ‘connected’ can – if one is properly prepared – lead to the higher forms of samadhi. This is recognised in Hindu culture and the blessing of this experience is only bestowed, normally by your guru. When Paramahansa Yogananda visited a saint he was told the following:
Autobiography of a yoga – Paramahansa Yogananda
Sir, why don't you grant me a samadhi?"
"Dear one, I would be glad to convey the divine contact, but it is not my place to do so."
The saint looked at me with half closed eyes.
"Your master will bestow that experience on you shortly. Your body is not tuned just yet. As a small lamp-bulb would be shattered by excessive electrical voltage, so your nerves are unready for the cosmic current. If I gave you the infinite ecstasy right now, you would burn as though every cell were on fire.
And in the end his guru Sri Yukteswar did indeed do just this, this is the result……….
A description of the experience
Autobiography of a yoga – Paramahansa Yogananda
He struck gently on my chest above the heart.
My body became immovably rooted; breath was drawn out of my lungs as if by some huge magnet. Soul and mind instantly lost their physical bondage and streamed out like a fluid piercing light from my every pore. The flesh was as though dead; yet in my intense awareness I knew that never before had I been fully alive.
My sense of identity was no longer narrowly confined to a body but embraced the circumambient atoms. People on distant streets seemed to be moving gently over my own remote periphery. The roots of plants and trees appeared through a dim transparency of the soil; I discerned the inward flow of their sap.
The whole vicinity lay bare before me. My ordinary frontal vision was now changed to a vast spherical sight, simultaneously all-perceptive. Through the back of my head I saw men strolling far down Rai Ghat Lane, and noticed also a white cow that was leisurely approaching. When she reached the open ashram gate, I observed her as though with my two physical eyes. After she had passed behind the brick wall of the courtyard, I saw her clearly still.
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. The unifying light alternated with materialization of form, the metamorphoses revealing the law of cause and effect in creation…
An oceanic joy broke upon 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 entire cosmos gently luminous, like a city seen afar at night, glimmered within the infinitude of my being. The dazzling light beyond the sharply etched global outlines faded slightly at the farthest edges; there I saw a mellow radiance, ever undiminished. It was indescribably subtle; the planetary pictures were formed of a grosser light.
The divine dispersion of rays poured from an Eternal Source, blazing into galaxies, transfigured with ineffable auras. Again and again I saw the creative beams condense into constellations, then resolve into sheets of transparent flame. By rhythmic reversion, sextillion worlds passed into diaphanous lustre, then fire became firmament.
I cognised the centre of the empyrean as a point of-intuitive perception in my heart. Irradiating splendour issued from my nucleus to every part of the universal structure. Blissful amrita, nectar of immortality, pulsated through me with a quicksilver-like fluidity. The creative voice of God I heard resounding the Aum, the vibration of the Cosmic Moto.
Suddenly the breath returned to my lungs. With a disappointment almost unbearable, I realized that my infinite immensity was lost.
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A master bestows the divine experience of cosmic consciousness when his disciple, by meditation, has strengthened his mind to a degree where the vast vistas would not overwhelm him. Mere intellectual willingness or open mindedness is not enough. Only adequate enlargement of consciousness by yoga practise and devotional bhakti can prepare one to absorb the liberating shock of omnipresence.