[Don Salmon]

This is a description of contemplative awakening that comes later in The Synthesis of Yoga. It may be helpful in that it describers a realization that is common to contemplative traditions the world over, even though using English and Indian terms. It also gives a practice.

*******************************************************************

This realisation of all things as God or Brahman has, as we have seen, three aspects of which we can conveniently make three successive stages of experience.

First, there is the Self in whom all beings exist. The Spirit, the Divine has manifested itself as infinite self-extended being, self-existent, pure, not subject to Time and Space, but supporting Time and Space as figures of its consciousness. It is more than all things and contains them all within that self-extended being and consciousness, not bound by anything that it creates, holds or becomes, but free and infinite and all-blissful. It holds them, in the old image, as the infinite ether contains in itself all objects.

NOTE: THIS PRACTICE IS VERY SIMILAR TO THOSE GIVEN IN THE JAPANESE, CHINESE AND TIBETAN BUDDHIST TRADITIONS, AS WELL AS MANY PRACTICES IN THE ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN TRADITION GOING BACK AT LEAST TO THE 3RD CENTURY DESERT FATHERS: This image of the ethereal (Akasha) Brahman may indeed be of great practical help to the sadhaka who finds a difficulty in meditating on what seems to him at first an abstract and unseizable idea. In the image of the ether, not physical but an encompassing ether of vast being, consciousness and bliss, he may seek to see with the mind and to feel in his mental being this supreme existence and to identify it in oneness with the self within him. By such meditation the mind may be brought to a favourable state of predisposition in which, by the rending or withdrawing of the veil, the supramental vision may flood the mentality and change entirely all our seeing. And upon that change of seeing, as it becomes more and more potent and insistent and occupies all our consciousness, there will supervene eventually a change of becoming so that what we see we become.

We shall be in our self-consciousness not so much cosmic as ultra-cosmic, infinite. Mind and life and body will then be only movements in that infinity which we have become, and we shall see that what exists is not world at all but simply this infinity of spirit in which move the mighty cosmic harmonies of its own images of self-conscious becoming.