Chapter 33: The Varieties of Samadhi -- What Is Permanent?
The most important question about samadhi is not what it feels like. It is whether it lasts.
This is not an academic question. For the practitioner who has tasted absorption, who has known the dissolution of the boundary between self and Name, who has come back and found the old noise returned, the old restlessness, the old sense of separation, this is the most urgent question in spiritual life. Was it real? Did it change anything? Or was it just another experience, more vivid than the rest but ultimately as fleeting as everything else?
The traditions, when they are honest, give a sobering answer. There are two kinds of samadhi. One is temporary. One is permanent. And the temporary kind, however magnificent, is not the destination.
Ramana's Decisive Teaching
Ramana Maharshi made this distinction with a precision that leaves no room for ambiguity.
He distinguishes between Kevala Nirvikalpa Samadhi and Sahaja Nirvikalpa Samadhi. The words are technical, but the difference they point to is the difference between a visit and a homecoming.
Kevala nirvikalpa samadhi is temporary absorption. In Ramana's words: "The immersion of the mind in the Self, but without its destruction, is kevala nirvikalpa samadhi. In this state one is not free from vasanas and so one does not therefore attain mukti."
Let that land. The mind is immersed in the Self. It sounds like the highest achievement. But the mind has not been destroyed. It has been submerged, like a bucket pushed under water. The bucket is still there. Pull it up and it returns, full of whatever it held before. The vasanas, the subtle tendencies and latent impressions that drive your behaviour, remain intact. They were not burned. They were merely suppressed.
Ramana is blunt about the consequences: "Years spent in this state without addressing vasanas yields no liberation." You can sit in nirvikalpa samadhi for years. You can experience the most profound absorption the human nervous system can sustain. And you can emerge from it with your patterns, your reactions, your deepest conditionings, entirely unchanged.
This is why Ananta says: "Accept all the tastes as prasad, but till you know in your heart that you have come to atma darshan, you do not settle for anything as the final taste." Even the taste of samadhi is prasad. A gift to be received and honoured. But not to be mistaken for the destination.
And Ananta adds: "God knows how to keep us in check." The experiences along the path, including the most exalted states, are given and withdrawn by grace. They are not possessions you accumulate. They are glimpses that orient you. And the orientation they provide is toward something that does not come and go.
Sahaja: The Natural State
Now listen to the other side of Ramana's teaching.
"Remaining permanently in the primal state without effort is sahaja."
"In sahaja samadhi the communion is continuous."
Here the mind has not merely been immersed. It has resolved into the Self. The bucket is gone. The river has linked with the ocean, and there is no pulling it back. The vasanas are not suppressed but destroyed. Not through force. Through recognition. Through the sustained abiding in Self-awareness that dissolves the very conditions that gave the vasanas their power.
The word sahaja means "born together," "innate," "natural." It describes not a special state achieved through extraordinary effort but the uncovering of what was always already the case. You were born in sahaja. You will die in sahaja. Everything in between was a forgetting and a remembering.
The hallmarks of sahaja are almost disappointingly ordinary. No effort is required to maintain it. The intellect remains fully functional. Daily activities continue naturally. There is no withdrawal from the world. The sage in sahaja cooks, speaks, walks, answers questions. Others see him active, eating, talking, moving. But Ramana says something startling: the jnani "is not himself aware of these activities." Not that he is unconscious. Not that he is dissociated. But the centre from which awareness radiates is no longer located in a personal self that monitors and narrates. The activities happen. Awareness is present. But there is no one standing apart, watching and commenting.
"The state of Self-realisation is not attaining something new or reaching some goal which is far away, but simply being that which you always are and which you always have been."
Simply being what you always are. This is both the most encouraging and the most confounding teaching. Encouraging because it means you are not building something from scratch. Confounding because it means the very effort to achieve something is pointing in the wrong direction.
The Mandukya Map
The Mandukya Upanishad, the shortest of the principal Upanishads at only twelve verses, maps the syllable AUM onto the four states of consciousness. Its brevity is not a sign of its insignificance. Gaudapada considered it sufficient for liberation. Shankara built an entire commentary on its twelve verses. And the structure it reveals clarifies why temporary samadhi and permanent sahaja are different in kind, not merely in duration.
The letter A corresponds to waking, jagrat, consciousness of the external world. U corresponds to dream, svapna, consciousness of the internal world. M corresponds to deep sleep, sushupti, a mass of consciousness and bliss where distinctions have disappeared but awareness has not turned luminous. And then there is the silence that follows AUM. Not a fourth letter. The silence after the letters have sounded.
That silence is Turiya. The Fourth. And verse seven of the Mandukya, arguably the most important verse in all of Advaita Vedanta, describes it through a cascade of negations:
"Turiya is not that which is conscious of the internal world, nor that which is conscious of the external world, nor that which is conscious of both, nor that which is a mass of sentiency, nor that which is simple consciousness, nor that which is insentient. It is unseen, not related to anything, incomprehensible, uninferable, unthinkable, indescribable, essentially of the nature of Consciousness constituting the Self alone, negation of all phenomena, the Peaceful, all Bliss and the Non-dual."
Turiya is not a state you enter. It is the common ground of all states. It manifests in waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, and yet in its own nature it transcends them all. It is, as Ramana puts it in Talks 353, "only another name for the Self."
Now here is the key. Temporary samadhi corresponds to the experience of touching Turiya while the three states, waking, dreaming, and deep sleep, still retain their apparent reality. You "go into" samadhi and "come out." You touch the Fourth and return to the first three. The experience is genuine. But the framework that generated the departure and return is still intact.
Sahaja corresponds to what the tradition calls Turiyatita: beyond the Fourth. Not a fifth state. Rather, the recognition that the three ordinary states were never separate from Turiya. When this is seen, the label "Fourth" becomes unnecessary, because there are no longer three other states to count from. As Ramana clarifies, Turiyatita is not a separate state. It is the recognition that Turiya is the only reality.
In practice, this means: the sage in sahaja does not oscillate between absorption and ordinary consciousness. There is no "ordinary consciousness" left to oscillate to. The ordinary has been recognised as having always been the extraordinary. Cooking is Turiya. Eating is Turiya. Speaking is Turiya. Not because the activities have been spiritualised. Because the Self that was always their ground has been recognised.
The Sufi Mirror
The Sufi tradition has its own vocabulary for this distinction, and it adds a dimension worth hearing.
A hal is a temporary spiritual state. It may be ecstasy, or sudden closeness to God, or the intoxication that arises during dhikr or sama. It comes without asking, by God's grace alone. And it leaves without asking. "States are gifts," the Sufis say.
A maqam is a permanent spiritual station. It is not given. It is earned, through sustained effort, spiritual struggle, and ascetic discipline. A station endures. Once attained, it becomes a permanent possession. The key maqamat include repentance, patience, gratitude, trust in God, and divine love. Each stands in hierarchical order; even when transcended, the lower stations remain.
The distinction is precise. A hal is like weather. It comes and goes. A maqam is like altitude. Once you have climbed, you do not descend.
This maps exactly onto Ramana's framework. Kevala nirvikalpa samadhi is a hal. Magnificent, overwhelming, undeniable in its reality while it lasts. But it passes. Sahaja is a maqam. You do not leave it, because there is no you left who could leave.
Vasanas: Why the Temporary Does Not Hold
To understand why temporary samadhi does not liberate, you need to understand vasanas.
A vasana is a subtle tendency, a trace of past experience that dwells in the mind and influences present thought and action. The Yoga Vasistha describes it as a fragrance left behind by something long gone. You cannot see it. You cannot locate it in any specific thought. But it colours everything. It is the reason you react to certain situations in ways you do not understand, the reason old patterns return even after you thought you had dissolved them.
Samskaras are the seeds. Vasanas are the shoots. A samskara is the deep impression left by a past action or experience. A vasana is the living tendency that sprouts from that impression when conditions are right.
Now here is the crucial teaching. There are two classes of vasanas. Vasanas of enjoyment remain even after liberation. The liberated sage still tastes food, still feels the warmth of the sun, still registers the beauty of a face. These are not binding because there is no attachment. And then there are vasanas of bondage. These are the ones that drive the seeking, the grasping, the sense of incompleteness. These are destroyed in sahaja.
Destroyed, not suppressed. Ramana is emphatic: "Samadhi only suppresses the vasanas but does not destroy them; only by abiding in Self-awareness will the vasanas be destroyed, and sahaja samadhi be attained."
This is why you can have the most shattering experience of absorption in your meditation, and the next morning you are angry at someone over nothing. The vasana was suppressed during samadhi. It was not confronted, not seen through, not traced back to the root misidentification that generated it. The fire of samadhi burned hot. But it did not burn deep enough.
What burns deep enough? Not more intense samadhi. Not longer sessions. Not forceful suppression of the mind. What burns deep enough is what Ramana points to again and again: steady, uninterrupted self-awareness. The quiet, moment-to-moment recognition of what you are. This is what dissolves the vasanas at their root. And when the roots are dissolved, the plant does not return.
The Hesychast Parallel
The Christian mystical tradition, particularly the Hesychast tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy, draws exactly the same line.
Rapture, the tradition teaches, is a temporary phenomenon. It occurs "because of the weakness of the body and its powers to withstand the divine illumination." Rapture is not a sign of advancement. It is a sign that the soul is not yet strong enough to sustain the divine presence continuously. It is overwhelmed, and the overflow manifests as ecstasy.
As the soul is purified, the tradition teaches, "ecstasy no longer occurs." This is counterintuitive. You would think that more advanced practitioners would have more ecstatic experiences. The opposite is true. The advanced practitioner has become strong enough to hold the divine presence without being knocked off balance by it. The rapture gives way to transforming union: "a permanent state of being in which the person's nature is transformed or deified."
In permanent union, "consciousness of self and the world remains," accompanied by "a continuous sense of union with God." And the tradition adds, with quiet finality: "No higher state is conceivable, save that of the Beatific Vision in the life to come."
The rapture was a taste. The transforming union is the meal.
The Taste and the Meal
Ananta holds this distinction with great care. He does not dismiss experiences. He does not tell you that your tears, your moments of spontaneous devotion, your brief absorptions in the Name, were meaningless. They were prasad. They were real. They were God meeting you where you were.
But he does not let you settle.
"Accept all the tastes as prasad, but till you know in your heart that you have come to atma darshan, you do not settle for anything as the final taste."
Atma darshan. The sight of the Self. Not a vision. Not an experience that begins and ends. The steady recognition of what you are, which does not fluctuate because it is not a state. It is the ground on which all states arise and dissolve.
Sahaja. The natural state. The word means "born with." You were born in it. You will die in it. Everything in between was a series of veils, thickening and thinning, and the journey of the Name was the gentle, persistent, sometimes devastating removal of those veils, one by one, until what remained was what was always here.
The next chapter asks whether the path of the lover and the path of the knower arrive at the same place. Whether the bhakta who dissolves in the Name and the jnani who dissolves the one who names find themselves at the same airport.
From Ananta's Satsangs
"Accept all the tastes as prasad, but till you know in your heart that you've come to Atma Darshan, you don't settle for anything as the final taste. The soul in its wisdom brings us to the point where God will reveal himself to us and gets us to wait over there. Now there are some aspects of the Antahkarana which are designed to distract us, especially the mind which will offer us alternatives."
"He knows exactly what is needed to be fed to us at what point of time. When to make His presence apparent and when to make His presence unapparent. So to keep our pride in check, God knows how much of the felt feeling of presence to give."
-- It's a Privilege To Remember the Lord of the Universe - 31st December 2025
"As much as we need insight, it must be supported by the spirit of being in service to God, literally like a servant of God, and deeply immersed in the love for God. Otherwise, we are creating spiritual Frankensteins. Anytime you spot the one who says, 'I have seen the truth, I have seen the truth,' make its head bow down and surrender that one to God."
-- Insight, Servitude & Love - Three Elements of True Spirituality - 13th September 2023
"He knows how to clean us up as well. We just have to keep offering ourselves up over and over again. Say that 'My heart belongs only to You, Father. My heart belongs only to You, Lord God.' And you see that He cleans us up. Whatever needed to be done, He does."