Nirvikalpa Samadhi - Stanza one

''The man of Cosmic Consciousness, never feeling himself as limited to a body or as reaching only to the brain, or only to the cerebral-lotus of a thousand rays, instead feels by true intuitive powers the ever-bubbling Bliss that dances in every particle of his little body, and in his big Cosmic Body of the universe, and in his absolute nature as one with the eternal Spirit beyond manifested forms.

Never a victim of imaginary perceptions, fanciful inspirations, or 'wisdom' hallucinations, is always intensely conscious of the Unmanifest Spirit and also of the entire Cosmos in all its bewildering variety.

With his consciousness extended and awakened in every particle in the circumambience of infinite space feels his little physical body and all its perceptions not as an ordinary human being, but in Oneness with omniscient Spirit.

Freed from the intoxications of delusion and delusive mortal limitations he knows his earthly name and possessions, but is never possessed or limited by them.

Living in the world, he is not of the world.

He is aware of hunger, thirst, and other conditions of the body, bu his inner consciousness identifies itself, not with the body, but with Spirit.

Such a one's Soul floats on the foul waters of dark earthly experiences - of man's sad indifference to God - like an unsoiled lotus arising from the muddy waters of a lake.

Sucha one experiences sensations, not in the sensory organs but as perceptions in the brain.

The ordinary man feels cold or heat, he hears sounds in the ears; he tastes with the palate; and smells through olfactory nerves; but the Self-realized Master experiences all such sensations in the brain.

He percieves sensations, feelings, will, body, perception - everything - in thought, as mere suggestions of God as he dreams through man's consciousness.

He beholds the body, not as flesh, but as a bundle of condensed electrons and life force, ready to be dematerialized or materialized at the yogi's will!

He sees the motion picture of the cosmos going backward and forward on the screen of his consciousness; he knows in this way that time and space are dimensional forms of thought, displaying cosmic motion pictures, dreams that are constantly new, infinitely varied - and true-to-touch, true-to-sound, true-to-smell, true-to-taste, and true-to-sight.

He sees that the birth of his body was merely the beginning of certain changes; he knows death to be the change that naturally follows earthly life. He is ready and able, at the moment of his choosing, to part consciously with his bodily dwelling!

He is aware of the coursing of a planet trillions of light years distant, and, at the same moment, of the flight of a nearby sparrow.

He feels his body, a tiny atom, within his vast luminous Cosmic Body.''

Paramahansa Yogananda<

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