Word: samadhi
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Fasting and flagellation, sensory deprivation and repetitive prayer, may indeed have produced chemical or metabolic changes as preconditions of samadhi, satori, or the beatific vision. It has even been suggested that many extremes of asceticism were developed because, for some reason, drugs ceased to be available. But, to the orthodox Christian, "technological" or "chemical" mysticism is either blasphemous or absurd. The man who gets to a mountaintop in a funicular has the same view as the man who climbs the peak, but the effort of getting there is important too; the vision is not all, and manuals of contemplation often...
...Koestler] is in no position to discuss samadhi until he has himself experienced that state. Then he may find words superfluous. EILEEN HYATT McGregor, Texas...
...Samadhi, the trancelike bliss that is the yogi's goal, is for Koestler the closest thing possible to death, and the practice of Yoga is "a systematic conditioning of the body to conniving in its own destruction, at the command of the will, by a series of graduated stages." Koestler erroneously thinks that the "Christian ascetic mortifies his body to hasten its return to dust."* This, he holds, at least has the merit of directness over the yogi's "prodigious detour. He must build up his body into a superefficient, super-sentient instrument of self-annihilation...
...object of Zen is satori (enlightenment), and Koestler thinks this is the opposite of Yoga's aim, samadhi. "Samadhi is the elimination of the conscious self in the deep sleep of Nirvana; satori is the elimination of the conscious self in the wide-awake activities of intuitive living . . . To make the point quite clear: literally, samadhi means 'deep sleep,' satori means 'awakening.' Mystically, of course, 'deep sleep' means entering into Real Life, whereas the Awakened one 'lives like one already dead.' But cynically speaking, it is less risky and more pleasant...
...head and body, desire and fulfillment, than the original storyteller ever dreamed of; these, and their solution, make up the rest of Mann's book. A fade-out starts Sita's child, who combines many of the features of all three, on his career. His name is Samadhi, which means Collection. (Such symmetries make one shudder to think what Dr. Mann could do with Abie's Irish Rose.) This story is told with a great writer's irony at its most bland, cruel and elegant...