THE MENTAL VOID – YOGA SUTRA – commented by Swami Vivekananda.

“There is another type of divine ecstasy that is obtained through the assiduous practice of stopping any mental activity, in which the chitta (mind) is transcended and retains only the unmanifested impressions.

This is the soamprajnata samadhi, the perfectly superconscious state that gives us the supreme spiritual liberation.

We can get all the paranormal powers in the world and yet miss again.

There is nothing certain until the soul goes beyond nature, beyond conscious concentration. It is, for some people difficult to obtain, although this method seems very easy.

It consists in maintaining the mind as an object and stopping anything that comes to us through it: we do not allow any thought to enter the mind, we keep it totally empty. At the very moment when we can truly do that, we will achieve spiritual liberation.

When they seek to empty their minds, untrained and inexperienced people will only manage to fill it with tamas, a darkening of consciousness that sinks into slowness and stupidity, confused with the mental void. But to be truly able to live the state of mental void means the manifestation of the greatest strength and perfect control. When this state of superconsciousness, the asamprajnata, is reached, the samadhi becomes seedless.

What is meant by that? In that kind of concentration when there is consciousness, when the mind has only managed to hold them in check and appease them, the waves of chitta still exist as tendencies, and these tendencies (or seeds) will come to life again at the right time.

Only when we have destroyed all these tendencies, when we have almost destroyed it -it, only then will the mind have become seedless, for in it there are no other seeds from which to grow again and again this plant of life, this eternal wheel of birth and death.

You may ask yourself:

what state is that in which we will have no dual knowledge whatsoever?

But you must know: what we call knowledge is a state inferior to that beyond knowledge.

The extremes seem to be very similar. The lowest vibration of light is darkness; the highest vibration is all the darkness. But only the first one is truly dark, the other is actually an extremely intense light. However, they seem the same.
So ignorance is the lowest state, knowledge is the intermediate state, and beyond knowledge, over-knowledge, is the highest state.
Knowledge itself is an invention, a concoction, a mixture; it is not a reality.

What will be the result of the constant practice of this type of higher concentration? All the old tendencies of agitation and inertia will be destroyed, as will the beneficial tendencies.

It is as in the case of metals that are used together with gold to remove dirt and alloy. In the process of melting the ore, the slag is burned together with the alloy.

This constant control of power will stop previous negative tendencies, and at some point, also good ones. These good and bad tendencies will destroy each other, and only the Self will remain, in all its glorious splendor, beyond good and evil, and that Self is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient.

Giving up all his powers became omnipotent, giving up his entire life he reached beyond death; it became life itself.

Then the Self will know that he was never born nor ever died, he will no longer want either Heaven or the earth. He will know that he neither came nor departed; Nature has always moved, and that movement has been reflected in itself.
The shapes of light move, are reflected and emitted by the projector to the wall, and the wall mistakenly believes that he is moving. This is how it happens with each of us: it is the chitta that is constantly moving, taking all kinds of forms, and we believe that those forms are us. All these deceptions will disappear. When that free soul asks—it will not pray or beg, but simply ask— all its desires will be fulfilled instantly; it will be able to do whatever it wants.“