the
world. But nowhere else was it received with equal purity and passion.
Elsewhere than in India the claims of Time were predominant. In India
they have been subordinate. This, no doubt, is a matter of emphasis. No
society, as a whole, could believe and act upon the belief that activity
in Time is simply waste of time, and absorption in the Eternal the
direct and immediate object of life. Such a view, acted upon, would
bring the society quickly to an end. It would mean that the very
physical instinct to live was extinguished. But, as the Eternal was
first conceived by the amazing originality of India, so the passion to
realise it here and now has been the motive of her saints from the date
of the Upanishads to the twentieth century. And the method of
realisation proposed and attempted has not been the living of the
temporal life in a particular spirit, it has been the transcending of it
by a special experience. Indian saints have always believed that by
meditation and ascetic discipline, by abstaining from active life and
all its claims, and cultivating solitude and mortification, they could
reach by a direct experience union with the Infinite. This is as true of
the latest as of the earliest saints, if and so far as Western
influences have been excluded. Let me illustrate from the words of Sri
Ramakrishna, one of the most typical of Indian saints, who died late in
the nineteenth century.

First, for the claim to pass directly into union with the Eternal:

"I do see that Being as a Reality before my very eyes! Why then
should I reason? I do actually see that it is the Absolute Who
has become all these things about us; it is He who appears as
the finite soul and the phenomenal world. One must have such an
awakening of the Spirit within to see this Reality.... Spiritual
awakening must be followed by Samadhi. In this state one forgets
that one has a body; one loses all attachment to things of this
world."[5]

And let it not be supposed that this state called Samadhi is merely one
of intense meditation. It is something much more abnormal, or
super-normal, than this. The book from which I am quoting contains many
accounts of its effects upon Sri Ramakrishna. Here is one of them:

"He is now in a state of Samadhi, the superconscious or
God-conscious state. The body is again motionless. The eyes are
again fixed! The boys only a moment ago were laughing and making
merry! No