The Yogis- Shri Yogendraji

What was this due to - this great culture of the Yogis? It was their self-concentrated stage, a stage higher than our physical and the mental planes where they could see reality face to face. They controlled their inner activities and misleading perceptions, to realize that Ultimate Truth - that stage of higher super-consciousness. Plotinus glimpsed the truth and found that it is only by an act of intuition in which the mind rises above thoughts and merges in the object, that one can realize the Ultimate Reality.

“Perfection is to be gained by the Yogi”, says Swami Vivekananda, “and no power is any more his master. He has become almost Almighty, almost Allknowing.” It is because he is no more his own little self tied up with any knot of individuality, but a free soul - the universal spirit who knows and governs the universe.

His way of taking things is quite different to our own, bent mostly towards spiritualism and divinity, with life not artificial but natural, with delight more than all our material happiness. And, if ever he comes in touch with the material world, it is not to him the real matter, but it is the realization of the spiritual in and through the material- the material, as it were, shining, becoming refined and luminous through the life’s experience. The chief joy of his life is not out elsewhere in the world and hence he does not go hankering after it, but it is in him - in his real self, the pure Atman, “The Yogi thus united ever with the self, with the mind controlled, goeth to peace.” Verily, in Samadhi, he comes before things face to face, and there is nothing to charm him more than his own self, reflected. In himself, he finds the supreme delight which the reason cannot grasp beyond senses. It is because he knows that the real source of joy is not the objective world but his own self - “the soul who maketh all”