The liberated

What happens when one reaches the goal of spiritual life? One's ego is gone, and one experiences and lives on his higher or the real Self. The little prison-house vanishes and one realizes one's universal Self or Eternal Existence, where there is no death, no misery, no conflict or interaction of good and evil.

Man is ordinarily bound by time, space and causation. For the man of spiritual realization these bondages are gone and he experiences what is called absolute Freedom, or Liberation from the bondage of matter. That is a state of infinite bliss which words cannot express, thoughts cannot reach. One feels that bliss but one cannot describe it. It is what Swami Vivekananda in his poem on Samadhi says, 'His heart only knows who has felt it a state beyond the reach of words and thoughts.'

Swami Vivekananda now and then gave out, though casually, glimpses of that state as experienced by himself. In a letter from Alameda, California, dated 18th April 1900, he says :

'Oh, it is so calm! My thoughts seem to come from a great, great distance in the interior of my own heart. They seem like faint, distant whispers, and peace is upon everything, sweet, sweet peace. . . .

The world is, but not beautiful nor ugly, but as sensations without exciting any emotion. Oh, Joe, the blessedness of it! Everything is good and beautiful ; for things are all losing their relative proportions for me my body among the first. Om Tat Sat, Om. '

A few days earlier from the same place he wrote :

'Mother is doing Her own work; I do not worry much now. Moths like me die by the thousands every instant. Her work goes on all the same. Glory unto Mother! . . . Alone and drifting about in the will- current of the Mother, has been my whole life. . .. I am free. I am Mother's child. She works. She plays. Why should I plan? What should I plan? Things came and went, just as She liked, without my planning. We are Her automatons. She is the wire-puller.'