Article source – Swami Ashokananda, When the Many Become One
(Calcutta: Advaita Ashrama, 1997), 94-6.
You feel like becoming one with the whole universe. You do
not want to be separate from anything but to become one with everything. There
was a time when I liked that idea very much.
I had finished my education in the university and was living
in a small town. It was a very unusual kind of place, with the habit of
becoming inundated with floods.
Every year a good part of the town would be under water, as
was the neighboring land for miles and miles and miles all around.
Well, it was a beautiful thing to see…
I made a habit in those days of going into the backyard of the
house where I lived.
From there I could see miles and miles of this water, and
there I would sit. There was no rain at that time. I would sit there and lose
myself in the utter oneness of these undivided waters.
No waves there; the water not moving. And there was the sun.
I looked towards the east, and for miles and miles I would see only the water
in which the blue sky and the sun were reflected.
And then I would lose the sense of outerness; that sense of
an outer world at which I was looking would go away, and the sense of oneness
that this vast water created would pervade the mind, saturate the mind, and
somehow overwhelm the mind.
I would lose myself in this sense of oneness pervading
everywhere; I would not remember even my own physical existence.
After I had bathed, I would meditate on the sun, and that
meditation was also of a peculiar character. I wore eyeglasses even in those
days, and I would take them off and hold them so that the sun would shine on
the glass.
The sun would appear small in the lens, but it was a very convenient
symbol for meditation, and I would lose myself in that meditation for a long
time.