I was sitting in my favorite chair, the chocolate brown one with the fringe along the bottom and I was engrossed in a Nancy Drew novel. I was eight years old, and I was completely mesmerized as I read about the daring exploits of my favorite heroine. During that particular summer each scorching afternoon I would crawl onto my chair before dinner and I would not hear or notice anything around me until my Mother finally got through to me by standing close and repeatedly calling me to the table. I had been transported to another time and place. This ability to focus on one thing and shut out everything else would certainly help me in school. But later it would be of value to me as I begin to understand what philosopher/yogi Patanjali was writing about when he mentioned dharana, or the state of concentration in his Yoga Sutra. 

      The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali was written some two hundred years BCE and is 
a concise statement of the way the mind works and how we as yoga practitioners can integrate yoga into our lives. Patanjali presents the eight-limbed path, also called astanga yoga, in the third chapter. Dharana or concentration is the fifth of these eight limbs; the next is called dhyana, or meditation, and the eighth and final limb is samadhi, or enlightenment. 

    The last three limbs, dharana, dhyana and samadhi, are often studied together 
and are called antaratma sadhana or the innermost quest. In the first sutra of Chapter Three, concentration is explained as the binding of consciousness to a [single] spot. (Georg Feuerstein, p. 95). The ability to concentrate the mind is half of what is necessary for the practitioner to reach what has been called wholeness, enlightenment, or oneness. First we must be able to focus on one thing completely; this ability to be absorbed in the moment is necessary if the practitioner is to be able to reach the liberation of samadhi. The second half of what is necessary for liberation is the ability the practitioner must develop to let go of ego's view of reality. (More on this later.) When this happens one can enter the state of samadhi. All the practices of yoga are concerned with learning to 
focus and surrender. 

       I like to honor this state of absorption whenever and wherever I find it. 
Sometimes it can be seen in a musician who is focused on the music to the 
exclusion of all else; it may be seen in an athlete in a tense moment of a crucial game. Of course, yoga practitioners actively seek out this depth of concentration in the practices of asana (posture), pranayama (breathing exercises) as well as in meditation itself. But I believe that dharana can be found whenever a person is fully present and focused on an activity or object. One of the great powers that this focus affords is that it is by definition the cure for the inner conflict we commonly experience.  I have found that if there is a disparity between my actions and my thoughts I tend to become more fatigued and feel less joy in my life. However, when I am truly focused on and committed to this moment, I may 
encounter difficulty but I will not feel conflict. Dharana is the ability to bring all the mind's attention toward one thing; this ability is the foundation for the next limb or practice, dhyana or meditation, presented in the second verse of Chapter III of the Sutra. 

      The word meditation is used frequently to mean to think about something. But meditation is not thinking; it is a deep sense of unity with an object or activity. One way to understand the distinction between concentration and meditation is by thinking of rain. Before it rains, the moisture is diffuse in the clouds. When the rain starts, the moisture coalesces into distinct raindrops. These raindrops represent dharana or concentration. When the rain falls to earth and creates a stream, the merging of the individual raindrops into one stream is the process of dhyana or meditation. Dharana is the intermittent focus of the mind on one thing while dhyana is the constant flow of the mind toward one object. 

       In the beginning students of yoga are taught to meditate by focusing on a 
mantra, the breath, or perhaps the image of a guru or great teacher. This is 
extremely difficult because it is the nature of the mind to jump around from idea to idea, from sensation to sensation. In fact, Swami Vivikenanda called the mind drunken monkey when he introduced meditation to the US at the end of the 19th century at the Chicago World's Fair. Learning to meditate is first learning to teach the body to sit still. When this is accomplished, one cannot help but notice by contrast how un-still the mind is. Therefore I do not consider meditation to be a time in which I am quieting my mind or pacifying my mind, trying to quiet something that by nature is never quiet. Instead I pay total attention to the agitations which are my thoughts.  My thoughts may continue, but it is the act of paying uninterrupted attention to my thoughts which is the meditation. Meditation is not some dreamy state in which thoughts do not happen at all. (I also have an untested theory that the physiological state which accompanies meditation is the state in which brain waves in both hemispheres are perfectly balanced.) 

      The final limb in the practice of yoga which Patanjali presents in verse  3, Chapter III, is samadhi, or enlightenment. When I contemplated writing about this most illusive of limbs I first thought about just leaving the page blank in a Zen approach. Somehow it seems that writing about samadhi is about as useful as giving a hungry person just words about food instead of food itself. Nonetheless, I will attempt to keep my editor happy. 

      When I first began to study yoga I thought that samadhi was a trance-like state which would take the practitioner away to a new and better state of being. Over the years my understanding has changed. Now I tend to think of samadhi as exactly the opposite. Samadhi is a state of being intensely present without a point of view. In other words, it is perceiving all points of view of reality at once without focusing on any particular one.  To understand this better, imagine that each of us has a grid or filter in front of us. The struts in this grid are constructed of all of our 
experiences and ideas; it is created by our particular personal history, our 
gender, family and cultural values, and education, to name a few things. This 
grid filters all experiences we have. While we all have the need for food, for example, our grid tells us whether hamburgers, raw fish or organic tofu is food. In other words, the grid is the sum total of our beliefs about reality. 

      Samadhi is the state in which we no longer experience reality through a grid; we are able to experience reality directly. Virtually all of us have had a taste of this state. Some people have had this experience in relationship with worship, others during lovemaking, or while alone in the woods. Samadhi is a state in which one is aware on a cellular level of the existent oneness which underscores the universe. 

    Scientists are beginning to study this oneness. In an article in the January 21, 1997, New York Times, atomic physicist Dr. Steve K. Lamoreaux reports experiments which have led him to postulate the existence of a quantum foam. This foam is believed to extend throughout the universe and to fill the empty space within the atoms in human bodies as well as reaching the emptiest and most remote regions of the cosmos. Perhaps the state yogis call samadhi is the state in which the individual is somehow in complete harmony with this cosmic foam. Whatever samadhi is, it is certainly illusive. 

      How does samadhi relate to daily life, a daily life filled with paying taxes, cleaning up the kitchen, practicing yoga poses, washing the car? On one level it does not relate at all. On one level our actions in the world are just our actions in the world. But on another level Patanjali's eighth limb, samadhi, is the most important thing in our life. Patanjali teaches us that we can become whole and fully present, at any moment, that we are capable of experiencing samadhi at any time. If we understand this, then that understanding becomes a fundamental acknowledgment. And that acknowledgment is that our wholeness already exists within us because it was always there.