Before my first samadhi experience, I had implicit faith in the wisdom of Dylan Thomas. He said we should rage against the dying of the light. As a sixteen-year-old boy with no experience in death and a great desire to be heroic, he won me over.

Then a few months later, by focusing on my breath and third eye in pranayama meditation, I found myself ascending the tunnel and entering the Light of real Being that every great mystic from Jesus to Patanjali talked about. It was the brilliant white bliss of samadhi, the breathless “death” state that is the pinnacle of yogic practice. And I realized Thomas had it completely backwards. 

The real light awaits us on the other side.   

If you have heard of people who have had near-death experiences, or NDEs, samadhi is basically identical. When NDE subjects “come back to life” after flatlining in a hospital bed or the scene of an accident, most describe travelling up a tunnel and becoming immersed in a brilliant white light that feels like infinite love. Afterwards, returning to regular waking consciousness, they perceive with razor clarity that their real Self is something much greater than this bag of bones, and they are left with a profound sense of joy, peace, and purpose. The yogi who enters samadhi experiences the same thing. 

Why would we want to rage against this? 

In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Sogyal Rinpoche observes that people in the West are deeply uncomfortable talking about death. As a consequence, knowledge of the intricacies of physical death and the process of dying is obscured or never shared. We don’t know how to help our loved ones as they make the final passage, and we are filled with terror when we near our own end. 

It was ever thus. Ignorance creates fear, and fear leads to suffering. 

We suffer throughout our lives, because regardless of how much we tell our conscious mind that we’re not bothered by the thought of death, our subconscious knows better. We wouldn’t struggle to seek security in our lives if this wasn’t true.

It’s much worse when we reach our deathbed. As our mortal light begins to flicker, we suffer consciously and acutely because we’re still stuck in the belief that only darkness awaits us. 

Samadhi washes away all ignorance by immersing us in the light of knowledge of the true Self. In revealing the Light of our own immortality, it frees us from fear and allows us to live a vastly richer life. The lives of the saints, mystics, and NDE survivors attest to this.  

To conquer death, however, we need to confront it and ask questions. In the Katha Upanishad, the youth Nachiketas does exactly this. 

Given the opportunity to ask anything of Yama, the Hindu god of death, Nachiketas asks him to share the truth about whether or not we really die. Yama pleads with Nachiketas to ask for something else. He says he will give him all the wealth, women, and elephants in the world. Nachiketas doesn’t fall for the ruse and continues to press. Yama finally relents and shares the truth with him: 

There is the path of joy, and there is the path of pleasure. Both attract the soul. Who follows the first comes to good; who follows pleasure reaches not the End. 

Yama then explains at length that the secret to overcoming death is to discover the omnipresent Spirit within. The Katha Upanishad doesn’t report Yama describing how to do this, because observant students of the Upanishads and Patanjali’s yoga sutras would have known that they needed to apply the techniques for attaining samadhi consciousness.      

I had the good fortune to experience samadhi at a young age, and this is why I left “Do not go gentle into that good night” behind me at sixteen. However, I have never stopped appreciating Dylan Thomas’ brilliance as a poet. His “And death shall have no dominion” still stirs me: 

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

This comes closer to the truth. We are sparks of the great Light that lies beyond the dimness of this earthly plane, and this is why we shouldn’t rage. We would do better to go gently seeking knowledge, then perhaps we might ease much of death’s suffering. 

 © James Andrew Grove