Early indication of spiritual greatness

Early indication of spiritual greatness
     While the above-described qualities of head and heart marked Naren out as a budding many-sided genius, what distinguished him most from others was his rare spiritual excellence. Even in boyhood he displayed great powers of concentration. As a young boy he was one day playing at meditation with some companions in a closed room. Not finding the boy any-where for a long time, the people of the house began to search everywhere and at last came to the closed room. They broke into it, whereupon the other boys fled, while Naren remaind absorbed in meditation without any awareness of what was taking place around him. As his Great Master said later on, he was born perfect in meditation..
     He always went to sleep in a peculiar way. As soon as he closed his eyes o sleep, he was aware of a luminous glow into which he felt himself dissolving. Till he reached more mature years he thought that it was the way in which all people went to sleep. At that young age Narendra discovered, even without the advice of anyone, that meditation was the best way for realising God, and he used to practice meditation regularly in a bolted room without any body's knowledge. In 1877 when Narendra was about fourteen, he had to take his family to Raipur where his father had gone for a long stay. Much of the traveling had to be done in bullock carts through the thick forests of the Vindhyan ranges. Stimulated by the wonderful beauty of Nature surrounding him, the naturally meditative mind of Narendra brought him cribing it to his companions in later days, he said: "What I saw and felt when going through the forest has for ever remained firmly imprinted in my memory, particularly a certain event of one day. That day we had to travel by a mountain road passing through a valley of the Vindhyan ranges, whose peaks, rising very high in the sky, were overlooking it from both the sides. Bending under the weight of their fruits and creepers covered the mountain slopes in their matchless beauty. Birds were flying from arbour to arbour or down on he ground in search of food, filling the quarters with their sweet notes. I saw all bullock carts arriving at a place where two mountain peaks coming forward as in love, locked themselves up in an embrace over the narrow forest path. Observing carefully below their meeting point, I saw that there was a very big cleft from the crest to the foot of the mountain on one side of the path, and filling that cleft, there was hanging in it an enormous honey-comb, the result of the labour of the bees for ages. Filled with wonder, as I was pondering over the beginning and the end of that kingdom of bees, my mind became so much absorbed in the thought of the infinite power of God, the Controller of the three worlds, that I completely lost my consciousness of the external world for some time. I do not remember how long I was lying in the bullock cart in that condition. When I regained normal consciousness, I found that we had crossed that place and come far away. As I was alone in the cart, no one could know any thing about these happenings" This was perhaps his first experience of the mystic consciousness called Samadhi.
Collected by:
Keerthi

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