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400
The Unknown Pidgrims
concentration but, if one may express it so, bodily fixation,29 Moreover, when his āyu-karman, which determines his life-span, arrives at its term, his earthly stage will come to an end. The last of the three yogas is by this time extremely rarefied and now the third level of śukla-dhyāna is reached, called: sükşma-kriyā-apratipāti, a state in which only very slight bodily activities such as the respiratory movement remain; return is no longer possible to a state of less than perfection.30 Here we must pause, for we are already on the threshold of mokşa.
B - Mokşa: Liberation
When this stage has been reached, everything happens with lightning speed; the weight of matter is so slight that nothing impedes the flight of the atman in its urgency to arrive at long last at this final, definitive state.
What is mokşa? At one and the same time, a radical and for all time separation of the jiva from karman, and thus from the body, and also plenitude of being, these two aspects being interdependent.31
The rupture occurs on earth and with this rupture the path comes to an end. When we attempt to fathom the end of the process of Liberation in the kevalin, we find ourselves simultaneously in this world and beyond it, for it is impossible to isolate one from another the final moments of the transition.
a) The final break-through
The kevalin has already ceased all bodily activity, only the respiratory movement continuing within him. After a few moments
29 Cf. YSas XI, 11.
30 Cf. TS IX, 39-40; US XXIX, 72 says that this phenomenon lasts less than a muhurta; cf. also DhyanSat 81.
31 Cf. DravSam 37; these two aspects correspond to dravya-mokșa and bhava-moksa.
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