Śivasaṃhitā 5.119

This verse describes a moment of exceptional grace: the spontaneous dissolution of the mind into a specific center of the subtle body. It is not an achievement reached through technical effort alone, but an event that occurs daivāt — by divine favor. This distinction between deliberate practice and unexpected grace is central to many streams of Tantric yoga.

The term laya — dissolution, absorption — belongs to the technical vocabulary of layayoga, one of the great recognized paths in the tradition. Unlike the mental suppression (nirodha) of Patañjali’s classical yoga, laya implies a merging where the mind dissolves into its source, like salt into water. The adverb daivāt introduces the dimension of grace (prasāda) as an indispensable factor.

This verse is the first half of a couplet describing the effects of this absorption. Within the context of the fifth chapter of the Śivasaṃhitā, it appears after the description of the higher subtle centers, suggesting that the ‘place’ (sthāna) referred to is one of the most elevated cakras, possibly the space of the brahmarandhra. Its syntactic incompleteness requires it to be read together with the following verse.