Wherever the mind goes, there is samādhi

Vasiṣṭha demystifies samādhi as an exotic trance, a specific posture, or an altered state. There is no special place where it occurs, no prerequisite condition that enables it. Yatra yatra—wherever, always—indicates ubiquity: samādhi cannot be located in time-space because it is the very nature of consciousness itself, not an event that happens to it. When the mind goes to the market, samādhi is there; when it goes into retreat, it is there as well; when it goes into memory, into fear, into desire—it is there. This is not to say the market is samādhi: rather, it is the mind, by not seeking another place, by not postponing stillness, that discovers it never abandoned it.

The Yoga Sūtra (III.3) defines samādhi as deśa-bandhaḥ cittasya—the mind bound to a single point—but Vasiṣṭha goes further: there is no necessary point, no unification to be achieved. Samādhi is not concentration but the dissolution of the need to concentrate. It is like an eye that, upon opening, discovers it was always seeing: it did not need to close in order to see better, only to stop insisting that vision requires effort. Stillness is not the absence of mental movement: it is the absence of the search for stillness, which turns every movement into an obstacle.