With devotion full of love and affection, the spiritualist should meditate from the depths of his heart on the laughter of Sri Visnu; this laughter is so captivating that one can easily meditate on it, and when the Supreme Lord laughs thus, one can see His little teeth, like jasmine buds tinged pink by the splendor of His lips. Having devoted his mind to this meditation, the spiritualist should not desire to see anything else.
By following this path, the spiritualist gradually develops pure love for the Supreme Lord, Sri Hari. In the course of his progress on the path of devotional service, the hairs on his body come to stand on end with extreme joy, and he is bathed in a constant stream of tears occasioned by his intense love. Gradually, even his mind, which he has been using to attract the Lord just as a fish is attracted to a hook, renounces all material activities.
When the mind is thus perfectly freed from all material contamination and detached from all material objectives, it becomes like the flame of a lamp. It then becomes truly united with the mind of the Supreme Lord, and can be seen as one with Him, freed from the flow of combined material influences.
Now situated on the highest spiritual plane, the mind cuts itself off from all material reactions and establishes itself in its own glory, beyond all material conceptions of happiness and unhappiness. At that moment the spiritualist realizes the truth of his relationship with the Supreme Personality of Godhead. He discovers that the joys and sorrows attributed to his own being, as well as their interactions, are in fact the work of the false ego alone, which is a product of ignorance.
Because he has regained his real identity, the perfectly realized soul is not conscious of the way the material body moves or acts, any more than a drunken man is conscious of whether he is clothed or not.
The Supreme Lord Himself now takes charge of the body as well as the senses of a liberated spiritualist, so that his functions are maintained until his destiny is fulfilled. The liberated devotee, who has awakened to his natural and eternal position and is thus established in Samadhi, the highest level of perfection of yoga, no longer sees the products of his material body as his own. He therefore regards the activities of that body as so many manifestations of a dream.
Out of deep affection for family and wealth, one will see a son or money as one's own, and out of affection for the material body, one will regard it in the same way. But in truth, just as one can understand that family and wealth are different from oneself, so the liberated being knows himself to be different from his body.
Fire itself is distinct from flames, sparks and smoke, although all these are intimately related because they are the product of the same burning wood.