Not just any old psychic-hotline enlightenment, but ``samadhi,'' the Sanskrit concept of spiritual joy. The York, Pa., band has appropriated the term for its long-awaited third album, ``Secret Samadhi,'' which arrived in stores this week and is being celebrated with a concert tour that began Tuesday night with a sold-out date at the Tower.

In anticipation of a media onslaught befitting a group whose last release sold more than six million copies worldwide, Kowalczyk is trying to shoehorn his definition of ``samadhi'' into a tidy sound bite.

``It doesn't mean joy, exactly,'' the slight Kowalczyk explains, his words gathering preacherlike intensity. When he talks, those around him, even the ones not sitting cross-legged on the floor, are deferential: The look in Kowalczyk's eyes says this stuff is important to him.

``It's more like a place of spiritual realization. For us, it works on a few levels. The place we go as a band is a sort of `samadhi,' intensely emotional and not bound by self-thinking. And lyrically, one of the goals is to suggest that something is going on beyond what you can see.''

Feel free to cue up the Rolling Stones' ``It's Only Rock 'n' Roll'' if you need a breather here. Kowalczyk doesn't care - he might even sing along. But, in the end, it's not only rock 'n' roll to him. It's nothing less than a means of transcendence.

The 25-year-old seeker and his three longtime friends from York have found a niche that takes in metal and metaphysics, Krishnamurti and the three-chord crunch. Like early U2, Live stirs idealism and religious mysticism into songs with intentionally obscure lyrics and heavy, turmoil-filled backbeats. It celebrates contradictions, jumbles the sacred and the tawdry. It creates the irresistible tension of great rock, then guides the music into moments of introspection and repose. It can be fervent one minute, self-righteous the next.

``We've been slighted in the press for being heartfelt,'' says Kowalczyk, who wears the criticism like a badge of honor. The singer, now virtually bald and sporting industrial black fingernail polish, has spent a considerable amount of time trying to figure out why earnestness is a negative.

One of his conclusions: Expressions of faith come more naturally to the young. Being forthright embarrasses cynical old-school rock critics.

``It's as simple as, `Can you handle it if we sound committed to something?''' says Kowalczyk. ``We've never been satisfied with just making the music. What we're doing is trying to go to a place of some reverence.''

Live arrived at that place through ``Secret Samadhi,'' a work that is a significant improvement on ``Throwing Copper,'' the 1994 commercial breakthrough that had critics uttering the band's name in the same breath as R.E.M. and U2.

To Kowalczyk, the new material reflects the band's increased willingness to translate elusive existential questions into music. ``It's not like we sat around and talked about how to reinvent ourselves,'' Kowalczyk explains. ``Because our relationship with the music is so personal, it becomes a reflection of our growth as individuals. For me, this was the first time everything felt completely unified. Finally, it was a mirror image of who I was, what I was feeling at the time.''

The rhythm section feels the same way. ``With the other records, I can listen and pick out influences,'' says bassist Patrick Dahlheimer. ``Now we're starting to sound like ourselves. We're trusting more.''

Written on the road and in seclusion in Jamaica, then produced by the band and engineer Jay Healy, ``Samadhi'' is notable for verses shrouded in mystery, and choruses so abrupt they take you by surprise. But it also has the requisite big anthems and moments that show that the band is no longer quite so full of itself.

Kowalczyk says the prowling ``Freaks,'' which was written in 1993, was the band's attempt to tear down the cult of celebrity that had grown up around it. ``As the British say, it was us taking a ... on the whole idea of being something special.''

The opening track, ``Rattlesnake,'' is a series of tense, measured crescendos punctuated by Kowalczyk's hissing voice, which in a wonderful moment of self-mockery asks: ``Is it money, is it fame, or were they always this lame?''

Though the band probably could have gotten away with replicating the crisp, disciplined ``Throwing Copper,'' it headed in the other direction, with atmospheric arrangements that are darker, less overt. There are lavish swirls of dissonance, and times when the entire sound field seems slightly out of focus, as though covered by a thin layer of psychedelic paint. Many songs are built around the jarring contrasts found on Live's previous albums: ``Graze,'' for example, starts as a pensive meditation, then erupts in a halestorm of clanging guitar.

As the music has grown more diverse and daring, Kowalczyk's narratives have become similarly adventurous. Bent on writing something based on myth that wasn't a fairy tale, he composed ``Lakini's Juice,'' about a female deity he describes as ``destructive and awful, a destroyer of karma.'' The album's first single, ``Lakini'' is about ``embracing all of life as it exists, not as we'd like it to be.''

``Century'' describes the day after the millennium is celebrated by wary, alienated inhabitants of a city whose streets smell like vomit and beer. For Kowalczyk, it's one of the songs on ``Samadhi'' that come from a clear generational perspective.

``I think you can hear it (comes from) being in your mid-20s and confronting this. Not only trying to figure out where we belong as a generation, but how to deal with the impending millennial weirdness. Are we going to go the way of our parents, and live life as it presents itself, materialistically, or are we going to move beyond that?''

Then there's the baby boomer tweak on the brooding ``Unsheathed'': ``Free love was just another party for the hippies to ruin.''

``We played around with the '60s a lot on this record - the contrasts and also the similarities,'' says Kowalczyk. ``It's not the '60s anymore. People can look now and see that it was too idealistic, and all about indulgence and consumerism eventually. The minute you try to take something like free love and change it into something you can see and measure and sell, you ruin it.''

Kowalczyk and his co-horts, Dahlheimer, guitarist Chad Taylor and drummer Chad Gracey, never expected to reach the point where their take on the '60s would matter to anyone. They formed a band in the mid-'80s, while in middle school, and called it Public Affection. After high school, they decided to dedicate themselves fully to the group.

Theirs was the quintessential go-slow project. They toured constantly, and developed a chiming, yearning sound that betrayed years of R.E.M. worship. In 1989, they released a homemade cassette called ``The Death of a Dictionary'' and played CBGB's. In 1991, they were signed to Radioactive Records.

Then things happened fast. The band changed its name to Live, and released its major-label debut, the Jerry Harrison-produced ``Mental Jewelry,'' on New Year's Eve 1991. The album earned polite notices and landed the band a spot on MTV's ``120 Minutes'' tour with Public Image Ltd. and Blind Melon. With ``Throwing Copper,'' released in '94, the band ascended to headliner status. Then came ``MTV Unplugged,'' the covers of Spin and Rolling Stone, and more than 250 sold-out shows.

Life became different for Live. Gracey sums it up this way: ``All of a sudden we were the biggest band ever from Pennsylvania. People who wouldn't give us a gig in our hometown wanted to be our friends.''

While the other members of Live continued relatively normal existences, Kowalczyk was an object of adulation. He couldn't leave the house without a hassle.

``They say that everything changes when you get famous, and we were sure that wouldn't happen to us. But it did,'' says Kowalczyk, a heavy reader who lives near his family and is extremely private about the details of his personal life. ``People don't relate to you the same way. Even people you thought you knew, the conversations get strange in a very subtle way. So I stay pretty tucked away. I like to be surrounded by people I don't know.''

Kowalczyk began his spiritual studies with the writings of Krishnamurti in 1993, but found his current guru on the World Wide Web. He had been reading Ken Wilber, known for books that link New Age spirituality with current science about the mind, and one day happened on a Wilber essay about the Eastern teacher Adi-Da, who had devotees in the United States in the '60s but now lives in seclusion in Fiji. The singer followed the thread to the Adi-Da Web site.

``I remember it was last April, right before we were going to record,'' recalls Kowalczyk, who has visited his teacher's sanctuary on the Mountain of Attention in Fiji. ``I was just following some intuition, which is the way everything seems to happen with Live. I'm looking around, and here's this guy talking about self-understanding and the nature of ego in a way that went beyond Krishnamurti or anything else I'd read. It was amazing, like a piece of the puzzle dropping in at exactly the right time.''

As he surveys what's left of the pizza, it's clear that Kowalczyk is experiencing no internal dissonance about having surfed his way to a spiritual guide. Such cosmic coincidence comes naturally to him, and could even be considered an extension of Live philosophy: Transcendence can be no more than a mouse-click away.