Question : Can there be a Partial Experience of Samadhi
Osho : Not partial but preliminary. There is a difference between the two. The experience of samadhi cannot be partial, but there can be a mental glimpse of samadhi. The experience is spiritual; the glimpse is mental. If I stand on the top of the mountain and see the sea, I will definitely see the sea but from a distance.
I will not have stood at the shore; I will not have touched or tasted of its waters; I will not have dived into it or bathed in it. I have seen the sea from the top of the mountain. Would you call this experience partial? No. And in spite of the fact that I did not touch even a drop of the ocean, you cannot call my experience unauthentic. I have seen the ocean from the top of a mountain even though I have not become one with it.
In the same way you can see the soul from the topmost peak of your body. The body too has its peak – its peak experiences. If you have a very deep experience of the body you can get a glimpse of the soul in it. If you are perfectly healthy and experience a feeling of well being,
if the body is overflowing with good health, you can reach a height of the body from where you can have a glimpse of the soul.
You will experience that you are not the body and that you are something else. You will not have known what the soul is but you will have reached the ultimate height of the body. The mind too has its heights: For example, when you are deeply in love – not in sex, because sex is only the possibility of the body. But even in sex, if you reach the peak of sexual experience, you get a glimpse of the soul.
However, it will be a faraway glimpse – a glimpse from the farthest end. But if you have a deep experience of love, if you sit next to your loved one for a moment with not a word to break the silence, with only love moving between the two of you, without any doing or desiring but only waves of love moving from one to the other, in that peak moment of love you will reach the height from where you will have a glimpse of the soul.
So lovers too get a glimpse of the soul. An artist paints a picture. He is so absorbed in making it that for a moment he becomes God, the creator, because he experiences the same state that God must have felt when he created the world. But this height is of the mind. During the moment of the glimpse this man feels like the creator. Many times such a man makes the mistake of thinking that this experience is enough.
This experience can be had from music, from poetry, from natural beauty and from other such things. But all these are faraway peaks. When you are totally dissolved in samadhi, the realization happens. On the outside there are many peaks from where you can have a glimpse of the soul. So this experience of Vivekananda happened at the level of the mind, because as I have told you, the other can go into you up to the peak of the mind and can lift you up to that peak.
Look at it this way: I take a small child on my shoulders and he looks all around. Then I put him down – because my shoulders cannot be his own. His own legs are still small and it will take a long time for him to grow up to my height. But lifted up on my shoulders he has seen, and now he can go to others and say that he has seen something. People may not believe him; they may say that it is not possible at his height.
But it is possible to climb on the shoulders of another and have a view. All this is the possibility of the mind; hence, it is not spiritual. All the same, it is not unauthentic; it is elementary. The elementary experience can take place either in the body or in the mind. And it is not partial; it is complete, but it is confined to the realm of the mind. It is not of the soul, because in the experience of the soul there is no coming back.
At that level no one can keep your key; no one can say that when he returns the key, then only will it happen. Nobody else has any say there. If some special task is expected to be accomplished by a medium, then he has to be stopped before the point of transcendence; otherwise difficulty will arise.
So Vivekananda’s experience was an authentic experience, but its authenticity is psychic and not spiritual. This too, however, is not a small happening; it does not happen to all. It requires a very powerful and matured mind.