Osho on Ramana Maharshi deep sleep and samadhi experience

 

 

This is the way Ramana Maharshi experienced the sudden opening into ultimate consciousness, in which his individual identity was almost entirely lost. A family relation had died, and young Ramana decided to explore directly the experience of death. His motive stemmed more from curiosity than any feeling of bereavement. Ramana removed all his clothes, lay on the floor of his room, and with tremendous intensity, imagined his body dead. He closed his eyes, simulating the state of deep sleep. Suddenly there flashed into view, timeless and complete, the primal awareness that lies at the source of our being, the ultimate consciousness that is the source of being itself. And when he opened his eyes, he was totally a different man.

 

What happened? Somebody had died, a relation. Ramana was only seventeen. He was not a very extraordinary student or anything -- nothing special about him, except one thing and that was his deep sleep. So deep was his sleep that it was almost impossible to wake him up. The family was tired. You could go on shouting, pulling him from the bed.... And sometimes the sleep used to come any time of the day -- he might fall asleep in the school, and the children had to carry him back to his home. That was his only speciality. Other children would be playing and he would fall asleep on the ground, and they would poke, and they would pummel and they would beat him, and he would not be there at all. And they would have to carry him home.

 

That was his only speciality, but of great significance, because deep sleep is very close to samadhi, just the threshold of samadhi. That has been my speciality too. It was almost a problem in my college in university -- because I would fall asleep. My teachers were very angry, because who wants somebody falling asleep? And I was a student of philosophy, and there were not many people because very few people go to study philosophy. In my MA class we were only three students, Sol would be sleeping just in front of the teacher. And he would come and shake me up.

 

Sometimes it would happen that I would be the only person, the other two had not come. And just looking at me he would say, "Finished! You go home. And I will go home, I can sleep myself. What is the point?"

 

Deep sleep is the threshold. That's why this incident was possible. Somebody died; Ramana was only seventeen and he thought, "What is death? Let me experience it." He threw his clothes, simulated death, fell on the floor. He had seen the relative lying on the floor; so just the same way he fell on the floor, closed his eyes, and started thinking, "I am dying, I am dying, I am dying."

 

And he died! The ego disappeared. And here the ego disappeared and there God appeared -- the primal awareness. And when he opened his eyes he was no more the same person. He left the home, immediately, without saying anything to anybody. It was not a renunciation. He simply left the home because there was no point. It was not that he was against the world or anything. There was no point any more. He went out and NEVER came back. The mother searched for him for years; finally, after ten years, she found him in Arunachal in a mountain cave. But he was a totally different man. And the mother asked him, "Why didn't you inform me?"

 

And he said, "But the thought never came to me. In fact, thoughts have stopped coming to me. I sit and sit and days pass, and there are no thoughts coming. Good that you have come! Live with me.... "

 

This primal awareness is God, thoughtless awareness is God. This is the wine Sufis talk about, and once you have drunk of this wine, nothing else is needed for you to forget yourself -- because you are no more, there is no need to forget.

 

-Osho, "The Perfect Master Vol 1, #3"