Osho Quotes on Samadhi

 

 

Sanskrit has two words VYADI and SAMADHI. VYADI means "sickness of the soul" and SAMADHI means "health and wholeness of the soul." But these are existential meanings. A man who has not experienced samadhi is spiritually sick. He may be bodily fit, but he is not spiritually fit. It is possible a man may be bodily sick, but he can attain to samadhi. Even at the last moment of your life, you can attain to samadhi. Your spiritual being comes in all its health, wholesomeness. Even if for a single moment you have known samadhi, you have known the greatest secret in existence.

 

-Osho, "Bodhidharma The Greatest Zen Master"

 

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There is no self nature which makes people different. The moment you are in samadhi, you will see trees are also in samadhi. The mountains are in samadhi. The stars are in samadhi. The whole existence is in samadhi. Only you had gone astray. You have come back, merged and melted into the wholeness of the universe.

 

-Osho, "Bodhidharma The Greatest Zen Master"

 

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Right samadhi means you have to be without mind, fully awake; in wakefulness, thoughts have to disappear. It is easy to fall asleep, to fall into a deep coma, in a kind of hysterical fit and be without mind; but that is falling below mind not transcending mind. Right samadhi is a transcendence: you go beyond mind, but you are fully alert, aware. Only then is samadhi right -- when it grows in awareness and when awareness grows through it. When you become enlightened you have to be absolutely awakened; otherwise you missed at the last step.

 

-Osho, "The Dhammapada - The Way of the Buddha, Vol 7"

 

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Satori is half awake, half asleep. Samadhi is full awareness. But if you are half awake, it won’t take long for you to be fully awake. Just a little hit of the master’s staff on your head, and you will jump out of the bed.

 

-Osho, "The Messiah, Vol 2"

 

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Samadhi means death with consciousness, dying fully alert. You have died many times but it was not samadhi, it was simple death, because whenever you died you were unconscious. Before death happens you are unconscious, it is just a surgical procedure.

 

-Osho, "Vedanta - Seven Steps to Samadhi"

 

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Samadhi is your very nature in its absolute clarity, in its absolute purity, in its absolute awareness. Samadhi is your real home. And the people who don't know samadhi are wandering without a home. They are homeless people, rootless people and their whole life is nothing but a tragedy. Samadhi gives you roots in existence, and it opens the doors of your home. Samadhi is the ultimate actualization of your potential. And the way to samadhi is simple. Drop the mind -- go beyond the mind and you will enter into samadhi. Mind is the only barrier and strangely we are continuously educating the mind to become more and more powerful. Our whole educational systems around the world, are nursing the mind -- your enemy, making it stronger, more informative, more knowledgeable.

 

-Osho, "Bodhidharma The Greatest Zen Master"

 

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Patanjali says there is not much difference between sushupti, dreamless sleep, and samadhi, the ultimate state of buddhahood -- not much difference, although there is a difference. The difference is that of consciousness. In dreamless sleep you are unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious, but the state is the same. You move into God, you move into the universal center. You disappear from the circumference and you go to the center. And just that contact with the center so rejuvenates you.

 

-Osho, "The Book of Wisdom"

 

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when the mind dies totally, what is left is samadhi. So I cannot say that the mind dies totally only in samadhi; that will be putting things upside down. The mind dies first, and then what is left is called samadhi. That state of no-mind is called samadhi.

 

-Osho, "Come, Come, Yet Again Come"

 

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Awareness is something beyond the mind. You have to watch the mind, you have to watch the presence of mind as much as absence of mind. You have to watch both, you have to go beyond both. It comes, it certainly comes, and when it comes it takes all that is your misery, your ego, your insensitivity, your cruelty. It takes all mud from you... and out of that mud arises the lotus, the one-thousand-petaled lotus of samadhi in you.

 

-Osho, "The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 9"

 

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God is total relaxation. Hence Patanjali says that perfect SAMADHI is like sleep, with only one difference — otherwise the quality is the same, the same flavor, the same taste — with just one difference: in sleep you are unconscious, in samadhi you are conscious. But the relaxation, the letgo, is the same. Everything untense, not going anywhere, not even a thought of going anywhere, just being here and now — suddenly everything starts happening.

 

-Osho, "Just Like That"

 

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Samadhi, the ultimate goal of all yoga and Tantra, is a deep orgasm with the universe itself, with the existence itself. The guru is just trying to help you, to bring you to a point where you can at least surrender the ego. Then a deep ecstasy will happen between you and your master. Wherever there is a `let-go’, ecstasy happens — that is the law.

 

-Osho, "Vigyan Bhairav Tantra, Vol 2"

 

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In India we make a difference. When an ordinary man dies, it is death. When someone who has attained enlightenment dies, it is samadhi, it is not death. And the word “samadhi” is immensely significant. Samadhi means: one who has attained the ultimate harmony with existence.

 

-Osho, "From the False to the Truth"

 

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Samadhi is just like the total opening of the lotus, and satori is the beginning of the opening of the petals. Satori is the beginning, samadhi is the climax.

 

-Osho, "The Great Pilgrimage - From Here to Here"

 

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Don't give energy to your thoughts. Become a witness -- indifferent, aloof, distant. Just see the thoughts, and don't be in any way involved in them. Note the fact: the thoughts are there; but don't choose this way or that, don't be for or against, don't be pro or con. Just be a watcher. Let the mind-traffic move, just stand by the side and look at it, unaffected by it, as if it has nothing to do with you.

 

Sometimes try it: go on the busiest street where the traffic rush is too much. Stand by the side of the road and see the traffic -- so many people going hither and thither, and cars and bicycles and trucks and buses. You just stand by the side and look, and do the same inside: close your eyes and see -- the mind is a traffic of thoughts, thoughts rushing here and there. You watch, you just be a watcher. By and by, you will see that the traffic is becoming less and less. By and by, you will see that the road is empty, nobody is passing. In those rare moments, first glimpses of SAMADHI will enter in you.

 

There are three stages of SAMADHI. First, when you achieve glimpses through gaps -- one thought comes, then it has gone and another has not come for the time being. There may even be a gap for a few seconds; in that interval reality penetrates you -- the moon becomes one. The reflection is there only for a single moment, but you will see the first glimpse.

 

This is what in Zen they call SATORI. By and by, the gaps will become bigger, and when the gaps become bigger and you can see reality more clearly, that vision of reality changes you. Then you cannot be the same because your vision becomes your reality also. Whatsoever you are seeing affects your being. Your vision, by and by, is absorbed, digested. That is the second stage of samadhi.

 

And then comes the last stage: when suddenly the whole traffic disappears, as if you were fast asleep and dreaming and somebody has shaken you and awakened you, and the whole traffic of dreaming has stopped. In that third stage you become one with reality, because there is nothing to divide. The fence that was dividing you has disappeared. The wall is no more there. The wall is made of the bricks of thoughts, desires, feelings, emotions; once it disappears -- it is a China wall, very ancient, and every strong -- but once it disappears, there is no fence between you and God. When for the first time the third stage happens, that is where the Upanishads announced, "AHAM BRAHAMASMI" -- I am God, I am the Brahma. It is where the Sufi mystic, Mansur, declares, "ANA'L HAQ" -- I am the truth. It is there when Jesus declares, "I and my God are one, I and my Father are one."

 

-Osho, "The Beloved, Vol 2"

 

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Patanjali says sleep is just next to samadhi. A good sleep, a deep sleep, and samadhi, are different only in one sense: samadhi has awareness, sleep has no awareness. But awareness can happen in sleep. Don't make trouble for yourself, don't divide yourself.

 

-Osho, "The Diamond Sutra"