Question
What proportion of the people who achieve satori, achieve samadhi? (?)
Satori becomes possible for a great number of people because sometimes it needs no preparation. Sometimes it happens by the way. The situation is created but unknowingly. There are so many people, a great number of them, who have known it. They may have not known it as satori, may not have interpreted as satori, but they have known it. A great search in love can create it. Even through chemical drugs satori is possible. Through mescaline, LSD and marijuana it is possible. Because even through chemical change mind can expand into a glimpse. It is nothing irreligious, because after all we are chemical bodies -- our body, our mind is a chemical unit. So through chemistry too the glimpse can become possible.
Sometimes a sudden danger can penetrate you so much that the glimpse becomes possible. Sometimes a great shock can make you so still in the moment that the glimpse becomes possible. And for those who have some aesthetic sensibility, who have some poetic heart, who have some feeling attitude towards the reality -- not of the intellectual but the feeling attitude towards reality. For a rational logical intellectual personality the glimpse is impossible.
Sometimes it can happen for an intellectual person only in some intense intellectual tension when suddenly the tension is relaxed. As for Archimedes -- he was in satori when he came out of his bath tub naked in the streets and began to cry: Eureka! -- I have found! It was a sudden release of a constant tension, constantly concentrated with a problem. The problem was solved so the tension that was a standing tension against the problem was released completely and suddenly. So he came out naked in the streets and began to cry Eureka! -- I have found it!
So for an intellectual person, a great puzzle which demands his total mind and touches to the peaks of his intellectual tension, if it is solved then even a rational mind can feel the moment of satori. But for aesthetic minds it is more easier.
- Osho, "Early Talks, #5"