Osho on Spaces experienced during meditation or through LSD Drugs

Question – Beloved Master, When i meditate i am sometimes aware of a desire to faint or pass out. This desire used to be behind drinking alcohol or taking drugs, although they always failed. Am i a seeker simply out of a desire for oblivion?

Osho – Shunyo, in meditation you pass through spaces which are very like the spaces that you experienced with alcohol or under the influence of drugs. And they are so alike that to discriminate between them is almost impossible. Even a genius like Aldous Huxley understood that the space he reached through LSD is the same as what Patanjali, in his yoga sutras, calls samadhi; what Gautam Buddha calls nirvana; what is known in Japan as satori. And he wrote a very significant book, HEAVEN AND HELL, in which he described his experiences of taking LSD. He tried to prove that through LSD one can reach, scientifically, to the same great experience of samadhi which yoga tries to reach by old primitive methods – which take years to practice.

What was really happening? Those states have some similarity, but the experiences of alcohol, LSD, marijuana or hashish stop at a point where you become unconscious – a kind of oblivion – while meditation goes on beyond that oblivion. For a moment you feel lost and then suddenly a fresh awakening, a fresh awareness becomes available. And this will happen at every interval; each time you move to a deeper state of awareness, there will be an interim period which will look like
fainting, oblivion, unconsciousness. But if you go on you will pass through it, and suddenly a more conscious, more alert, more joyful state will become available to you.

So Shunyo, it is not that you are a seeker simply out of a desire for oblivion. You have to go beyond the state where you start feeling faint or passing out. Don’t be afraid – pass out, faint, go into it, let it overwhelm you. For a moment all will be lost, but only for a moment. And then suddenly – the dawn; the night is over.

This will happen many times at each turning point in awareness, but that does not prove that you are a seeker simply out of a desire for oblivion. It simply shows that you don’t yet have a clear-cut understanding of the differences. The whole of humanity has lived in the past with this misunderstanding.

After he had finished his sermon, the rabbi remonstrated with the member of his congregation who had walked out in the middle of it. ”Please, rabbi, forgive me,” said the man, ”but I have a problem.”
”Ah,” said the rabbi, ”what is it?”
”I walk in my sleep.”

In churches, in synagogues, people enjoy a beautiful morning’s sleep, and because he has the habit of walking in his sleep he does that in synagogues too.

Shunyo must have been taking all those drugs. The whole new generation, particularly in the West, has gone through that phase. Now the situation has worsened; even school-age boys and girls are taking drugs; six-year-old, eight-year-old boys and girls, in the millions, are taking drugs. No government can prevent it – all the governments are trying; no politicians can succeed in preventing it because they themselves are all drinking alcohol, which is a far worse drug than marijuana. Marijuana is innocent: it does not have all those bad after-effects that alcohol has. But it is a strange world – alcohol is available and marijuana is prohibited.

And if we really want people not to be destroyed by drugs and alcohol, we are absolutely capable of making synthetic drugs like LSD and taking all the bad effects out of them. There is no need for any prohibition. They can even become supportive to health, to better sleep, to better appetite. Everything can be done, but because of our old mind we go on trying to enforce old, stupid prohibitions. Now thousands of young people are suffering in jails for no crime at all, just because they had been taking marijuana.

My feeling is that this widespread influence of drugs all over the world in the new generation is very significant. It shows that man is not satisfied with his ordinary consciousness, that he is fed up with it, he is bored with it, he wants new spaces, new experiences, new consciousnesses.

Drugs can give you a slight glimpse, but soon you are back to your old consciousness. The younger people will graduate from drugs to samadhi automatically because the drug, on the one hand, is very superficial – it gives only a few hours. Secondly it has some bad effects: you become addicted to it, the governments are against it and if you are caught you have to suffer in jail unnecessarily.

Samadhi costs nothing. You just have to learn the art of meditation and it can become a permanent state of cheerfulness, of joy, of blissfulness. My feeling is that the great revolution that is going on through drugs in the new generation is going to introduce that generation to meditation. There is no other way, because no drug can fulfill, in depth, the desire of the drug takers. Only meditation has that capacity.

An ancient story… God visited the earth and approached the Babylonians. ”I have a commandment for you,” he said. ”What is it?” asked the Babylonians. ”Thou shalt not steal,” said God. ”We don’t want it,” the Babylonians replied.
So God approached the Egyptians, and offered them the same deal. But the Egyptians said, ”No, thanks.”
And then God saw Moses wandering in the desert. ”I have a commandment,” he said.
”How much does it cost?” asked Moses.
”Nothing,” answered God. ”It is free.”
”Okay,” said Moses, ”in that case I’ll take ten.”

The East knows only one commandment – and that is samadhi. Its beginning is meditation, its ultimate flowering is enlightenment.
Okay, Maneesha?
Yes, Beloved Master.

Source – Osho Book “The Rebel”