Are authentic experiences always the same?

Osho, is the experience of the Divine different for each person?

Think of it like this: you go home from this garden, and your children say, “Tell us—what was the garden like?” A painter might tell you by making a painting: “It was like this.” A poet will write a poem—of the trees, of the winds passing through them, of the sun filtering between their leaves. Now a poem and a painting differ greatly. Or perhaps someone is a musician; he will not even write a poem—he will lift his vina. Why write? The winds passed through the trees and there was sound and resonance—he will reproduce that resonance on the vina. The colors in the trees he will translate into tones. The sun and shade he will pour into music. He will play the garden on his vina. Another will write a poem; another will render it on paper. The three expressions will differ. And if you look only at…

Osho, but in that knowing, Maharaj-ji, can there not be sameness—that as another has known, I may know the same? And may that sameness become available to me.

If you look very closely, such sameness is possible only if I am exactly as the other was. Otherwise it can never be. See the full implications: when I am knowing, my whole personality, my total being, is knowing. Only if your whole personality is exactly as mine, could the event of our knowing be one and the same. And no two persons are ever the same. In fact, forget persons—that is a far-off matter. Pick up a stone from a Delhi street; search the whole earth and you will not find another exactly like it. Pluck a flower from a garden; comb all the forests and you will not find another just like it. Here, each and every thing has its own uniqueness. And that very uniqueness is its soul. In my view, this uniqueness is its soul. A machine has no soul, because a machine is not unique.…

Osho, the samadhi that Vivekananda experienced through contact with Ramakrishna—was that an authentic experience of samadhi?

Call it preliminary. The question is not so much authenticity—rather, it was primary, extremely primary, where a glimpse becomes available. And that glimpse, certainly, cannot be very deep, nor truly of the Self; it cannot be very deep. It happens right on the boundary where our mind ends and the soul begins. At depth it remains merely psychic, and therefore it was lost. And it was not allowed to go deeper. Ramakrishna was afraid that if it went deeper, this man might cease to be useful for the work. He was so concerned with the work that he did not consider that it is not necessary that the man become useless! Buddha spoke for forty years, Jesus spoke, Mahavira spoke—no difficulty comes from that. But Ramakrishna’s fear was natural; he had his difficulty. So whatever difficulty one has, that is what fills one’s mind. Therefore he received only a very…

What is a mystical experience?

And God laughed and said, "Because you all are together here. Touching each other, you have become total. And I can only be available to you when you are total. Now, you are not fragments. Up to now you have been fragments: one was working through the heart, another was working through the head, and the third was working through the body. You were fragmentary. And I am not available to the fragments: I,am available only when somebody becomes total. In this moment, your energies met and mingled with each other. "I have always followed you, but have remained invisible because the I can only see me when it is total. Now you can touch me! Now you can have me! You have been missing me for only one reason: you were adamant, stubborn; you were clinging to one fragment -- and God is a totality." This is my message…

How can one know that the spiritual search in which one is involved is not an ego-trip, but is an authentic religious search?

If you don't know, if you are confused, then know well that this is an ego-trip. If you are not confused, if you know well that this is authentic, if there is no confusion at all, then it is authentic. And it is not a question of deceiving someone else. It is a question of deceiving or not deceiving oneself. If you are confused, in doubt, it is an ego-trip, because the moment the authentic search is there, there is no doubt. Faith happens. Let me put it in some other way. Whenever you phrase such problems, the very confusion exactly shows that you are on the wrong path. Someone comes to me and he says, `Tell me. I don't know whether my meditation is going deep or not.' So I say, `If it is going deep, there is no need to come and ask me. The depth is such…