What unusual experiences can occur during deep meditation?

[An Indian sannyasin had come before darshan to talk to Osho about a frightening experience he had had recently while meditating. As people arrived for the darshan Osho was saying:] ... one gets really scared. Really, it came too early and you weren't yet ready. It can happen that suddenly a key fits, and then the experience of deep meditation is exactly like death. The problem is created because one gets scared. Meditation leads you deep into yourself. Beyond a certain point it is felt like drowning, sinking, suffocating. If you accept it and cooperate with it and simply say that you are ready to die, then you don't create the opposite process of trying to come out of it. Then there comes a peak where all disturbance disappears. Something has happened -- but you are still there.

Osho, for the past month something strange has been happening. When I begin meditation in the meditation hall—after bowing to you and remembering you beneath your picture—within moments my skin seems to vanish into emptiness, the circulation stops, the breath almost ceases. After an hour to an hour and a half, it takes another half hour to return to the previous state. Yet throughout, I experience an incomparable bliss and freshness. Kindly guide me.

When a flower laughs, remember: who knows how many drops of dew have become tombs in its laughter. Behind its smile the deaths of countless dewdrops are hidden. When someone attains the bliss of samadhi, many pains lie concealed behind it. To endure those pains with a feeling of grace is what is called austerity. Austerity does not mean to inflict suffering upon yourself—there is no need to. When you go on the inner journey, many sufferings come by themselves. The one who bears those sufferings as good fortune, as God’s grace, as blessing—he is the true ascetic. So, Anand Gautam, the auspicious hour has come—do not let it slip away. Continue exactly as you are doing. Proceed in the same direction in which the journey has begun. More will happen—deeper and for longer. Even if you are lost for hours, inform your friends and loved ones not to be…

[A sannyasin, who is leaving, says: Would you say something about dying? I'm very much engaged with that. I awoke last night and suddenly I saw how absolute it was. I've never seen it before like that -- I could hardly get any air. In response to Osho's query she says she likes Kundalini meditation best.] So continue Kundalini in the morning, and in the night before going to sleep, start a death meditation. Just lie down, put the light off, and start feeling that you are dying. Relax the body and feel that you are dying, so you cannot even move the body -- even if you want to move the hand, you cannot. Just go on feeling that you are dying -- a four or five-minute feeling that you are dying, dying, and that the body is dead.

Osho, in the last two verses there remains a small yet special point. It says that for the meditator there should be a specific seat, a pure place, an upright body, the gaze fixed on the tip of the nose, and the vow of brahmacharya. Then it says: fearless, and with an inner being properly quieted. What does fearless mean for a seeker? Please clarify.

Fearless, and with a properly quiet mind! This is important—very important. Because the one who carries fear will not be able to enter into the Divine. Why? Then we must understand fear a little. What is fear? What is its fundamental basis? Why are we afraid? What is the root cause from which all fear arises? There is fear of illness. Fear of going bankrupt. Fear of losing reputation. There are a thousand fears. But deeply there is only one fear—the fear of death. Illness frightens, because in illness a partial glimpse of death begins. Poverty frightens, because in poverty too a partial glimpse of death appears. Disrepute frightens, because in losing status a partial taste of death begins to show. Wherever there is fear, look closely and you will see some trace of death. Even if not immediately obvious, scratch the surface a little and it will be revealed:…

Osho, you have said that if a seeker undertakes the experiment with intense resolve—“I want to die, I want to return to my center”—then within a few days his life-energy (prana) begins to contract inward, and the seeker may first, from within, and later from without, see his own body lying there as if dead; then his fear of death is erased forever. So the question is: in such a state, is any special preparation or precaution necessary to be able to return safely to the body again? Or does the return happen all by itself? Please shed light on this.

Human life, in many senses, is the life of the mind. What we take to be a physical event is, in its depths, a mental event as well. Whatever appears upon the body has its birth in the mind. If we understand a couple of points in this regard, then the question that has been asked will be easier to understand. Until about fifty years ago all illnesses were thought to be physical. In these past fifty years, as our understanding of disease has grown, the proportion considered purely physical has gone down and the mental proportion has gone up. Today even the most diehard materialist is ready to accept that more than fifty percent of illnesses are mental. And even those that are physical are influenced more than half by the mind. The mind is the fulcrum of our personality. From there we live, from there we fall ill,…