Osho,
I have known frustration attempting to describe my mystical experiences to people. It is like trying to explain what an orgasm is to someone that has never known one. One can say it is like a wave of pleasure or like a sneeze, but the reality of the experience is much more satisfying than the words convey.
Verbalizing something seen or felt can leave one exhausted. Even if one can lead another up to the experience, it is the prerogative of the other person to be receptive. You can’t really give another person an orgasm; they have to permit themselves to experience it. Dearest Osho, I am so grateful for the immense bliss I have known through meditation. One problem: how does one talk about it?

There is no problem at all. One simply does not talk about it. It is almost an impossibility. You can talk around and around, but you cannot talk directly about it. There is every possibility that you will be misunderstood.

You can say what is happening to you; you can express in your actions, in your behavior, in your postures, in your gestures, what is happening to you. Because a man or a woman of meditation has a grace which does not come in any other way, has a beauty which is not physical, has a spontaneity which people have almost forgotten. They only go on repeating their past experiences, rarely are they spontaneous – just right in the moment, like a mirror reflecting the situation and allowing the response to arise in oneself on its own.

You can live meditation – that is the only way to convey some fragrance of it and some fragmentary indications about it. But talking about it…the words are too small.

And words are meant for the marketplace, not for the temple. The temple knows only the language of silence, and when you try to convert silence into sound, everything that was living in it disappears and what is left in your hands is a dead word. And the difficulty is multiple. First, you cannot bring your experience into words; secondly, the person who hears them hears according to his own conditioning.

A Japanese scholar had come to see me a few years ago, and I told him that all his problems needed only one solution, and that is meditation. If you try to solve each single problem separately it will be like pruning the leaves of a tree – you go on pruning, and new leaves will go on coming up. Meditation is like uprooting a tree; the very foundation is demolished. This much he understood, but the word meditation created a problem. Immediately he asked, “I am ready to meditate, but tell me, on what?”

That is our whole mind’s approach – objective. Even meditation has to be on something – a name, a form, a god, a chanting, a mantra, but something has to be there. Otherwise how are you going to meditate? On what?

The reality is, English has no word to translate exactly the Sanskrit word dhyan. English has three words: concentration, contemplation, meditation. But they are all objective. In concentration you put your whole mind energy on one subject. It is a useful technique for all scientific research. No science can grow without concentration.