Don’t be afraid. This existence is yours. This existence is very friendly and there are immense mysteries waiting for you – to be known, to be experienced.

This was a beautiful moment for you. Now that it has happened, you can make it happen again and again – and there is no necessity to go into the samadhi tank. It can happen in your room in the night when you are alone. It can happen anywhere if you allow it to happen.

One of the greatest calamities that has befallen the modern man is that he has become very very mundane. He takes only that which is explainable, he accepts only that which is definable, he accepts and recognizes only that which can be scientifically and objectively proved. But then you remain on the lowest rung of existence, because the higher the rung is, the more indefinable it becomes, the more unexplainable, the more and more elusive. You cannot catch hold of it, you cannot have it in your fist, and you cannot show it to somebody else. It becomes more and more intimate, less and less public, more and more private.

Many people experience such things but they don’t tell others, because others will think they are crazy. That’s my own observation: many people have told me their experiences and they have said that they have never told anybody else before, because they have always been afraid that they may be thought crazy, or people will think that they hallucinated, or people will think that something is wrong – their nuts and bolts are a little loose. And not only will others think this – they themselves think, “Something is wrong with me, because this is not ordinarily experienced by others, then why me? Something is wrong with me – deny this experience, forget about it!”

If you ask people sympathetically, lovingly, many people will reveal mysteries to you. The mystic experience is not as rare as people think, and the mystic experience has nothing to do with religion as such. It happens in many spaces which are not thought to be religious at all.

It happens to mountaineers, many times, because climbing in the mountains, alone, in a dangerous situation, suddenly the mountaineer becomes aware of a presence by his side – not only that but mountaineers have talked and the presence has helped and the presence has said, “I am a friend, don’t be worried. I am protecting you. There is no danger – go on climbing.”

Sometimes a man is lost in the jungle and after one or two days, or three days – no food, no possibility seems to be available to get out of the jungle, tired, exhausted – suddenly he becomes aware of a presence, a very protective presence, which says, “Don’t be afraid! You are on the right track, you will get out. Don’t be worried.”