Sadhguru on sitting for meditation for long hours

#‎Questioner‬: Dear Sadhguru, is it possible to go into meditation for long durations? How does it help our spiritual growth?

‪#‎Sadhguru‬: A lot of people meditate for years. This is possible because people go off into different kinds of samadhis. These samadhis, by themselves have no great significance in terms of Realization. Experiencing a certain type of samadhi, doesn’t mean you are released from Existence. It is just a new level of experience.

It is like when you were a child, you had one level of experience, once you moved into your adulthood, you have another level of experience. The same things that you have experienced at a particular point in your life, after a few years, you experience them in a totally different way. So, you have moved from one level of experience to another level of experience.

Samadhis are just like this. You are moving from one level of experience to another level of experience in a much more significant and deeper sense. Still, it is just another level of experience.

Somebody may go into a certain level of samadhi and stay there for years because it is enjoyable. There is no space or time. There are no bodily problems. He has broken the physical and psychological barriers to some extent. But this is only temporary. The moment he comes out, again he gets hungry, he has to sleep, and again everything comes back.

Samadhi definitely has its benefits. There are many things it has to offer for an individual, but this doesn’t really take you any closer to Realization, as such. Compared to a man who is sober, a man who is slightly drunk, has a different level of experience, but he has to come down at some point. All samadhis, I would say, are a way of getting high without any external chemicals. Now, by going into these states, it opens up a new dimension for you, but it doesn’t leave any great transformation behind. It doesn’t leave you permanently transformed.

You have not moved into another reality. In the same reality, your level of experiences has deepened. You have experienced the same things in a little deeper sense. You have not become free from the mind.

Now, somebody meditates for 12 years and comes out. Even after 12 years, he may not be a realized being, but, maybe he is a little closer. When you go into another reality and stay there for long hours or long years, the grip of this reality is broken on you. Now, you have come to a experiential understanding that, this is not it. Not just an intellectual understanding, you have seen experientially that this is not it. That is the whole purpose of long meditations, staying there for very long. But most realized beings never went into samadhi states.

Gautama never sat for 12 years in one place, you know. Many of his disciples, many Buddhist monks went off into very long meditations. They never came out for years together, but Gautama himself never went, because he saw it is not necessary.
He practiced and experienced all the eight kinds of samadhis before his enlightenment and he discarded them. He said, “This is not it”. This is not going to take you any closer to realization. It is just moving into a higher level of experience and probably you will get more caught up, because it is more beautiful than the current reality.

If the goal is set, if you’ve made realization the top priority in your life, then every thing else which doesn’t take you one step closer is meaningless. Isn’t it? Let’s say you are climbing the Mount Everest, you will not take one step sideways, because every ounce of energy is needed. Now, if you have to transcend your own consciousness, you need every ounce of what you have and it’s not enough. So, any action that we perform, we don’t want it to be a sidewinder.