Ed, I'm surprised by your words... I'm surprised someone would know this very intimate feeling that I've rarely shared with someone... and you put it so beautifully in "others become obsessed to feel the embrace of the a cosmic ocean permanently and even drown themselves in the Ganges". This was indeed the feeling I lived with until the 2003 November NirviKalpa. The first Samadhi spontaneous Samadhi occured to me in the summer of 2001 where I woke up and saw the blue faced goddess looking at me directly, and from that experience majority of my emotional and depressive patterns were just immediately healed. It was within that week that I met my Yogi Guru at the time who trained me in Kundalini, Raja Yoga, Tantra, and mix of practices and knowledge he had gained while traveling and practicing in the south indian jungles and the himalayas himself.

That immense desire to jump into the river has lost it's pull; the pull before was such that I would do practices that I knew not if I would return alive from, and still without regard I would move forward as I saw nothing of any significance in my life to return to. It was perhaps this type of mental affirmation for the path I had that allowed me to so easily say good by to the old illusion of self.

I am still experience such deep states of Samadhi, often 3 to 4 days of each week, and I sit in such states generally in the evenings from 11PM onwards to 3, sometimes 4AM before I go to sleep and wake up to go to work. Lately I've also started entering Samadhi in the mornings and learning how to stay in the state as I drive to work and maintain some of it. Gradually I come out of it before I return in the evening.

Each time I go into Samadhi through meditation, asana, pranayama, prathyahara, dhyana, leading to samadhi I gain much insight and discover new things. Sometimes about how the world is created, others about how our physical body and energetic body exactly relate, or of witnessing myself in samadhi as the ever-wakeful-consciousness vividly and fully awake regardless whether I am conscious or unconscious.

I've found it very easy to recognize when I am in the presence of someone who is in Samadhi, and the stages they have gone through can also be seen through the way they express and carry themselves in certain situations.

Samadhi has been the fountain of knowledge, the ocean of my immortal bliss, it is where my individual-consciousness enter the unmanifest universal self, and as I switch back and forth... that bridge is being built.

I've also ensured that as I develop the inner practices, I also work as strongly in the outer life with family, running a business, building the social skills, and enjoying the physical body experiences fully... in turn creating a more balanced development.

There is one very strange aspect of realization... at least strange from the mind's perspective...
Samadhi is a practice of total surrender with the capacity to totally bare everything
It's like you are at a point in your life where you just give up... you put up your hands above your head in surrender,
you allow your innocence and honesty to express itself for you have nothing else left to hide
you have fully rid of the 6 bad qualities of the mind, and now you are in the this transition place of feeling powerless
you raise your arms in surrender, and slowly you notice a great will and power building within your body as you surrender
a power voice of authority begins to develop within you that you dare not express for the world may misunderstand your frailty and innocence.
the knowledge that you are that, that I AM THAT I AM rises like the road of all oceans within you, and your entire being screams, sings, dances, and helplessly demands that you acknowledge this Self-Truth.

and life returns back to its simplicity, because you know that the divine lives in you, is you, and there is also your individuality within all of this.

I guess my life is in a transition again... I've learned a transition doesn't always means things on the outside will change, often they just look even more mundane than they before. It's the inner transitions.

Spirituality, is it getting old? Has everyone already heard and read all of this? I realize I've probably said nothing new... what I sought to share is my personal individual and sincere experience of it... the commonality of it... that this is all not some out there thing only for the select few.... well it probably is for a select few, since few really go after it.... though it's not limited to those sitting in ashrams or caves.