THE THINKER IS CREATIVE WITH HIS THOUGHTS. This is one of the most fundamental truths to be understood. All that you experience is your creation. First you create it, then you experience it, and then you are caught in the experience – because you don’t know that the source of all exists in you.

 

There is a famous parable: Once a man was travelling, accidentally he entered paradise. In the Indian concept of paradise there are wish-fulfilling trees there, KALPATARUS. You just sit underneath them, desire anything, and immediately it is fulfilled – there is no gap between the desire and its fulfillment. There is no gap between a thought and a thing. You think, and immediately it becomes a thing; the thought realizes automatically. These KALPATARUS are nothing but symbolic for the mind. Mind is creative, creative with its thoughts.

 

The man was tired, so he fell asleep under a KALPATARU, a wish-fulfilling tree. When he woke up he was feeling very hungry, so he simply said, ”I am feeling so hungry, I wish I could get some food from somewhere.” And immediately food appeared out of nowhere – just floating in the air, delicious food.

 

He was so hungry that he didn’t pay much attention to where it had come from – when you are hungry you are not philosophic. He immediately started eating, and the food was so delicious that he was caught up in the food. Once his hunger was gone he looked around. Now that he was feeling very satisfied, another thought arose in him: ”If only I could get something to drink…” – And there is still no prohibition in paradise; immediately, precious wine appeared.

 

Drinking the wine relaxedly in the cool breeze of paradise under the shade of the tree, he started wondering, ”What is the matter? What is happening? Have I fallen into a dream, or are some ghosts around and playing tricks with me?”

 

And ghosts appeared. And they were ferocious, horrible, nauseating. And he started trembling, and a thought arose in him: ”Now I am sure to be killed. These people are going to kill me.” And he was killed.

 

This parable is an ancient parable, of immense significance. It portrays your whole life. Your mind is the wish-fulfilling tree, KALPATARU – whatsoever you think, sooner or later it is fulfilled. Sometimes the gap is such that you have completely forgotten that you had desired it in the first place; sometimes the gap is of years, or sometimes of lives. So you can’t connect the source. But if you watch deeply you will find all your thoughts are creating you and your life. They create your hell, they create your heaven. They create your misery, they create your joy. They create the negative, they create the positive. Both are illusory – the pain and pleasure, the sweet dream and the nightmare, both are illusory.

 

What is meant by calling these things illusory? The only meaning is that they are your creation. You are creating a magic world around yourself – that’s what is meant by the word maya. Everybody here is a magician. And everybody is spinning and weaving a magic world around himself, and then is caught – the spider itself is caught in its own web. There is nobody torturing you except yourself. There is nobody except yourself; your whole life is your work, your creation.

 

Buddhism insists on this fact very emphatically. Once this is understood, things start changing. Then you can play around; then you can change your hell into heaven – it is just a question of painting it from a different vision. Or if you are too much in love with misery you can create as much as you want, to your heart’s content. But then you are never complaining, because you know that it is your creation, it is your painting, you cannot make anybody feel responsible for it. Then the whole responsibility is yours.

 

Then a new possibility arises: you can drop creating the world, you can stop creating it. There is no need to create heaven and hell, there is no need to create at all. The creator can relax, retire. That retirement of the mind is meditation. You have seen all, this way and that. You have enjoyed and you have suffered, and you have seen the agonies and the ecstasies: love and hate, anger and compassion, failure and success, you have seen all. Ups and highs, lows and downs, you have lived all. Slowly slowly, this experience makes you alert that you are the creator.

 

If you have been on any drug trip, you know it. The drug simply releases your mind energy and things start happening. You are transported into other worlds. If a person suffers from paranoia and he goes on an LSD trip, the trip is going to be very very horrible. He will be persecuted, he will be surrounded by enemies, he will suffer much. If the person is not living out of fear but living out of love and joy, he will have beautiful experiences.

 

Aldous Huxley says that he lived great heavenly experiences through LSD. But Karl Reiner says that he went through hell. And both are right. They think they are against each other, criticizing each other. Reiner thinks drugs create hell. Drugs create nothing. All that is created is by your mind; drugs can only magnify it. They can exaggerate, they can allow things to appear in a very magnified form, a thousandfold bigger than they are. Molehills are turned into mountains, that’s all. The drug can only exaggerate, but the seed is supplied by your mind.

 

Your whole life is a kind of drug trip. When you are under the impact of a drug, things happen fast; immediately; they start happening. When you are living the usual ordinary life, things take a little longer time, conventional time. But it is the same trip. Your life and your drug experiences are not separate, because both are out of the mind – how can they be separate?

 

Buddhism says: To see this point is to allow an awakening in yourself. Then both can disappear. You can simply let things disappear by not cooperating, by withdrawing yourself, by becoming a simple witness, watching. Scientists say that every day in twenty-four hours, fifty thousand thoughts pass through the average man. Fifty thousand thoughts are continuously passing. You don’t allow all the thoughts to be realized; you choose. There are good thoughts, there are bad thoughts, there are beautiful thoughts and there are ugly thoughts – you choose.

 

It is almost as if you have a radio and all stations are available on the radio. The whole noise of the world and the politicians is available on the radio. But you choose the station – that choice is yours. Or you can choose not to put the radio on; you can choose to put it off. Then all that noise disappears.

 

Exactly this is the situation. A meditator chooses not to choose any station; he simply puts the radio off or disconnects it. And all the noise and all the politicians and all that nonsense disappears. But if you want to choose, you can choose; you can choose any station. People become addicted to stations. When you enter into somebody’s room you can see his radio. You will see the needle on the station to which he is addicted, whether the radio is on or not. Slowly slowly, the radio remains always fixed on that station which he likes.

 

That is the situation of your mind. When I look into you I see your needles fixed. Somebody has decided to live in hell; his needle is fixed. And it has remained fixed for so long that now even to change to another station is going to be difficult. It has gathered rust; maybe it has lost the capacity to be moved from here to there, it may have become fixed. You may have left it there for many many lives; you have forgotten that other stations are available. And you think you are suffering, you have to listen to this noise. You don’t like it at all, but what can you do? – you have to listen to it. People become addicted to their thoughts. Then that thought comes more often, is repeated more, creates a groove in the head, in the brain cells, and becomes your reality. Naturally, you think what can you do? – you are a helpless victim.

 

Buddhism says: You are not a victim at all – not a victim of fate, not a victim of God, not a victim of the so-called theory of karma. These are just tricks, strategies, to avoid seeing the fundamental law of life. When you are suffering you try to find some explanations. There are beautiful explanations available. Somebody says, ”This is how God wants it to be, so what can you do? You have to live it. It is not in your hands. Man is impotent and God is omnipotent. What can you do? All that is possible for you is either to suffer happily or to suffer unhappily. Suffering is going to be there, so just suffer – as happily as possible, as ungrudgingly as possible, without complaint. Suffer with acceptance – that’s all that you can do. Or you can go on crying and weeping, but nothing can change it. It is beyond you.”

 

This explanation helps people. Then they remain fixed in their groove. They forget that they can change anything. Buddhism declares that man is free. That is Buddhism’s greatest contribution to human consciousness and the history of human consciousness, that man is utterly free, that man is freedom. There is no God who is programming you, there is no programming at all. You are programming yourself; you are a self-programmer.

 

There are other explanations: those who don’t believe in God, they believe in karma. You are suffering, you are in anguish, and you say, ”What can I do? It is my past life’s karma, I have to go through it.” This helps acceptance; it is a consolation. It gives you a certain kind of rest, it makes life a little easier – otherwise it will be too difficult, it will be impossible, it will be unbearable.

 

Once you see the point that it is predetermined in some way or other – whether by God or karma, it is the same strategy, with no difference; karma is another God, only words are different – now nothing can be done. You have done something wrong in the past life, there is no way to undo it now; the only way is to go through it. Go through the worst, and hope for the best. Remain in a kind of consolation that something good will come out sooner or later. This is why people are in so much misery – because of their explanations! If you have explained your misery, how are you going to transform it? If you have a certain explanation that helps you to accept it as it is, then there is no possibility of transformation.

 

Buddhism wants to take away all theories and consolations. Those are all tranquillizers, deadly poisonous. And the insight that Buddhism wants to share with you is that you are the sole agent, the sole creator of your life; nothing else determines it. Each moment you are in control. You just have to see it and you have to try a few changes – those changes will help you to become more aware.

 

One day you are feeling very miserable: just sit silently in the chair, relax, and start enjoying. Just do the opposite – don’t get into the trap of the misery: start smiling. In the beginning it will look false. Just get euphoric, blissed out. Start swaying, as if there is a great dancing energy in you. And you will be surprised that, slowly slowly, that which had started almost like a pretension is becoming real. The misery is disappearing; it no more has its hold on you, something has changed. A laughter is arising in you.

 

Your old habit will say, ”What are you doing? What about karma? This is not supposed to be; you should not do such things. This is against all philosophy and metaphysics. Go back into the old groove! This is not right, you are cheating – you have to be miserable when there is misery. This is inauthentic, this is pseudo.”

 

The mind will bring in all kinds of things to create the disturbance again. But insist: ”This time I am going to drop out of the theory of karma. I am going to jump out of the wheel! This time I am going to choose the polar opposite.” Start dancing, singing, and see, and you will be surprised. But you will have experienced a great truth, that it changes; that the climate changes, that the clouds disappear, that it becomes sunny, that you are different.

 

Sometimes you are feeling very happy: do the opposite, become miserable – for no reason at all, just become miserable. In the beginning it will again be just acting. But soon you will get into the act – because all that you are doing is nothing but an act, so it can be changed. What you call your authentic life is also just an ACT. Maybe you have practised it long, that’s all, but it is an act. So it can be changed for another act. And once you have learnt the trick of changing your acts from one to another, you will be able to see your freedom. You are something beyond the acts.

 

The function of a master is to destroy all your acts and to make you capable of being free. Buddhism says you are free, utterly free. Experience your freedom, and slowly slowly get out of the old ruts. It happened, a professor of English language was invited to speak on the philosophy of life. He was a retired professor, well-known, but he wanted to make a little change in the title of the lecture. He said, ”Let it be called ’The grammar of life’.” A professor of English language: the people who had invited him thought, ”It is right, it is the same – the philosophy of life or the grammar of life.”

 

And do you know what the professor said when he spoke? He said: ”Live in the active voice, not the passive. Think more about what you make happen than what happens to you. Live in the indicative mood, rather than the subjunctive. Be concerned with things as they are, rather than as they might be. Live in the present tense, facing the duty at hand without regret for the past or worry for the future. Live in the first person, criticizing yourself rather than finding fault with others. Live in the singular number, caring more for the approval of your own conscience than for the applause of the crowd. And if you want a verb to conjugate, you cannot do better than to take the verb ’to love’.”

 

This is his grammar of life. His whole life he must have been teaching grammar, grammar and grammar. Now it has become almost an unconscious habit; he cannot think in any other terms. This is how you are caught, you are caught by habits. There is no karma that is holding you – or if there is any karma it is nothing but your habits. The thing that you have been doing again and again, becomes almost a determining factor in your life, becomes decisive.

 

But one can drop any habit. You may have been smoking for thirty years – but you can drop THIS cigarette, half-smoked, on the floor and never take another cigarette in your hand. You are free. If you cannot drop it, that simply means you are choosing not to drop it. If people say, ”How can we get out of misery?” they are simply saying, ”We don’t want to get out of misery.” They are deceiving themselves.

 

People come to me and they go on asking, ”How to get out of this?” And I am simply puzzled, because only they are holding themselves in it; nobody else is there. They can come out of it just as easily. The energy that they are putting into being in it is more; less energy is needed to come out of it. But they have forgotten one thing – they have forgotten their freedom.

 

The message of Buddhism is freedom. Freedom from God, freedom from heaven and hell, freedom from fear, freedom from the future – freedom from all these explanations that man has created down the ages and is burdened with and crushed by.

 

I have heard: An efficiency expert died and was being carried to his grave by six pall-bearers. As they approached their destination the lid of the coffin popped open and the efficiency expert sat up and shouted, ”If you’d put this thing on wheels you could lay off four men!”

 

Just the whole life’s habit – an efficiency expert is an efficiency expert. And don’t laugh at it, this is what you are doing. You are living in habits, you will die in habits. And because of these habits you will miss real life. Real life consists of freedom. And once you know that you are free then there is no obsession to choose this or that. You can choose NOT to choose.

 

That state is called Buddhahood.

 

- Osho, “Take It Easy, Vol 2, #5”