Reality

 

 

You are in reality only when you are real. When your awareness is real you live in reality; when your awareness is faulty you live in the unreal. And you create it every day, but you don’t seem to be aware.

 

What happens when you fall asleep? Why do dreams come when you are asleep? – your consciousness is lower, very much lower; it almost disappears. Then dreams bubble up. Are you drunk? You take alcohol, and again you are in a dreamworld. Or you take acid, you take LSD or something like that; your consciousness is lowered, you are again in a dreamworld.

 

That’s why it happens that LSD may not give you the same experience as it gave to your friend. Somebody may move into heaven, and somebody may move into hell – because it depends on your mind what type of dream you can create. LSD or any drug can only lower down your consciousness. It simply removes all barriers, it simply helps you to move in a private world – the world of the dream. And of course when you are on a drug trip things are tremendously beautiful, very psychedelic, very colorful…

 

But it depends. If you are a poet and you have lived with trees and flowers and birds, you will have a very beautiful world opening up. But if you are a butcher, then beware; then you will have the world of the butcher – a nightmare.

 

That’s why different people going into drug trips come back with different experiences. Some say it was paradise, and some say it was hell. It depends on you.

 

You create the dream. The drug is not a dream-creating thing, the drug simply lowers your consciousness which does not allow dreaming. Sleep is needed for dreams. The more aware you are, the less possibility there is of dreaming. When you are perfectly aware dreams disappear. Then you don’t create a dream; then you are simply face to face with that which is.

 

When you are real you live in a real world. And what do I mean when I say ‘when you are real’? – I mean when you are aware. That’s what Buddha’s message is.

 

-Osho, “The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4, #6, Q2”

 

 

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Accept Your Reality

 

 

Man is unawareness, and man need not be. Man can become a light of awareness. And only when you are a light of awareness is your life worth living, is your life LIFE; otherwise you are simply dragging, somehow managing, pulling. It is ugly, it is desert-like. It has not known anything worth knowing. It has not seen beauty, it has not experienced good, it has not been able to touch anything that is sacred. It has not come across truth; it cannot -- if you remain unaware.

 

The only thing needed is to wake up.

 

And remember, you can even dream that you are awake, and many are doing that too. Have you not dreamed sometimes that in the dream you think you are awake and that you are going to the office? And then your wife comes and pulls you out of your bed and says, "What are you doing? And you are getting late, you have to go to the office, and it is not Sunday. " Then you jump out of the bed, then you become aware that you were dreaming. That dream was a trick of the mind.

 

Have you not dreamed sometimes, when your bladder is full in the night and you start dreaming, that you are going to the bathroom and you are in the bathroom? That is just a trick so that the sleep remains undisturbed.

 

Dream is a support to your sleep. Ordinarily people think that dream is a disturbance in sleep; that is not right. All the psychological investigation that has gone into dreaming has proved something just the opposite. Now the psychologists who have been working on dreaming and sleep say that dreaming is a friend of sleep, not a disturbance. It keeps you asleep; otherwise there are a thousand and one chances of your waking up in the night.

 

But the dream gives you an explanation, a beautiful explanation.

 

You can always find an explanation. Explanations help you to remain the way you are.

 

If you really want to move in a new world, in a new consciousness, stop making explanations for your dreams. And even if the fact hurts, let it hurt, but don't hide it behind a fiction.

 

You go on doing things that you don't want to do. You go on not doing things that you always wanted to do. You live in a very divided way. See to it that this division disappears. This division is the cause of all your misery and hell. A divided person is a miserable person, and a divided person is in constant turmoil; he is in a civil war, fighting with himself. And all your politicians and priests want you to continue fighting with yourself so that they can go on exploiting you, so you don't have enough energy to fight with them.

 

If you are fighting with yourself you can't have energy enough to be rebellious. This is the basic strategy which has been perpetuated down the ages by all kinds of exploiters: divide the man and rule. And they have divided you in two: the outer and the inner, the lower and the higher, the good and the bad, the actual and the ideal, the earthly and the heavenly, the worldly and the other-worldly. They have divided everything. You are living in thousands of fragments.

 

Drop all these divisions. See it: that these divisions are your enemies. Renounce these divisions, become utterly one.

 

And what is the way to become one? Just accept your actuality. There is no other reality. You are the reality. Accept your reality, and in that very acceptance, grace descends. In that very acceptance, intelligence arises, because you accumulate so much energy. Not fighting, energy goes on and on; you become a reservoir of energy. And energy is delight. And great energy is great delight.

 

You can become infinite energy. You are, but you are caught in traps. Those traps have beautiful names, names of religion, morality, ethics, virtue; beautiful names.

 

Your prison is called the temple, the mosque, the gurudwara, the church. Your jailers have become your priests. Your scriptures have become your knowledge and are preventing your wisdom from arising. And all that you have been doing has not helped you to become aware, so now do something that can make you aware.

 

What can make you aware? Seeing the point that the society is not interested in your blissfulness or in your awareness, one drops out of this society. And by dropping out I don't mean that you escape to the Himalayas. You remain in it, but deep down you are no more in it. That is sannyas. That's what it means to become a Sufi. [....]

 

Beware. Watch what you are doing. Watch each act. De-automatize each act. Remain constantly alert. Walking, watch each step. Eating, watch. Even while going to sleep, go watchfully into it, into what is happening: slowly, slowly the body relaxes, the limbs relax. Watch, feel... the coolness of the bedsheet, the softness of the pillow. Be sensitive, be watchful: then slowly, slowly the mind is moving into an her dimension, the dimension of sleep; you are just in between -- a little awake, a little asleep. Watch. Go on watching, go on watching as long as you can, and one day it happens: you fall asleep, and yet watching continues. Then one learns how to watch the dreams. Then on another level, one day you can even watch your deep sleep, dreamless sleep. And then finally, when you have been able to watch your waking life, your dream life, your sleep life, you have arrived to the fourth state. Just the other day I was talking about turiya, the fourth state. You have come home, you are alert. [....]

 

That's why people killed Jesus; he was a mirror, and showed you in your total ugliness and nakedness. And they poisoned Socrates; he was a mirror, one of the best mirrors ever.

 

Why do people become so angry with these people? Why are they so angry with me? Their anger is that what they are doing unconsciously is being done consciously here, deliberately. They can't understand it. They can't see the point. They become angry against the mirror.

 

This place is a mirror: it will show you in all your dirt, it will show you in all your perversions. It will need courage to be here. And if you are really courageous, then yours is going to be a great blessing. You can go beyond those perversions, because the only way to go beyond is by becoming aware, alert, watchful, a witness. [....]

 

It is very difficult to understand somebody who belongs to a different gestalt of thinking, a different style of life. Only a man who has arrived can see that Jesus, Mahavira, Krishna, Buddha, and many others, are all the same. Only one reality has expressed through them — in different languages, of course, in different styles of course. They have all painted the same reality; their paintings are different. For example, if you bring ten painters and the sun is setting and you tell them to paint, do you think their paintings will all be the same? Although they are painting the same reality, they are going to be different. And the greater the painters, the greater will be the difference. If they are just photographers, not real painters, then maybe the paintings will look alike. If they are real painters, geniuses — if Van Gogh is painting, and Picasso and Goya and Gauguin — then those paintings will be utterly different. You will not be able to figure out that it is the same sunset. Their individuality, their signature, will be there.

 

-Osho, “The Secret, #5”