Osho – The brain carries a memory just matter-of-factly, like a mechanism, like this tape recorder will carry what I am saying to you. But the tape recorder is not involved in it. If you efface it, it will not cling to it. If you want to record something else, if you want to replace it, if you want to change it, it has no personal involvement in it; it is just a mechanical thing. The brain goes on recording things mechanically.
The real problem is with the psychological memory – that you get involved in it. Then things go on and on hanging around you, and the load becomes heavier and heavier every day, because each day many more memories are happening. A child comes into the world weightless, and an old man dies carrying a mountain on his heart. There is no need. One should learn to die like a child; one should go as one comes. One should go absolutely light, weightless. If that is possible – and that is possible – then life has been meaningful. Then you were not destroyed by your experiences: you remain transcendental to them. This is the beginning of sannyas: go on unburdening every day. Never get psychologically involved in the past.
A man who lives in the past, lives not, because how can you live in the past? It is gone and gone forever, and there is no way of bringing it back. Nothing can be done about it: you cannot add anything to it, you cannot take anything out of it. You cannot undo, you cannot redo. Nothing can be done so it is utterly futile to put any energy into it… and much energy is involved there. As I observe people, nearly ninety per cent of their energy is involved with the past. Release that energy from the past; get out of it.
That is the symbolic meaning of sannyas. It will help you. The change of the name, the change of the dress will simply help you to look into the mirror again and ask: ’Who is this man standing here?’ You will have to start learning again. and this time of course you can learn far better than you did the first time. Now you will be more conscious. You will not commit the same mistakes again, you will not repeat. So when I say to drop the past, I mean that from now onwards. that is going to be an everyday thing. Every night before you go to sleep, finish that day. It is finished in existence; now it is futile to carry it in the mind. Just be finished with it. Say goodbye to it.
If something has remained incomplete in the day it is difficult to finish it. Complete it, complete it in the mind. You were passing on the road and you saw a beautiful woman and you wanted to hug her. Now that cannot be done; something hangs incomplete. Before you go to sleep just look at the whole day and see what is incomplete. Complete it psychologically: hug her. Relive that moment, hug her in the mind, thank her and be finished with it! Don’t carry it incomplete. Only incomplete moments are carried. They hang, because each experience wants to be complete.
There is an intrinsic mechanism in each and everything that compels it to become complete. A seed wants to become the tree, a child wants to become a young man, the unripe fruit wants to become ripe, and so on and so forth. Everything wants to complete itself; it has a built-in urge to complete. And that is so about every experience.
You wanted to hit somebody and it was not feasible, not practical. It would have cost too much and you were not ready to lose that much. Do it before you go to sleep. Let there be half an hour every night, and that will be your meditation: go on finishing. Start from the morning and finish everything that has remained incomplete. You will be surprised that it can be completed. And once it has been completed you will tall into sleep. By and by you will see that dreams are disappearing, because dreams are a mechanism, a natural mechanism to complete things… but then things are completed very unconsciously.
In a very very primitive way the dreams try to complete what you are not doing. Dreams are great helpers; they complement your existence in many ways. You wanted to hug the woman: you will hug the woman in the dream but it will be an unconscious thing. Maybe in the morning you will forget about it, you may not remember it. The mind that wanted to hug is the conscious mind and the mind that hugged is the unconscious. They may never meet; the message may never be delivered. There are a thousand and one barriers for the message to reach.
So in the unconscious it has been completed but in the conscious it remains incomplete. A hankering and a longing goes on and on. There are many things clamouring for your attention and this load becomes bigger and bigger every day and then it is almost impossible to finish it. From tonight start finishing things every day. And within two, three months your dreams will start completely disappearing. When dreams start disappearing that is an indication that meditation is working.
I am not interested in analysing dreams; I am interested in helping them to disappear. That’s the difference between psychoanalysis and meditation, between the western psychology and the eastern psychology. For nearly three thousand years we have been working on how to help dreams to disappear. Once dreams are gone completely you have a clarity, your mind is unclouded, but the way to help the dreams go is to complete things consciously, otherwise they will be there.
If you have completed things there is no need for them to be there. Then the sleep becomes deep sleep – what in yoga is called ’sushupti’ – a dreamless sleep. Patanjali says sushupti can become samadhi. It is just on the verge of it. Yoga divides human consciousness into four states: the waking, the dream, the sleeping, and the fourth… and the fourth is below the third. When dreams have disappeared and you are perfectly asleep, everything is silent, utterly silent, then there is a possibility of slipping into the last substratum of your being. So this is your special meditation that you have to continue….
Source – Osho Book “Only Losers Can Win in This Game”