Osho – If the mind is filled with dreams you cannot see rightly. If the heart is filled with desires you cannot feel rightly. Desires, dreams and hopes – the future disturbs you and divides you. But whatsoever is, is in the present. Desire leads you into the future, and life is here and now. Reality is here and now, and desire leads you into the future. Then you are not here. You see, but still you don’t see; you hear, but still you miss; you feel, but the feeling is dim, it cannot go deep, it cannot be penetrating. That is how truth is missed.
People keep on asking: Where is the divine, where is the truth? It is not a question of finding the divine or the truth. It is always here, it has never been anywhere else, it cannot be. It is there where you are, but you are not there, your mind is somewhere else. Your eyes are filled with dreams, your heart is filled with desires. You move into the future, and what is the future but illusion? Or, you move into the past, and the past is already dead. The past is no more and the future has yet to be. Between these two is the present moment. That moment is very short, it is atomic, you cannot divide it, it is indivisible. That moment passes in the flicker of an eye. If a desire enters, you have missed it; if a dream is there, you are missing it.
The whole of religion consists of not leading you somewhere, but bringing you to the here and now, bringing you back to the whole, back where you have always been. But the head has gone away, very far away. This head has to be brought back. So God is not to be sought somewhere – because you are searching somewhere, that is why you are missing him. He has been here all the time waiting for you.
Once it happened that Mulla Nasruddin came staggering home totally drunk, and knocked many times at his own door. It was already half past midnight. The wife answered and he asked her, ”Can you tell me, madam, where Mulla Nasruddin lives?”
The wife said, ”This is too much. You are Mulla Nasruddin.”
He said, ”That’s right, that I know, but it doesn’t answer my question. Where does he live?”
This is the situation. Drunk with desires, staggering along, you knock at your own door and ask where your home is. Really, you ask who you are. This is home, and you have never left it, it is impossible to leave it. It is not something outside you which you can go away and leave; it is your within, it is your very being.
Asking where God is, is foolish, because you cannot lose God. It is your within, your innermost being, your very core. It is your existence: you breathe in him, you live in him, and it cannot be otherwise. What has happened is that you have become so drunk that you cannot recognize your own face. And unless you come back and get sober you will go on searching and seeking and you will go on missing.
Tao, Zen, Yoga, Sufism, Hassidism, these are all methods for bringing you back, to make you sober again, to destroy your drunkenness. Why are you so drunk? What makes you so drunk? Why are your eyes so sleepy? Why aren’t you alert? What is the root cause of it all? The root cause is that you desire.
Try to understand the nature of desire. Desire is alcoholic, desire is the greatest drug possible. Marijuana is nothing, lsd is nothing. Desire is the greatest lsd possible – the ultimate in drugs. What is the nature of desire? When you desire, what happens? When you desire, you are creating an illusion in the mind; when you desire, you have already moved from here. Now you are not here, you are absent from here, because the mind is creating a dream. This absentness is your drunkenness. Be present!
This very moment the doors of heaven are open. There is no need even to knock because you are not outside heaven, you are already inside. Just be alert and look around without eyes filled with desire, and you will have a belly laugh. You will laugh at the whole joke, at what has been happening. It is just like a man dreaming at night.
Source – Osho Book “The Empty Boat”