Osho – How you look at things depends on you, not on things. Unless you come to a point where you drop the interpreting mind and look direct, look immediate, mind is your mediator. It brings you things distorted, it brings you things mixed with interpretations. They are not pure.
So the only way to reach to truth is: how to learn to be immediate in your vision, how to drop the help of the mind… This agency of the mind is the problem, because mind can create only dreams. But beautiful dreams mind can create, and you can get so excited. Through your excitement the dream starts looking like reality.
If you are too excited then you are intoxicated, then you are not in your senses. Then whatsoever you see is just your projection. And there are as many worlds as there are minds, because every mind lives in his own world. You can laugh at others’ foolishnesses, but unless you start laughing at your own you will not be able to become a man of Tao, the man of nature, the man of truth. So what to do?
Try in small things not to bring the mind in. You look at a flower – you simply look. You don’t say, ”Beautiful! Ugly!” You don’t say anything! Don’t bring words, don’t verbalize. Simply look. The mind will feel uncomfortable, uneasy. The mind would like to say something. You simply say to the mind, ”Be silent! Let me see. I will just look.”
In the beginning it will be difficult, but start with things in which you are not too much involved. It will be difficult to look at your wife without bringing words in. You are too much involved, too much emotionally attached. Angry or in love, but too much involved.
Look at things which are neutral – a rock, a flower, a tree, the sun rising, a bird in flight, a cloud moving in the sky. Just look at things with which you are not much involved, with which you can remain detached, with which you can remain indifferent. Start from neutral things and only then move towards emotionally loaded situations.
People start from the loaded situations; they fail, because it is almost impossible. Either you love your wife or you hate, there is no in between. If you love you are mad, if you hate you are mad – and both ways the words will come. It is almost impossible not to allow the words, difficult, because of so much practice in saying something continuously.
One day I was at Mulla Nasruddin’s house in the morning. They were taking tea when I arrived. The wife said, ”Darling, in the night while you were asleep, you were saying many nasty things about me.”
Nasruddin looked at me and said, ”Who says I was asleep? I cannot say things while awake, that’s why I was pretending sleep.”
Even in sleep, or awake, when you are emotionally too much involved, it is difficult to put the mind aside. It will come in. So look at unloaded situations first. When you HAVE the feeling that, yes, you can look at certain things without the mind coming in, then try with loaded relationships.
By and by one becomes efficient. It is just like swimming: in the beginning you feel afraid and in the beginning you cannot believe how you will survive. And you have been working with the mind so long you cannot think that without the mind you can exist for a single moment. But try!
And the more you put the mind aside, the more light will happen to you, because when there are no dreams, doors are open, windows are open, and the sky reaches to you, and the sun rises and it comes to the very heart, the light reaches you. You become more and more filled with truth as you are less and less filled with dreaming.
And if while you are awake dreaming stops, by and by when you are asleep dreaming will stop there also, because it can exist only as a continuous circle. If it is broken anywhere, by and by the whole house disappears. You take out one brick and the whole house is already on the way towards being a ruin.
If during the day you can look at things without dreaming, then in the night less and less dreams will be there, because your night is nothing but a reflection of the day, a continuity of the same. When the day is different the night is different. When you are awake – and by ’awake’ is meant when you are not dreaming, not that you are sitting with open eyes…
Jesus goes on saying to his disciples, ”Be awake!” Were they sleeping before him always, continuously? Because he is every day saying, ”Be awake!” Buddha teaching his disciples every day, ”Be awake!”
Why? They were with open eyes, as alert as you are, but Buddha and Jesus go on saying, ”Be awake!” They mean, ”Don’t dream, just be here! Don’t go anywhere else!” In the memories, in the past, and you dream; in the future, in imagination, and you dream. Be herenow – only then is there no dream.
In the present there is no dream. In the present there is no mind. In the present YOU are there and the truth is there. And then there is no gap between you and truth – -because both are true and there is no boundary. You melt into truth and truth melts into you. You become BRAHMA, BRAHMA becomes you. Dreaming is creating a fence around you, very invisible but subtle, powerful.
Source – Osho Book “Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing”