Question – Dear Osho, are you really just a man who got enlightened?
Osho – Just the other way round: a god who got lost and has found himself again; a god who rested and slept deeply and dreamt of being a man and is now awake. And the same is true about you. You are not just men. You are gods — dreaming that you are men. It is not that men have to become God. It is only that gods have to become a little awake; then the dream of “man” disappears.
This is the difference between the Eastern attitude and the Western. The West tries to explain the highest by the lowest. If you attain to samadhi — for example, Ramkrishna attains to samadhi, is lost in the infinite — ask Freud. He will say this is a sort of repressed sex. Samadhi is to be explained by sex. Ask me about sex, and I will say this is a first glimpse of samadhi.
The highest is not to be reduced to the lowest. The lowest has to be raised to the highest. Ask Marx and he will say consciousness is nothing but a by-product of matter. Ask me; I will say matter is nothing but an illusion of consciousness.
In the East we have tried to explain the mud, the dirty mud, by the lotus. In the West you have tried to explain the lotus by the dirty mud it comes out of. And it makes a great difference. When you try to explain the lotus by the dirty mud it comes out of, the lotus disappears; only dirty mud in your hands. All beauty, all greatness, all truth disappears; only dirtiness in your hands. Everything can be reduced to the lowest because the highest and the lowest are joined together. The highest rung of the ladder is joined to the lowest rung of the ladder, so nothing seems to be wrong in it, but there is much which is important to be understood.
If you explain the dirty mud by the lotus and you say, “When the lotus has arisen out of this dirty mud, even this dirty mud is not really dirty; otherwise how can the lotus arise out of it ? The lotus is hiding in it. We may not have been able to see the lotus in it — that is our limitation” — if you explain the dirty mud by the lotus, the dirty mud disappears: your hands are full of lotuses.
Now it is for you to choose. The East makes you suddenly rich, superb, divine. The West makes you suddenly very ordinary, material, it reduces you to things, and all that is grand in human beings becomes suspicious, suspected.
Remember, you are an evolution from God to God. In between is the world; that’s why we call it a dream. Maya, a dream: a god dreaming he is lost. Enjoy it, nothing wrong in it. Sooner or later you will awake and you will laugh; it was a dream.
If you ask psychoanalysts about God, they say it is something in your imagination. You ask Shankara, you ask Eastern sages, and they say you are something in God’s imagination. Tremendously beautiful. You are something in God’s imagination, God imagining you, dreaming you. Ask Freud; he says, “God ? You are dreaming; you are imagining something.”
Both are true! And it is for you to choose. If you want to be in despair, anguish, agony, for ever and ever, choose the Western attitude. If you want to Flower and be happy — unconditionally — choose the Eastern attitude.
Source – Osho Book “The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 9”