If you dont want frustrations, drop dreaming. Life is not frustrating, dreaming is frustrating. I have heard Mulla Nasrudin say to his son, It is none of your business to know or enquire how I first met your mother, but I can tell you one thing: it sure cured me of whistling. If your life can cure you of whistling and dreaming, it will be enough, more than enough, more than life can give to you. It will be a great realization. But what happens? The moment one dream is frustrated, we immediately replace it, substitute it with another dream, maybe an even bigger dream. We never look into the reality. We go on saying that man proposes and God disposes. God has never disposed anything. It is you, in your very dream, who both proposes and disposes. It is your own proposal that carries the seeds of disposal, because it is not in tune with reality. It is your expectation that carries the seeds of frustration. God, or call it reality, has never frustrated anybody. It is always showering on you; it is always ready to fulfill you to the deepest core of your being. But you wont listen to reality. You are too much with dreams. This is what I call religious conversion: listening to reality and dropping the dreams is religious conversion. It will be difficult, hard, arduous in the beginning, because the dreams persuade you so easily, and they show you such wonderful visions, fantasies. Dreams are great poets: they paint, they poetize, they fantasize; they create such beautiful hopes in you, paradises, heavens. They are all dreams. But you can live hoping, and todays misery can be tolerated because of tomorrows dream. It is very difficult to drop tomorrows dream because then suddenly you become aware of the misery that is here today. But remember, that misery is created by yesterdays dream. It has nothing to do with today. Yesterdays dream has created misery today; tomorrows dream will create misery again. So when you drop tomorrows dream, you will not suddenly become happy, because yesterdays dream will still linger on. You have sown the seeds -- who is going to reap the crop? But half is done when you drop tomorrows dream. Yesterdays dream, its frustration, has to be passed through. Thats what in India we call TAPAS, austerity. Yesterdays dream was my dream. I have sown it, so I have to go through the suffering. I have to pass through the frustration. I accept it; it is my own doing. Nobody else is responsible, but now I am not going to sow any more seeds. First, drop tomorrows dream, then by and by yesterdays dream and its hang-ups and hangovers disappear. Then a man becomes aware. When your eyes are not full of dreams, your eyes are full of awareness. It happened: MacGonigal was staggering up the street from telephone pole to lamp-post and back again. Father Daly stopped him and said, Drunk again? Are you? said MacGonigal. So am I, Father. This is no time for levity, admonished the priest. After taking the pledge and promising me two weeks ago that you would never drink again! It is a sin against God and the church, and I am sorry to be saying so. You are sorry to see me so? Indeed I am! Are you sure you are sorry? Yes, very, very sorry. Then if you are so sorry, said the drunkard, I will forgive you Father. Drunk, in our dreams, we go on interpreting in our own ways. We go on seeing things which are not. We go on listening to things which have not been said. We go on pretending what we are not, and we go on holding a dream-world around ourselves. The befuddled group was hanging around a bar, when the door opened and a voice shouted, McGuire, your house is on fire! One fellow rushed out, and after running a block at breakneck speed, suddenly skidded to a halt. Hell, he said to nobody in particular, my name isnt McGuire. This is what is happening to everybody: you dont know your name, you dont know your essence, you dont know who you are, you dont know why you are here, you dont know why you are running so fast. Where are you going? Why are you in such a hurry? Reality is here. Where are you going? But some conditioning -- what Hindus call SAMSKAR, from many lives of dreaming, desiring: that has become your only reality. You go on after it, not knowing why. It has become a habit. You cannot resist it; you are always on the move. The reality is here and you are always on the move, hence there happens no meeting. Unless that meeting happens, you will never be happy. Happiness is when you are in tune with reality. Happiness is a harmony between you and the real. So if you are unhappy, remember, you must be going away from reality. Be aware that you must be somehow not falling in line with reality. There must be a conflict between you and the real, and of course you cannot win against the real; there is no way. You have tried all the ways. The whole humanity has tried all the ways possible, but there is no way to win over reality and against reality. You have to follow reality, you have to come into a deep accordance with reality, in tune with it. You have to become a note in the great orchestra that reality is -- not fighting but surrendering, submitting to it, ready to dissolve into it. That is what Bauls call love: the readiness to dissolve into reality, the readiness to merge, melt, the readiness to be one with reality. You will be losing something -- your dreams, your individuality, your ego; you will be losing that separation. You will disappear as a drop of water, but it is nothing to be worried about, because you will become the ocean. You will not be what you have been up to now: your ego, confined in a form, in a name. Your fences will disappear. You will not be an island, you will become part of the continent but you will become the continent. Nothing is lost by losing yourself; everything is lost by resisting. But we go on misunderstanding reality. If reality tries to absorb us, it looks like death. OSHO, The Beloved, Vol 1 Chapter #4 Chapter title: The only criterion is your thirst 24 June 1976 am in Buddha Hall
Posted on: Wed, 13 Aug 2014 07:06:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015