Mind can create the illusion that even reality, itself pales down

Once a Sufi stayed with me. He had many disciples, thousands of disciples, and his disciples used to come to me and say their Master is great, he sees God everywhere – in the trees, in the rocks, in the birds, animals, even in the dog – everywhere he sees God. When he came to stay with me, the first night we sat together, I looked at him. He was a very beautiful man – but I could see that his God is a projection; he is living in his imagination, in a reverie, in a dream. The dream is beautiful, because when you dream about God everywhere, even the dream changes your life – even the idea that God is everywhere brings tremendous changes – but it is not radical. It is mental; it is a mind game. It is a sort of auto-hypnosis.

I asked him, ”Please, tell me how you started to see God everywhere.” And he was very reverent – to everything. He would go and bow down before a rock, any rock, and he would go down and touch the tree; and he was really very reverent and he had a very peaceful quality all around him. He was a poet, but not a mystic. I asked him, ”Tell me how you started to see God.”

He said, ”How I started? I started to think, continuously, ’God is everywhere,’ and whatsoever I would touch, I would think, ’Here is God.’ I would look into the eyes of a man, and I would say, ’Here is God.’ And I would repeat it and repeat it, and by repeating it continuously for three years, one day it suddenly dawned over me. he was everywhere.”

I told him, ”You do one thing. It took three years? You do one thing. You will be here with me for seven days; for three days you stop thinking about God.” He said, ”What do you mean? I cannot do it. For thirty years I have been continuously thinking about God, and it has given me tremendous peace and I have been very, very blissful – and why should I stop for three days?”

I said, ”Just to see whether, if you stop for three days, you can still see God or not. If you cannot see, then these thirty years you have lived in a beautiful dream – sweet, but a dream all the same.”

He became intrigued. He was afraid to try it, but then he became more and more interested too. Whenever you become afraid of something, you become infatuated too. First he denied, but I could see that he would not be able to resist the temptation. Next morning he said, ”Okay, I will try. I trust God, and I know he is everywhere. Just by not thinking do you think I will not be able to see him?”

I said, ”I don’t say anything. There is no need to conclude right now. Let the experiment be done. For  three days you stop thinking, you stop imagining – you stop altogether. You just move backwards,  thirty years back. Become that man who has never thought about God and who has not projected  God everywhere.”

By the third day, the man became ordinary. The aura disappeared, his eyes became empty. That peace was no longer there. He started crying, and he said, ”You have disturbed me very much. My  whole experience is lost.”

I said, ”I have not disturbed you. You can start imagining again. I have simply showed you one truth, that even if you go on imagining for thirty lives, it will remain your imagination. You have started wrongly – and it is time you should change, because this is of no use. Thirty years of constant auto-hypnotizing, and gone within three days? It is of no worth.”

Start from the within. First, rather than projecting God.... It is going to be a projection – you don’t know whether God is or is not. You know only the word, you know the tradition, you know the priest, you know the image that has been put into your mind.

Mind can create the illusion so beautifully and so realistically that even reality, itself pales down before it, becomes faint, looks unreal. And you have been doing it every night in your dreams. You know, your mind has a faculty – a faculty to create images. Not only to create images but to make  them appear so real that again and again you forget.,very night you dream, every morning you come to know that it was a dream and not a reality; and again when you dream the next night, again you become a victim, again you forget that it is a dream, again it looks real, absolutely real.

[Osho - 'Ecstasy - The Forgotten Language, Talks on Kabir']