Team L&M
In his book, The Perfect Way, Osho answers fundamental questions about what meditation is and how we can begin and sustain it in our lives. He does this with precision, thoroughness, humour and compassion. Here is someone who knows, but who also knows how to convey what he knows. His genius in full flight, he points us as far as one can with words towards the inner world of the self, towards the zone of silence. We share a few excerpts from Chapter 8 Self-observation is this mirror from the book. Read on:
I’m a Dream-Breaker
What I am in others’ views is not significant. What is significant is what I am in my own view. But we are in the habit of seeing ourselves through other people’s eyes and we forget that there is a direct and immediate way to see ourselves. And this alone is the real way to see because it is not indirect. So firstly, we create false images of ourselves and wear masks to deceive others, and then we base our opinion of ourselves on how others see us!
This self-deception goes on throughout our lives. To begin a life of religiousness, the very first thing that needs to be shattered is this self-deception. It is necessary to break through all self-deceptions; it is necessary to know yourself in your total nakedness—as you are, what you are—because only after this has been done can any steps be taken in some authentic direction of self-realisation.
Man cannot enter the realm of truth as long as he has false conceptions about himself and as long as the delusion persists that the role-playing personality is his real self. Before we can know
The Perfect Way
God, or the truth or our real beings, we must reduce to ashes the imaginary personality with which we have covered ourselves. This mask of deception does not allow us to rise above the artificial lives we are acting out and live real lives. Those who wish to walk the path of truth, of reality, must awaken from the false drama they are living.
Don’t you ever feel you are acting, performing in a drama? Don’t you ever feel you are one thing on the inside and quite another on the outside? In some conscious moment, when you are yourself, doesn’t the awareness of this deception ever trouble you? If questions about it do occur to you and do trouble you, that alone is the possibility that can take you out of the drama, can take you from the stage to the background, where you are not acting a role but are your own self.
One must ask oneself this question: ‘Am I really what I have been thinking I am?’ This question must echo in the very depths of your being. It must arise in your depths with such intensity and such awareness that there remains no room left for the possibility of any illusion.
As a result of this question, this inquiry, this introspection, such a unique awakening and consciousness comes that you feel you have been shaken out of a sleep. Then you begin to see that the castles you built have been built in a dream, that the boats in which you have been sailing were made of paper. Your whole life begins to seem unreal, as if it were not yours but someone else’s. It actually is not yours, it is part of some drama you have been acting out—a drama which education, training, culture, tradition and society have taught you, but the roots of which are not in you. If the flowers arranged in a vase were to become conscious in some way, they will know that they have no roots; the same is bound to happen to you if you become conscious. We are not really men. We are mere deceptions, without any roots, without any ground. We are like characters in a fairy tale, in a dream, with no existence in reality. I see you lost and moving in this dream. All your actions are done in sleep. All your activities take place in sleep. But you can awaken from this sleep. This is the difference between sleep and death. You can awaken from the former but not from the latter. No matter how deep your sleep, awakening is its intrinsic possibility. Sleep has this dormant seed, this potentiality hidden within it.
If you come face-to-face with yourself, many illusions will be shattered, as if somebody falsely considering himself very beautiful finds himself before a mirror for the very first time. Just as there is a mirror for looking at the body, there is a mirror for looking at the self. I am talking about this very mirror. Self-observation is this mirror.
Do you really want to see the truth of yourself? Do you want to meet the person that is really you? And knowing there is the possibility of seeing yourself in all your nakedness, don’t you feel afraid? Such fear is quite natural. It is because of this fear that we go on creating new dreams about ourselves and keeping our true reality forgotten. But these dreams cannot be your companions; you cannot get anywhere with their help. They only waste the time and the priceless opportunity that could have led you home.
You must wonder why I insist so much on your seeing the nakedness, the ugliness and the emptiness of yourselves. Wouldn’t it be better to leave what is unfit to be seen, unseen? And isn’t it nice, isn’t it good to decorate what is ugly with jewellery and to cover what isn’t worth seeing with curtains?
