Clean your mirror!
Beloved Osho,
How to see what is?
There is no how to see what is, because if you are carrying a how you will distort it. That which is needs no method, technique, to see it – just silence, a transparent stillness, no thought in the mind, not even the thought of a certain method. No strategy, because all strategies are bound to distort.
In fact, no mind is needed to see that which is. Mind means thoughts. And if there is a traffic of thoughts, you will never be able to see what is, you will see something else. You will see what your thoughts allow you to see. Your thoughts prevent much reaching you.
You will be surprised to know what modern psychological researchers have come to know: ninety-eight percent of the reality is not allowed to enter in your being; the mind only allows two percent. So whatsoever you see is only two percent of the reality. And because the mind allows only two percent ot the reality in and then gives you the feeling that this is the whole, you live in a false world. You think the part is the whole. And you live accordingly – your whole life becomes a falsification.
The mind is a judge; it allows only that which suits it, which fits with it, which nourishes it, strengthens it. It does not allow anything that goes against it. For example, you are listening to me: your mind will allow only that which helps to strengthen your opinions, your ideologies. If you are a Cristian, you will hear one thing, and if you are a Buddhist, you will hear something totally different. If you have come here with a prejudice, for or against, you will hear different things. I am saying the same thing, but a Cristian will interpret it in his own way and the Buddhist in his own way and the communist in his own way.
One who has come with a determined idea that I am wrong will find all the arguments that help his prejudice. Each prejudice tries to get support for itself. So if you think any methodology is needed to see that which is, then you are starting from the very beginning in a wrong way.
That which is already there – you be silent, without any prejudice, without any ideology, atheist, theist, without any concept, without any a priori. You simply remain available, open, like a child who knows nothing. Function from the state of not knowing and you will be able to see what is.
Let me repeat: function from the state of not knowing. If you know you will distort – knowledge is mind. The state of not knowing means you have put the mind aside; now your eyes are without dust, your mirror is clean. It will reflect! It will reflect that which is.
This is the way one comes to encounter reality – and the encounter is going to be shattering. It is not going to help your ideas about it. It will destroy all that you have been always thinking is right. It is going to show you that you have lived up to now in a dream, that you have lived up to now in your own projections, that you have not allowed reality to penetrate you – on the contrary, you have created a world of your own ideas around yourself. You have lived in a capsule, without any windows. That’s how people are living.
A Cristian cannot know reality, a Hindu cannot know reality, a Mohammedan cannot know reality. Only a man who is courageous enough to drop all this garbage, who can simply be, who can simply be innocent…
Function from the state of not knowing, and it will bring you immense, ecstatic experiences, because the person who is without knowledge is capable of wondering. The person who is without knowledge is capable of awareness. Because he knows nothing, everything, the most ordinary too, becomes absolutely extraordinary, luminous, because everything is mysterious.
Don’t ask how to see what is, because that question ‘how?’ simply means you want some methodology, some knowledge, some information, so that you can interpret reality. But reality is uninterpretable. You want something so that you can explain to yourself what it is about – but reality is unexplainable. You would to define reality, but it is indefinable.
You are so full of expectations, you are so full of ready-made answers, you go on interpreting it according to your own mind. You pass through a miraculous world, dull, dead, dragging. This world is nothing but miracles and miracles, and each moment they are happening. And not in a misery way is the existence miraculous – it overflowing with miracles! But you have to be again a little child, you have to be again innocent.
It is not a question of method, not question of how. It is more a question of understanding the very process of how the mind functions. And when you have understood how the mind functions, you will put it aside. Then there is no barrier between you and reality. And where is no barrier, there is no separation either – because it is the barrier that separates. When there is no barrier, you are one with reality. In that oneness, the reality reveals its secrets to you.
