The Great Path - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 2. THE STARS MIRRORED
identify. You never learned disidentification. You learned to identify with every situation. You have
totally forgotten the art of disidentification, and this is your unconsciousness – that you have learned
to identify.
One morning found Mulla Nasruddin at the bedside of his friend who was in the hospital. The patient
opened his eyes and said, ”What happened, Nasruddin? I haven’t the faintest idea.”
”Last night you just had a little too much to drink,” said the Mulla. ”Then you stood in the window and
said, you can fly. You tried to fly out of the third-story window. And this is the result – your broken
bones!”
The friend was shocked. ”But you were with me, Mulla. Why did you allow it to happen? What kind
of a friend are you?”
”Let’s not talk about that,” said Nasruddin. ”At the time I was convinced that you could do it. If
the cord of my pyjamas had not broken I would have taken off with you. But how could I keep my
pyjamas on while I was flying? That is all that held me back. You weren’t the only one drunk.”
The meaning of unconsciousness is to be one with whatever comes to the mind. If the drunk thinks
that he can fly, he cannot discriminate. There is no ability to discriminate left within him. He becomes
one with the thought.
Your life is exactly like this. Granted, you do not fly out of windows and break any bones and land
in the hospital, but if you observe very, very minutely you will find that you are in the hospital with
all your bones broken. Your whole life is one long illness, which gives you nothing but pain and
suffering. At every step you fall. At every step you have fallen. At every step you have hurt yourself,
and behind all this devastation, there is only one reason: your unconsciousness. You fail to create a
distance between you and your surroundings.
Just stand back a little. Move step by step. It is a long journey, because what has been built up over
millions of lives cannot be so easily destroyed. However, it can be done. Whatever you have created
is false. The Hindus call it maya. Maya means: the world which you are caught in is false. This does
not actually mean that the sun and the stars, the mountains and the trees are false. it only means
that your identification with your perception of them is false. You live with this identification. That is
your world!
How can you break this association? First, start from your waking state. Because only in the waking
state is a slight ray of consciousness. How can you start with dreams? It would be very difficult. And
you do not know deep sleep at all, because all consciousness is lost there. Begin with the waking
state, that is where your spiritual path begins. That is the first step. The second step is the dream
state, and the third is deep sleep. The day you complete all the three steps you will naturally have
stepped into the fourth: turiya, the state of self-realization.
Begin with the waking state. That is the path; that’s why it is called wakefulness. Otherwise it is not
wakefulness. What kind of wakefulness can it be when you are lost in the objects and you have no
awareness of your own self? This is wakefulness in name. But it has been called the waking state.
Actually we have called the buddhas ”the awakened ones.”
The Great Path 27 Osho