From Ignorance to Innocence - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 26. MEDITATION: WATCHFULNESS, AWARENESS, ALERTNESS – THE REAL TRINITY
But if you can remember – even as a memory – some moments in your life when suddenly you were
more aware than you usually are, it will be a great help to understand what I am going to say to you.
I have told you that modern psychology has moved below the so-called human consciousness. And
when people like Sigmund Freud found that just underneath your thin layer of consciousness there
is another layer, it was a great discovery for him, and for the West. And his whole life he devoted to
exploring the underground, the basement of your consciousness.
That’s why he became interested in the analysis of dreams, because when you are conscious you
can pretend, you can be a hypocrite. You can say something that you don’t mean, you can do
something that you never wanted to do. You can smile, and inside you want to cry, weep. You can
cry and weep, and inside you are enjoying, you are rejoicing.
So your consciousness has been so polluted by the society, it is not reliable. This was one of the
most significant contributions of Sigmund Freud: that your consciousness is not reliable. Strange,
that he feels your unconsciousness is more reliable than your consciousness.
Nothing can be a greater condemnation of the whole human civilization, the whole human history of
all the religions.
What else can be a greater condemnation than this: that your consciousness is not reliable; that
your society, your tradition, your religion, your convention, have made it unreliable.
In one of Kahlil Gibran’s stories, the mother and her daughter are both sleepwalkers. The daughter
one night walks in her sleep, goes into the garden and starts saying nasty things about her mother.
And just by accident her mother also sleepwalks behind her and starts saying ugly things about her.
But the cold wind outside suddenly wakes them both. And the daughter says, ”Mum, you don’t have
anything warm around you, you should not come out at your age. You make me so worried.”
And the mother says, ”My beloved daughter, in this whole world there is nobody except you whom I
can call mine.”
This much is the story, but it contains the whole discovery of Sigmund Freud: while they were asleep
they were saying really what they feel about each other. When they wake up they are saying what
they are supposed to say to each other. And they will not become aware of their two sides.
And if there were only two sides things would have been far easier, but there are many more sides.
I have told you – it will be good to be reminded – consciousness is a very thin layer where we are
existing. Below it is the subconscious mind; that is half-conscious, half-unconscious. That’s why you
remember dreams only of the later part of the night. You don’t remember all your dreams from the
whole night because in eight hours of sleep, for six hours you are dreaming.
Now this is a scientifically proved fact. Only here and there for a few minutes you fall into deeper
sleep where dreams are no more; the total is two hours. But the dream total is six hours. You don’t
remember in the morning six hours’ dreams – almost the length of three movies. At the most you
remember some fragment, or sometimes a whole dream, but that dream was the last dream when
you were waking up.
From Ignorance to Innocence 374 Osho