Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy - Osho - Oshorajneesh.com

CHAPTER 6. NUDITY AND CLOTHING SHOULD GO TOGETHER
The more we go back into olden times, the more we find that the way of thinking is pictorial, and not
verbal. Even now when you dream, you may have noticed you use pictures and images instead of
words. We still dream in pictures, because dreaming is our most primitive language. Our dreams
have yet to be updated, modernized. With respect to dreams there is no difference whatsoever
between modern man and the man who lived ten thousand years before him. Our dreams continue
to be primitive; no one dreams in a modern way. Our dreams are as old as they were ten thousand
years ago, even ten hundred thousand years ago. The way a man living in an air conditioned house
dreams today is the same as the caveman in times immemorial. In the manner of dreaming no
difference whatsoever has occurred between a caveman living in the vastness of the forests and a
man living in a skyscraper in New York.
One distinctive feature of dreams is that they express themselves wholly in pictures. How does an
ambitious person dream to express his ambition? He creates a picture that suitably expresses his
ambition. Maybe he grows wings and flies high in the sky. All ambitious people invariably fly in their
dreams. They fly higher and higher, leaving below the trees, the mountains, even the stars. It means
their ambition knows no limits, that even the sky is not its limit. But their dreams will never use the
word ”ambition”; the picture of flying will say it much better.
One of the reasons we find it hard to understand our dreams is their pictorial language, which is
utterly different from the verbal language we use in our everyday life. We speak through words
in the daytime, and we speak through pictures when we dream in the night. While our daytime
language is modern and up-to date, the language of our nocturnal dreams is the most primitive ever.
There is a distance of millions of years between them. That is what makes it so hard to understand
what a dream has to say.
Krishna is very old in the sense that his stories were written at a time when man thought about his
life and his universe not so much in words as in symbols, in images and pictures. Therefore we
now have to decode them to know what they want to convey. We have to translate them into our
language of words.
It is significant that the life of Christ begins more or less in the same way as Krishna’s; there is not
much difference. For this reason a good many people had this illusion – a few still cling to it – that
Christ never happened, that it is really the story of Krishna carried to Jerusalem.
There is great similarity between the stories of their births. Jesus too is born on a dark night; he too
is born amid fear of death. Here King Kansa, his own uncle, is trying to kill Krishna; in Jerusalem
King Herod is looking to kill Jesus. Kansa has a number of children killed in the fear that one of
them will grow up and kill him. In Jerusalem Herod does the same: he has any number of newborn
babes killed lest one of them later turns out to be his murderer.
But Christ is not Krishna. Jesus is a different person, and the rest of his story is quite different, his
own. But the symbols and metaphors of their stories are very similar, because all primitive minds
are very similar.
You will be amused to know that the language of dreams is the same all the world over. An
Englishman, a Japanese and an Eskimo all dream alike. But the languages that we use in our
daily life, for communication with one another, are quite different and diverse. And like the language
Krishna: The Man and His Philosophy 97 Osho