Past and Presence

[Guest guest]

The present is almost always a hell: you can prolong this hell only because of

the hope that you have projected into the future. You can live today because of

the tomorrow. You are hoping something is going to happen tomorrow -- some doors

of paradise will open tomorrow. They never open today, and when tomorrow will

come it will not come as tomorrow, it will come as today, but by that time your

mind has moved again. You go on moving ahead of you: this is what dreaming

means. You are not one with the real, that which is nearby, that which is here

and now, you are somewhere else -- moving ahead, jumping ahead.

 

And that tomorrow, that future, you have named it in so many ways. People call

it heaven, some people call it moksha, but it is always in the future. Somebody

is thinking in terms of wealth, but that wealth is going to be in the future.

And somebody is thinking in terms of paradise, and that paradise is going to be

after you are dead -- far away in the future. You waste your present for that

which is not: this is what dreaming means. You cannot be here and now. To be

just in the moment seems to be arduous.

 

You can be in the past, because again that is dreaming -- memories, remembrance

of things which are no more -- or you can be in the future, which is projection,

which again is creating something out of the past. The future is nothing but the

past projected again -- more colorful, more beautiful, more pleasant, but it is

the past refined.

 

You cannot think anything other than the past: the future is nothing but the

past projected again -- and both are not. The present is, but you are never in

the present. This is what dreaming means. And Nietzsche is right when he says

that man cannot live with the truth. He needs lies, he lives through lies.

Nietzsche says that we go on saying that we want the truth, but no one wants it.

Our so-called truths are nothing but lies, beautiful lies. No one is ready to

see the naked reality.

 

This mind cannot enter on the path of Yoga because Yoga means a methodology to

reveal the truth. Yoga is a method to come to a non-dreaming mind. Yoga is the

science to be in the here and now. Yoga means now you are ready not to move into

the future. Yoga means now you are ready not to hope, not to jump ahead of your

being .

 

Osho

 

 

 

 

 

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