Osho - Weekly Meditation For The Here And Now
Weekly Meditation - Week 23. Be Friend Your Dreams
June 3
Be Friend Your Dreams
Learn to befriend your dreams. Dreams are a communication from the unconscious. The unconscious has a message for you. It is trying to create a bridge to your conscious mind.
Analysis is not needed to understand dreams, because if you analyze the dream, then the conscious again becomes the master. It tries to dissect and analyze, to force meanings that are not the meanings of the unconscious. The unconscious uses poetic language. The meaning is very subtle; it cannot be found by analysis. It can only be found if you start learning the language of the dream. So the first step is to befriend the dream.
When you have a dream that seems to be significant - maybe violent, nightmarish, but you feel that there is some import in it - in the morning, or even in the middle of the night, before you forget the dream, sit in your bed and close your eyes. Befriend the dream; just tell it, "I am with you, and I am ready to come to you. Lead me wherever you want to lead me; I am available." Just surrender to the dream. Close your eyes and move with it, enjoy it; let the dream unfold. You will be surprised at what treasures a dream is hiding, and you will see that it keeps on unfolding.
June 4
Aloneness
Aloneness has in it both a sort of sadness, sorrow and a very deep peace and silence. It depends on you how you look at it.
It can be very difficult to have one's own space. But unless you have your own space, you will never become acquainted with your own being. You will never come to know who you are. Always engaged, always occupied in a thousand and one things - in relationships, in worldly affairs, anxieties, plans, future, past - one continuously lives on the surface.
When you are alone you can start settling, sinking inward. Because you are not occupied, you will not feel the way you have always been feeling. It will be different; that difference also feels strange. And certainly one misses one's lovers, one's friends, but this is not going to be forever. It is just a small discipline.
And if you love yourself deeply and go down into yourself, you will be ready to love others even more deeply, because one who does not know oneself cannot love very deeply. If you live on the surface, your relationships cannot have depth. It is your relationship, after all. If you have depth, then your relationship will have depth.
June 5
Violence
Nobody is born violent; one learns it. One is infected by a violent society, and one becomes violent.
Otherwise every child is born absolutely nonviolent. There is no violence in your being itself. Rather, we are conditioned by situations. We .have to defend ourselves against so many things, and offense is the best method of defending. When a person has to defend himself many times, he becomes offensive, he becomes violent, because it is better to hit first than to wait for somebody to hit you. The one who hits first has more chances of winning.
That's what Machiavelli says in his famous book, The Prince. It is the Bible of politicians. He says that attack is the best method of defense. Don't wait; before somebody attacks you, you should attack. When you are attacked, Machiavelli says that it is already too late. You are already on the loser's side.
Hence people become violent. Very soon they come to understand that otherwise they will be crushed. The only way to survive is to fight, and once they learn this trick, by and by their whole nature becomes poisoned by it. But it is not natural, so it can be dropped.
June 6
Humiliation
Be humble, then nobody can humiliate you. Be ego less, then nobody can hurt you.
Sometimes it happens that others just find excuses to throw out their anger, but that's no reason for you to get disturbed. There are only two possibilities: Either the other person is right, then you feel humiliated; or the other is wrong, then they are being ridiculous, so the whole situation is humorous and one can enjoy it.
If you feel that the other person is right, accept whatever is being said and be humble. If you are humble you can never be humiliated; that is the point. You are already standing in the last row; you cannot be thrown backward. You are not trying to become the first, so nobody can obstruct you. That is the whole Taoist attitude toward life.
Be humble, then nobody can humiliate you. Be egoless, then nobody can hurt you.
June 7
Worship
The attitude if worship is something that has to be felt within.
People have completely forgotten what worship really means. Worship is approaching reality with a child's heart - not calculating, not cunning, not analyzing, but full of awe, of a tremendous feeling of wonder. It is a feeling of mystery surrounding you, the presence of the hidden, that things are not as they appear to be. It is to know that the appearance is just the periphery, that beyond the appearance something of tremendous significance is hiding.
When a child runs after a butterfly, he is worshipful. Or when he suddenly comes across a path and sees a flower-just an ordinary grass flower, but the child stands there in deep wonder. Or when he comes across a snake and is surprised and full of energy. Each moment brings some surprise. The child takes nothing for granted; that is the attitude of worship.
Never take anything for granted. Once you start taking things for granted, you are settling. Your child is disappearing, your wonder is dying, and when there is no wonder in the heart, there can be no worship. Worship means that life is so mysterious that there is really no way to understand it. It surpasses understanding; all our efforts fail. And the more we try to know, the more unknowable it seems.
June 8
Likes And Dislikes
The day you decide not to ask for things you like but rather to like things that happen, that day you become mature.
We can always keep wanting what we like. But that will make you always miserable, because the world does not run according to your likes and dislikes. There is no guarantee that what you want, life also wants; there is no guarantee. There is every possibility that life is destined toward something that you don't know anything about at all.
When sometimes the thing you like does happen, you will still not feel very happy, because whatever we demand, we have already lived in fantasy. So it is already secondhand. If you say that you would like a certain man to be your lover, then in many dreams and in many fantasies you have already loved that man. And if it happens, then the real man is going to fall short of your fantasy; he is going to be just a carbon copy, because reality is never as fantastic as fantasy. Then you will be frustrated.
But if you start liking that which is happening - if you don't put your own will against the whole, if you simply say okay - whatever happens, you simply say yes - then you can never be miserable. Because no matter what happens, you are always in a positive attitude, ready to receive it and enjoy it.
June 9
Independence
A person who says, 'Whatever happens, I am going to remain happy; it will not make any difference to me. I will find a way to be happy whatever the circumstance," is independent.
No politics can make any difference. No change in the state of the outside world can make any difference. Poor or rich, a beggar or a king, the independent person remains the same. His or her inner climate does not change.
This is the goal of all meditation - to attain such tranquility, such stillness, that it is unconditional. Only then it is yours. Then whatever happens, let it happen - you remain happy. You remain tremendously happy. Drop your will, and you will see that the things that you were hankering for start happening on their own. Suddenly things start running smoothly. Everything fits together.
