HOW CAN ONE DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN A PROJECTED EXPERIENCE AND AN AUTHENTIC FEELING?
It is difficult. Because we have to speculate, that’s why it is difficult. For example, how can you feel that you are touching a real fire or just an imagined one? If you have not touched a real fire, it is very difficult to think about it, to make any theoretical distinction. If you have touched a real fire, then it is not so difficult, then you know. A projected experience is just a dream experience.
But we can think certain things. If you have projected something, you have to go on projecting it; otherwise it will disappear. For example, if I project God and I say, ”I see Him in the trees, I see Him in the sky, I see Him everywhere,” if it is a projected experience, just my projection, my thought imposed on things, not a realization, but an idea, a theory imposed on things; if I project that I can see a tree as Divine – then I have to help this projection constantly. If I drop repeating, if I forget even for a single moment, the Divine will disappear and there will only be a tree.
In a projected experience you have to work for it continuously. You cannot have any leave, you cannot be on any holiday. The so-called saints cannot go on any holiday. They are continuously at work. They are working and working day and night. If you stop them for a single moment, the projected experience will disappear.
Authentic experience needs no effort. You need not maintain it. When it happens, it has happened. Now you can forget everything. You need not go on maintaining it; there is no constant maintenance. It remains. You forget it – it is there. You don’t look at it – it is there. You sleep– it is there. Now the tree cannot become a tree again; now it can never again be a mere tree. Whether I remember or not, it is Divine.
When you love someone, the person is just a screen: you project. When you hate someone, the person is just a screen: you project. It is your thoughts that you go on projecting. The same face is beautiful today, and the next day it becomes ugly – the same face – because your beauty, your ugliness, your feeling of beauty, your feeling of ugliness, is not concerned with the face at all. The face is just a screen with your thoughts projected on it.
No thoughts, no projections! That’s why my insistence is that you come to a point of thoughtlessness, of thoughtless awareness – so that there will be no projection. Then you will see the world as it is, not as your thoughts make it. If you can see the world as it is, you have come to the Divine.
The authentic realization is totally different. You don’t know what the world is. You don’t say that it is Divine or not. You say, ”I don’t know.” That’s how a real, authentic seeker begins. He says, ”I don’t know.” The false, the projecting one, always says, ”I know! The world is Divine. Everywhere there is God.” The real seeker will say, ”I don’t know. I know the tree, I know the stone – I don’t know what the inside of Existence is. I am ignorant.”
This feeling gives you a humility, a deep humbleness. And when you don’t know, you cannot project – because now you will not cooperate with any thought. Then drop all the thoughts and say, ”I don’t know.” Drop all the thoughts. Don’t be attached to knowledge. By and by, be aware that no thoughts should be there between you and the world. This is what meditation means– a no-thought relationship. You are here; I look at you with no thought, with no prejudice, with no image, with nothing in between. You are there, I am here, and there is space– unfilled. vacant.
You can do anything with effort, but it cannot become your nature. You will go on losing it again and again. So if you go on losing a certain feeling, know that it is a projection. When you cannot lose it, do whatsoever you want to do or don’t want to do, be whatsoever….
In China there exists a beautiful Zen story: A very rich woman served one monk for thirty years. The monk was really beautiful, always aware, disciplined. He had a beauty that comes naturally when your life is ordered – a cleanness, a freshness.
The monk was living in a hut under a tree for thirty years, and he was known to be a very realized man. The woman was serving that monk continuously for thirty years. The monk was known as absolutely pure. Now he was old, and that woman was also old. That woman was on her deathbed, so she called a prostitute from the village and asked her to go to the monk in the night, at midnight: ”Just go and embrace him, and come back and tell me how he reacted.”
The prostitute asked, ”What is the purpose of it? What am I supposed to do?”
The woman said, ”I will give you as much money as you want. You just go in the middle of the night. He will be meditating, because I know he meditates in the middle of the night. The door is never closed because he has nothing which can be stolen, so you just open the door, and just watch his reaction. Open the door, come close, embrace him, and then come back and just tell me what happened. Before I die, I would like to know whether I have been serving a real master or just an ordinary, mediocre being.”
The old woman said, ”I have served him for thirty years, but still, I feel that his purity is a maintained purity. It is not yet effortless. So before dying I want to know whether I was serving a right man or whether I was just deluded as he is deluded– because I have been a part in this. So just before my death, let me know it. I want to know.”
The prostitute went. It was midnight and a small lamp was burning; the man was meditating – the last meditation of the night. The moment he saw that the prostitute was coming… he knew her, and he knew well. She belonged to the same village. And he knew well, moreover, because he had been attracted to her so many times before. Really, he was fighting against this prostitute for years. He was bewildered. He just ran out of the hut and cried, ”Why have you come here? Don’t touch me!” And he was trembling and perspiring. The prostitute laughed, went back, and told the old woman that this had happened.
The old woman said, ”Then I was deceived. He is still the same. Nothing has changed. He had not reached anywhere – he reacts very ordinarily. This man is of no use; he has not become innocent yet. He may be a saint, but his saintliness is ugly. It is manipulated. He is afraid. His mind is still attached; his mind is still sexual.”
The old woman cried, “He has been telling me for thirty years, ‘I am not the body.’ If he is not the body, then why should he be so much afraid of the body? No, his saintliness is cultivated, it is a pose. It is not from the inner, it is from the outer. He has managed it all right, but inside he is not innocent, he is not childlike.” And unless saintliness becomes childlike, it is not saintliness at all, it is just a sinner hiding, hiding through a facade.
Sex can have just the reverse aspect also. You can be attracted in two ways– positively or negatively. Negative attraction may not look like attraction, but it is.
The same happened to Buddha. Buddha was staying under a tree in a forest. Some young men had come for a picnic, to enjoy themselves. They had brought a prostitute with them. They were eating and they were drinking, and they became so intoxicated that the prostitute escaped. When they became conscious that the prostitute had escaped, they followed her.
There was only one path. The prostitute must have passed where Buddha was sitting. So they came and asked the Buddha, ”bhikkhu, have you seen a naked beautiful girl passing by here? – because this is the only path.”
Buddha opened his eyes and he said, ”It is difficult to say whether she was a woman or a man; it is difficult to say whether she was beautiful or not; it is difficult to say whether she was naked or clothed. But someone has passed– to this much I can be a witness. Someone has passed.
”I cannot say whether that one was a woman or a man because I am not interested – not interested at all, not even negatively. Whether she was beautiful or ugly, I am not interested. Whether she was clothed or naked, I am not interested. For this much I can vouch: someone has passed.
”And one thing more. The night is so silent – is it good, young men, to go after the one who has passed, to find that person? Or is it better to come and sit beside me and to find yourself? The night is very silent, so what do you think? Is it better to find yourself or to go in search of someone else?”
This is a very different mind– no negative, no positive attachment– as if it is meaningless. Meaning can exist even when you are antagonistic. It exists more, rather. Any maintenance for any state of mind, any effort to maintain it, shows that you are still fighting. It is not a realization; it is still an effort to impose something.
So be silent, thoughtless – and then know what is. Don’t think about it and don’t preformulate anything about it. Don’t be concerned with philosophies and metaphysical theories, don’t be concerned with ideas – only then is the reality revealed. If you are concerned with ideas, then you will project something onto the reality and the reality will just serve as a screen. And this is the danger: you can come to know anything you want, you can project anything you want.
Mind has two capacities: one is that it can project anything, and the other is that it can be totally vacant. These are the two possibilities. If the mind is used as a positive projection, then you can realize anything you like, but it is not a realization – you are living in a dream. Vacate the mind, and face reality with a vacant mind, with no thought– then you know what is.
Osho: The Ultimate Alchemy, Vol 1: Chapter 14. Facing The Reality Q 2 (excerpts)
Osho, A Bird on the Wing -Talks on Zen, Ch 6 (excepts)
ख़ुदा बदल न सका आदमी को आज भी ‘होश’
और अब तक आदमी ने सैकड़ों ख़ुदा बदले ……………..होश जौनपुरी
ḳhudā badal na sakā aadmī ko aaj bhī ‘hosh’
aur ab tak aadmī ne saikḌoñ ḳhudā badle ……………HOSH JAUNPURI
God has not been able to change man even today, O Hosh;
Yet man, by now, has changed hundreds of gods.
When Buddha is asking, “Is it better to find yourself or to go in search of someone else?” It is exactly what Sachin Dev Burman is asking in the title track of Dev Anand’s Navketan Films’ masterpiece “Guide” (1965)- “Wahan kaun hai tera? Musafir, jayega kahan?” brilliantly written by Shailendra.
Wahan Kaun Hai Tera Musafir Jayega Kahan – GUIDE (youtube.com)