IMAGINE SPIRIT SIMULTANEOUSLY WITHIN AND AROUND YOU UNTIL THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE SPIRITUALIZES

Osho - First you must understand what imagination is. It is condemned very much nowadays. The moment you hear the word "imagine' you will say this is useless, we want something real, not imaginary. But imagination is a reality, it is a capacity, it is a potentiality within you. You can imagine. That shows that your being is capable of imagination. This capacity is a reality. Through this imagination you can destroy or you can create yourself. That depends on you. Imagination is very powerful. It is potential power.

What is imagination? It is getting into an attitude so deeply that the very attitude becomes reality. For example, you may have heard about a technique which is used in Tibet. They call it heat yoga. The night is cold, snow is falling, and the Tibetan lama will be standing naked under the open sky. The temperature is below zero. You would simply start dying, you would freeze. But the lama is practicing a particular technique. That technique is that he is imagining that his body is a burning fire and he is imagining that he is perspiring -- the heat is so much that he is perspiring.. And he actually starts perspiring although the temperature is below zero and even the blood should freeze. He starts perspiring. What is happening? This perspiration is real, his body is really hot -- but this reality is created through imagination.

You just try some simple technique so that you can feel how reality can be created through imagination. Unless you feel it, you cannot work with this technique. Just count your pulse. Sit in a closed room and count your pulse. And then for five minutes just imagine that you are running. Imagine that you are running, it is hot, you are taking deep breaths, you are perspiring, and your pulse rate is going high. After imagining this for five minutes again count your pulse. You will see the difference: your pulse rate will be high. You have worked it just by imagination, you were not really running.

In old Tibet, Buddhist monks used to do exercise only through imagination. And those techniques can be of much use for modern man, because it is difficult to run in the street, difficult to have a long walk, difficult to find a lonely street. You can just lie down on the floor in your room and imagine that for one hour continuously you are taking a long fast walk. Just in imagination go on walking. And now even medical experts say that the effect would be the same as if it were a real walk.

Once you get in tune with your imagination, the body starts functioning. You are already doing many things without knowing that it is your imagination working. Many times you create many illnesses just through imagination; you imagine that now this disease is there, infectious, it is all over the place. You have become receptive, now there is every possibility that you will fall ill -- and that illness is real. But it has been created through imagination. Imagination is a force, an energy, and the mind moves through it. And when the mind moves through it, the body follows.

It happened once in a university hostel in the United States that four students were trying an experiment in hypnosis. Hypnosis is nothing but imagination power. When you hypnotize a person, he is really falling into deep imagination, and whatsoever you suggest will start happening. So they suggested many things to a boy that they had hypnotized. Four boys tried hypnosis on one. They tried many things and whatsoever they said, the boy immediately followed. When they said, "Jump," the boy started jumping. When they said, "Weep," the boy started weeping. When they said, "Tears are flowing from your eyes," tears started flowing. Then just as a joke they said, "Now lie down. You are dead!" And the boy lay down and he was dead.

This happened in nineteen fifty-two. After that they made a law against hypnosis in the United States. No one should try hypnosis unless some research work is involved; unless some medical institute, or some psychological department of some university authorizes you. Only then can you experiment. Otherwise it is dangerous -- the boy simply believed, imagined, that he was dead, and he was dead.

If death can occur through imagination, why not life, why not more life?

This technique is based on the power of imagination.

IMAGINE SPIRIT SIMULTANEOUSLY WITHIN AND AROUND YOU UNTIL THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE SPIRITUALIZES.

Just sit in a lonely place where no one will disturb you -- a lonely secluded room will do. Or if you can get somewhere outside it will be better, because when you are near nature you are more imaginative. When there are only man-made things around you, you are less imaginative. Nature is dreaming, and it gives you a dreaming force. Alone you become more imaginative: that's why you are afraid when you are alone. It is not that ghosts are going to trouble you, but alone your imagination can work. And your imagination can create ghosts or anything you want it to. When you move alone, your imagination is more potential; when someone else is there, your reason is in control Because without reason you cannot be related to the others; to others goes on working. When there is no one there, the mind goes on working. When there is no one there, the mind relaxes and you regress to a deeper imaginative layer of the being. When you are alone, imagination starts functioning.

Many experiments have been done with sensory deprivation. If a person can be deprived of all sensory stimuli -- if you are closed in a soundproof room with no light entering it, no possibility of being related to any other human being, no pictures on the walls, nothing in the room to which you can relate -- after one, two or three hours you will start relating to yourself. You will become imaginative. You will start talking to yourself. You will question and you will answer. A monologue will start in which you will be divided. Then suddenly you will start feeling many things which you cannot understand. You will start hearing sounds, but the room is soundproof, no sound can come in. Now you are imagining. You may start smelling perfumes, but no perfume is there. Now you are imagining. After thirty-six hours of sensory deprivation, you cannot make any difference between what is real and what is imaginary -- impossible. After thirty-six hours of sensory deprivation, imagination becomes reality and reality becomes illusory.

That is why seekers in the old days would move to the mountains, to the lonely places, where they could lose the distinction between the real and the unreal. Once the distinction is lost, your imagination is in full force. Now you can use it and you can be creative through it.

For this technique sit in a lonely place: if the surrounding is natural, it is good, it not, then a room can also do. Then close your eyes and imagine a spiritual force is felt within and without. Within you a river of consciousness is flowing and it is going all over the room, overflowing. Within and without, around you, everywhere, spirit is present, energy is present. And don't only imagine it only in the mind, start feeling within the body -- your body will start vibrating. When you feel that the body has started vibrating, it shows that the imagination has started functioning. Feel that the whole universe by and by is spiritualized -- everything, the walls of the room, the trees around you, everything has become no-material, it has become spiritual. Matter is no more.

That is the reality also. Physicists say that matter is illusory and energy is real, and wherever you see solid things, that solidity is just an appearance, it is not there. As physics enters deeper into the world of matter, matter disappears. Only energy, immaterial energy, remains indefinable.

Through imagination you are reaching to a point where, by your conscious effort, you are destroying the structures of the intellect, the patterns of the intellect. You feel that there is no matter, only energy, only spirit, within and without. Soon you will feel that within and without have disappeared. When your body becomes spiritual and you feel it is energy, then there is no distinction between the within and the without. The boundaries are lost. Now there is only a flow, an ocean, vibrating. This is the real also -- you are reaching to the real through imagination.

What is imagination doing? Imagination is only destroying the old concepts, matter, old patterns of the mind which go on looking at things in a certain way. Imagination is destroying them. And then the reality will be revealed.

IMAGINE SPIRIT SIMULTANEOUSLY WITHIN AND AROUND YOU UNTIL THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE SPIRITUALIZES -- until you feel that all distinctions have disappeared, all boundaries have dissolved and the universe has become just an ocean of energy. That is the fact, also. But the deeper you proceed in the technique, the more scared you will become. You will feel as if you are going mad. Because your sanity consists of distinctions, your sanity consists of this so-called reality and when the reality starts disappearing, you will feel that simultaneously your sanity is disappearing.

Saints and insane persons move in a world which is beyond our so-called reality. They both move, but the insane persons fall and saints go beyond. The difference is very small but it is very great also. If without any effort on your part you lose your mind and the distinctions, the real and the unreal, you will become insane. But if you destroy the concepts with conscious effort, you will become "un-sane," not insane. That "un-sanity" is the dimension of religion. It is beyond sanity. But conscious effort is needed. You should not be a victim, you should remain a master. When it is your effort which is destroying the patterns of the mind, you look into the unpatterned reality.

The unpatterned reality is the only reality; the patterned reality is just imposed. That's why now anthropologists say that every society, every culture, looks at the same reality but finds a different reality there, because their patterns, their concepts are different. There are many cultures in the world, primitive cultures. They look at the same world in a very different way; their interpretation is totally different. The reality is the same for us and for them, but the pattern looked through is different. For example, Buddhists say that there is no substance in the world, the world is a process. There is nothing substantial.

Everything is in movement -- or even that may not be the right thing to say. Movement is the only thing. When we say that everything is in movement, again there is the old fallacy -- it is as if there is something which is moving. Buddha says there is nothing which is moving -- only movement is there. That is all that there is. So in a Buddhist country like Thailand or Burma, they don't have any corresponding word for "is" in their languages. When the Bible was translated into Thai for the first time, it became a problem to translate it because in the Bible it is said that "God is." You cannot say that "God is" in Burmese or in Thai; you cannot say it. Whatsoever they say will mean, "God is becoming."

Everything is moving, nothing is. When a Burmese looks at the world, he looks at movement. When we look, when particularly the Greek-oriented Western mind looks, there is no process, only substance. There are dead things, not movements. Even when you look at a river, you see the river as "is." The river is not there -- the river just means a movement, something which is constantly becoming. And a point never comes where you say it has become, it is a process without end. When we look at a tree, we see the tree "is". The Burmese language has nothing to say. They can only say that the tree is becoming, the tree is flowing, the tree is growing, the tree is in process. If the child is brought up with this pattern in the mind -- then everything is a process -- the world, the reality, will be totally different. For you it is different and the reality is one and the same. But what mind do you bring to it to interpret it? Then it changes.

Remember one basic thing: unless the pattern of your mind is thrown away, unless you are "de-patterned", unless your conditioning is thrown away and you are deconditioned, you will not know what reality is -- you will know only interpretations. Those interpretations are the workings of your own mind. Unpatterned reality is the only reality. And this technique is to help you to unpattern, to decondition, to dissolve from the mind the words which have gathered there. You cannot look because of them. Whatsoever looks real to you let it be dissolved.

Imagine energy, not substance, nothing static, but process, movement, rhythm, dance, and go on imagining until the entire universe spiritualizes. If you persist, within three months of intensively working for just one hour every day, you can move to this feeling. Within three months you can have a different feeling of the whole existence around you. Matter is no longer there, only immaterial, oceanic existence, just waves, vibrations. When this happens then you know what God is. That ocean of energy is God. God is not a person. God is not somewhere sitting on a throne in heaven. The whole creative energy of existence is God. But we have a pattern of thinking. We say God is the creator. God is not the creator. Rather, God is the creative force, the very creation itself.

It has been forced again and again on our minds that somewhere in the past, God created the world -- and then and there creation finished. Christians have a story that within six days God created the world and on the seventh day he rested. That's why the seventh day, Sunday, is a holiday. God took a holiday on that day. In six days he created the world, forever and ever -- and since then there has been no creation. Since the sixth day there has been no creation. This is a very dead concept. Tantra says God is the very creativity.

Creation is not a historical event that happened somewhere in the past -- it is happening every moment, God is creating every moment. But again language creates a problem and we say, "God is creating." It feels that God is someone who goes on creating. No, the very creativity that goes on moving and moving every moment, that very creativity is God. So you are in creation every moment. This is a very alive concept. It is not that God has created something somewhere and since then there has been no dialogue between man and God, there has been really no connection, no relationship -- he created and the thing was finished. Tantra says that every moment you are being created, eery moment you are in deep relationship with the divine, with the source of creativity. This is a very alive concept.

Through this technique you will have glimpse of the creative force, within and without. And once you can feel the creative force and the touch, the impact of it, you will become totally different, you will never be the same again. God has entered you.You have become an abode.