No—pretending very hard won’t make you that; you’re already a jewel, just clean the dust from your eyes instead of daydreaming.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, there is a verse in the Yoga Vasistha: “As a person constantly strives, as he imagines with total absorption, and as he wishes to become—so he becomes; not otherwise.” Osho, is it really so?
About thirty to thirty-three percent of people are highly susceptible to hypnosis. They are easily hypnotized. These very people become your so-called religious people—your saints, your fakirs. For them, anything is easy. Having bound their own hands by imagination, they now try to open them and cannot. And there is a twist: the more they try and fail, the deeper their conviction that it is now impossible; their hands are bound and won’t open. They panic; they have no way to open them—except to reverse the process. They should stop struggling. Again for ten minutes they should think the opposite of what they thought before: “When I open my hands after ten minutes, they will surely open; certainly they will open. No doubt.” After ten minutes, their hands will open. You can test this with ten friends. You may not have suspected that you are among that thirty-three percent. Such…
Beloved Osho, does it really matter that I can't distinguish imagination from reality? If I can be aware that "I am", is this not enough?
It is certainly enough. It does not matter. There is no need to make any effort to discriminate between imagination and reality. You simply remain aware of yourself. And whatever is imagination will slowly disappear, and whatever is real will remain. It is again from Chetana. But remember, your friendship with ghosts.... Those ghosts will disappear. Because you cannot discriminate between who is a ghost and who is a real person, there may be fear that perhaps you are thinking that this is a real person -- and he disappears. But that much risk has to be taken. In the commune Milarepa used to disappear. That was because of your awareness of yourself. Then you can't find where he is. So if you are not afraid, then there is no problem. You simply remain aware of yourself. And I have never been teaching discrimination. Imagination is that which disappears. Reality…
Image spirit simultaneously within and around you until the entire universe spiritualizes.
WITH YOUR ENTIRE CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE VERY START OF DESIRE, OF KNOWING, KNOW. O SHAKTI, EACH PARTICULAR PERCEPTION IS LIMITED, DISAPPEARING IN OMNIPOTENCE. IN TRUTH FORMS ARE INSEPARATE. INSEPARATE ARE OMNIPRESENT BEING AND YOUR OWN FORM. REALIZE EACH AS MADE OF THIS CONSCIOUSNESS. You are here listening to me. This very listening can become a transformation. If you are entirely here, this very moment here and now, if listening is your entirety, that listening will become a meditation: you will enter a different realm of ecstasy, a separate reality. But you are not entire. That is the problem with the human mind, it is always partial. A part is listening. Other parts may be somewhere else, or may be asleep, or may be thinking about what is being said, or arguing inside. That creates a division and division is a dissipation of energy. So when doing anything bring your entire…
Osho, after finding you a great transformation has happened within me; and yet it also feels as if nothing has happened. Please clarify this paradox.
It is natural. It will be so. Everyone will feel the same. Because the transformation we are striving for has something unique about it—understand this. Here the effort is to make you what you already are. The attempt here is not to make you into something else. The method is to bring you to your natural state. To give you exactly what is already yours. So when it is found, on the one hand it will feel like an extraordinary meeting, a revolution has occurred—wonder! And on the other hand it will also seem that what has been found is not something new. It feels familiar. It feels one’s own. As if it was always within, and only the remembrance had been lost. When Buddha became enlightened and the gods asked him, “What have you attained?” the story says Buddha laughed and said, “Nothing has been attained. I have only…
Sometimes I feel that all my inner journey is only imagination. Sometimes I know it is true. Is going inward just moving back from the outside business, moving down in the deeper caverns of body into the heartbeat and down into the joy of being and behind the body, behind the feelings, shifting the me behind until it is just somehow that I am watched and felt by that which lives -- me? You say that the power of imagination deludes. In front of you I feel like such a schmuck when I don't feel that I am god.
But I can understand Padma Sambhava's difficulty too. I myself go on saying to you "Start the inner journey". I have to use words, you have to use words, and all words are inadequate. And if you go on stretching a word to its extreme, logical end, it becomes absurd. They have to be used only in a hypothetical way. They have to be used in a utilitarian sense. When I use the words 'inner journey', I simply mean that you have looked at one aspect of the journey in your life called 'outer', now try to look at another aspect of the journey called 'inner'. YoU have been running after money, now run after meditation. You have been running after power, now run after God. Both are running. Once you start running after meditation then one day I will tell you, "Now drop meditation too. Now stop running." And…