Past Lives

Question: BELOVED OSHO, HOW CAN WE FIND OUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN IMAGINATION AND REAL PAST LIFE EXPERIENCES? It is very easy. First, imagination cannot be repeated again and again, but the past life experience will be repeated the same in detail again and again. Second, the imagination will start from A, go to B, then to C, from the beginning to the end. The past life experience will start just in the reverse order -- from Z. First you will die; when you go into the past life, what you will come across first will be your death. Then you will move as if you are reading a novel from the back, or seeing a film backwards. Imagination will be direct; it will start from birth and move towards death.

In this connection, a friend has also asked: Osho, can we know our past lives?

All the truths of life, all the experiences up to today, are turning false. All the heights of life that were touched till now are becoming imaginary. They are turning into ancient stories. In a hundred or two hundred years children will deny that people like Buddha, Mahavira, and Christ ever existed—they will say these are all stories. In the West a man has written a book in which he says that no one like Christ ever was; it is merely an old drama. People slowly forgot it was a drama and began to think it was history. Even today we stage the Ramlila. We think Rama existed and therefore we stage the Ramlila. A hundred years later children will say that Ramlila was written and performed, and people were deluded into thinking that Rama existed—it must have been a play long performed. Because when before our eyes men like…

Beloved Osho, kindly tell me -- have we met in a past life?

CHIDVILAS, WE HAVE NOT even met in this life. What are you talking about -- the past life? You have been here, I have been here, but meeting has not happened YET. I go on trying to meet you, and you go on escaping. You are very artful, skillful, clever. And you KNOW it! And to avoid THIS encounter you are interested in thinking about past lives. Ask me why we have not met in this life. How is it going to help whether we met in the past life or not? Now we cannot go back to it; we cannot make anything out of it. It is finished. But this is how mind works. It escapes from the present. It finds ways either in the past or in the future. Those are tricks, strategies of the mind to save itself. Why should you be interested in-'past life'? It is…

Can we know about past lives?

We can certainly know about our past lives, but at present you know nothing even about this life. Knowing past lives is far more difficult. Man can, of course, know about his past lives, because once something is imprinted in the form of a memory on our minds, it is never destroyed. It always remains in our deep unconscious levels. Whatsoever we have known, we never forget. If I ask you what you did on January 1, 1950, perhaps you won't be able to answer. You might say, "I don't remember anything. I have absolutely no idea what I did on January 1, 1950." But if you could be hypnotized... and it can be done easily. Thus, by making you unconscious, were I to ask what you did on January 1, 1950, you would give me the whole day's account as if the first of January were passing before your…