The Mind Lives out of Fictions

The mind lives out of fictions. The mind is nourished by fictions – ordinary or occult. The mind always hankers for beautiful stories. The mind lives through lies. The mind is afraid of the truth but is a great lover of lies. To satisfy the mind, down through the ages, thousands of lies have been invented. When one lie becomes too old, rotten, it is dropped and a new lie is invented. Your so-called scriptures are full of such lies. Man is very inventive. But all inventions of this kind prevent you from seeing the truth, and your energy becomes engaged in a futile dimension.

You ask me, “Is the earth hollow?”

Even if it is it does not matter. Why be worried about it? Why waste your time for it? There are far more significant things waiting to be done. Put your priorities right. The better question, the far more significant question, would be: Is man hollow? And yes, man is hollow.

You ask, “Is there an advanced civilization living there?”

Yes, I say there is an advanced being living inside you. You are hollow, and in the innermost core of your being, God is living. The highest is living in you; why bother about the earth? Even if people are living they can’t be much different from the people who are living on the surface. Are you not yet fed-up with these people? Maybe they have three eyes and four ears and six hands, but what difference does it make?

You ask, “Is there a sun at the center?”

The sun is at your very center. That’s what I am calling Buddha – the light.

You ask me, “Do these… make periodic journeys through tunnels to specific places and tell the secrets?”

Yes. Many times from your innermost core messages come to your superficial-most consciousness. Many times secrets are revealed to you from the center to the circumference. But rather than searching for these, you become interested in whether the earth is hollow? Whether there is a sun inside? Whether it is populated? Is there an advanced civilization? And these fictions go on keeping people engaged. There are thousands of books written about such subjects. And controversies go on raging down the centuries, and people go on fighting, arguing, philosophizing, speculating, proving. And all is futile!

Beware of the mind’s tendency to invent lies, to support lies. That is mind’s way of protecting itself against truth.

Truth has not to be invented. You cannot invent truth, you can only make yourself available to it. Truth is already there, truth is already the case. If you are silent, if you have dropped your fictions, if you have dropped all lies, if you are naked, in that nudity and in that silence truth is revealed. And truth liberates.

Get out of all these stories! And I am not saying that they are true or not true: I’m not saying anything about them. I’m not for or against. I’m simply saying they are irrelevant. It does not matter. It is childish to be interested in such things. It is good for children – they need fiction and they need fairy tales – but it is not good for grown-up people.

The most important thing for an intelligent person is to know who he is. Everything depends on that. Without knowing it, all knowledge is gibberish. Without knowing it, you have lived but you lived in vain. Without knowing it, you miss the whole opportunity of life. Life is an opportunity to know yourself, it is a challenge to know yourself, it provokes you to know yourself. But we create some other curiosities, and we become so engaged with those curiosities that we forget the real question. And there are thousands of questions which are not real, and you can be lost in that crowd.

And the real question is a single question, one question: Who am I? Drop all other questions! Put your total energy into one question: Who am I? Let this question sink to the very innermost core of your being – in the hollow of your body, to the supreme consciousness within you, to the sun within you. Devote as much time as possible to this one single question. The whole of religion depends on it. Religion is nothing but the answer to this single question: Who am I? It is not concerned with God. It is not concerned with heaven and hell, it is not concerned with past lives and future lives, it is not concerned with reincarnation and the theory of karma. Real religion has only a single purpose, a single target: Who am I?

And don’t dissipate your energy in such curiosities. Even if people are there, even if you come to know that people are there and UFO’S come from the hollow of the earth, it won’t change you. It won’t help you in any way.

Go into the mystery that you are, penetrate that mystery. Let that become your only work in life. Knowing it, all is known. Being it, you have arrived.

Osho, The Wisdom of the Sands, Vol. 2, Ch 8, Q 2 - OSHO TIMES ARTICLE