Life is a dream.

A sense of possession... Everyone tries to possess their beloved. But this is no longer love. In fact, if you possess a person, you hate, destroy, and kill; you are a murderer. Love should give freedom; love is freedom. Love will make the beloved more and more free, love will give them wings, love will open up boundless skies. It cannot become a prison, an enclosure. But you do not know such love, because it happens only in awareness; this quality of love comes only when there is awareness. You know that love is a sin because it comes from sleep. And the same is true for everything else. If you try to do something good, it causes harm. Look at benevolent people: they always cause harm; they are the biggest pests in the world. Social reformers, so-called revolutionaries, are the biggest pests. But it is difficult to see what their harm consists of, because they are very good people who always do good to others—this is their way of creating a prison for the other. If you let them do something good for you, you will become their property. It starts with them massaging your feet, but sooner or later you will find that their hands are reaching for your throat! They start with the feet and end with the throat, because they are not aware; they do not know what they are doing. They have learned this trick—if you want to possess someone, do good to them. They don't even realize that they have learned this trick. But they will cause harm, because any—any!—attempt to possess another person, in any form and under any name, is a sin. Your churches, your temples, your mosques—they have all committed sins against you, because they have become owners, they have all become rulers. Every church is against religion, because religion is freedom! Why is this happening? Jesus is trying to give you religion, to give you wings. What happens then, how does this church interfere? It happens because Jesus lives on an absolutely different level of being, on a different level of awareness; and those who listen to him, those who follow him, live on the level of sleep. Whatever they hear, they interpret it, and they interpret it according to their own dreams. And everything they create will be a sin. Christ gives you religion, and then people who are sound asleep turn it into a church. It is said that one day Satan, the devil, was sitting under a tree, very sad. A saint passed by; he looked at Satan and said: “We have heard that you never rest, that you are always doing some harmful deed. How is it that you are sitting under this tree doing nothing?” Satan was very depressed. He said: “It seems that all my work has been taken over by the priests, and I can do nothing—I am completely unemployed. Sometimes I think about suicide, because the priests are doing so well.” The priests are doing so well because they have turned freedom into prisons, they have turned truth into dogmas—they have translated everything from the level of awareness to the level of sleep. Try to understand what sleep is exactly, because if you can feel what it is, you have already begun to become aware—you are already on the way to waking up from it. What is this sleep? How does it happen? What is its mechanism? What is the principle of its operation, the modus operandum? The mind is always either in the past or in the future. It cannot be in the present; it is absolutely impossible for the mind to be in the present. When you are in the present, the mind is no more—because the mind means thinking. How can you think in the present? You can think about the past; it has already become part of memory, the mind can work on it. You can think about the future; it does not yet exist, but the mind can dream about it. The mind can do two things. It moves either into the past—there is enough space to move in; the space of the past is limitless; you can continue endlessly—or into the future; again, a limitless space, an infinite space in which you can imagine, fantasize, and dream. But how can the mind act in the present? There is no space in the present in which the mind can move. The present is just a dividing line, that is all. There is no space in it. It divides the past and the future—just a dividing line. You can be in the present, but you cannot think; to think, you need space. Thoughts require space; they are like things. Remember this: thoughts are subtle things, they are material. Thoughts are not spiritual, because the dimension of the spiritual begins only when there are no thoughts. Thoughts are material things, very subtle, and every material thing requires space. You cannot think in the present. In the moment you begin to think, you are already in the past. You see the rising sun; you see it and say: “What a beautiful sunrise!”—this is already the past. When the sun rises, there is not even space to say, “How beautiful!” because when you utter these two words, “How beautiful!”—this experience is already in the past, the mind has already recorded it in memory. But in that very moment when the sun rises, in that very moment when the sun is rising, how can you think? What can you think? You can be the rising sun, but you cannot think. There is enough space for you—but not for thoughts. You see a beautiful flower in the garden and say: “What a beautiful rose”—you are no longer with that rose in that moment; it is already a memory. When there is a flower and there is you, and you both are present for each other, how can you think? What can you think? How is thinking possible? There is no space for it. The space is so narrow—in fact, there is no space at all—and you and the flower cannot exist as two, because there is not enough space for two to exist; only one can exist. That is why in deep presence you are the flower, and the flower has become you. When there is no thinking, who is the flower, and who is the one who is observing it? The observer becomes the observed. Suddenly, the boundaries are lost. Suddenly, you have penetrated, you have penetrated into the flower, and the flower has penetrated into you. Suddenly, you are not two—there is only one. If you begin to think, you have again become two. If you do not think, where is this duality? When you exist with the flower, without thinking, it is a dialogue—not a duality, but a dialogue. When you exist with your beloved, it is a dialogue, not a duality, because there are no two. Sitting next to your beloved, holding your beloved's hand, you simply exist. You are not thinking about the times that have passed and are gone; you are not thinking about the future that is coming—you are here, now. And it is so beautiful to be here and now, and so intense, that no thought can penetrate into this intensity. The gate is narrow; the gate of the present is narrow. Even two cannot enter it at the same time, only one. In the present, thinking is impossible, dreaming is impossible, because dreaming is nothing but thinking in pictures. Both are things, both are material. When you are in the present, without thinking, you become spiritual for the first time. A new dimension opens up—the dimension of awareness. Because you do not know this dimension, Heraclitus says that you are sleeping, you are not aware. Awareness means: to be in the moment so totally that there is no movement into the past, no movement into the future—all movement stops. This does not mean that you become frozen. A new movement begins, a movement inward. Osho