The first question:

Osho,
I feel that we need to hurry, that there is not much time left. The cocoon of slumber I am existing in seems to suffocate me, and I am afraid I will never make it.
You say the goose is out already. Why does it feel so impossible to grasp?

It is difficult to grasp because the goose is out; if it were in there would be no difficulty in grasping it. The bottle is dead, you can grasp it. The bottle is like philosophy, theology, dogma, creed, cult, doctrine – just a corpse. The goose is alive, it is life itself; you cannot grasp it. It is not conceptual, it is existential. Who is going to grasp whom?

You are the goose! The mind is your bottle, and the mind is not something that can be broken. It is not material; it is just a thought, an imagination, the same stuff as dreams are made of. You cannot destroy a dream, you cannot kill a dream, you cannot cut a dream with a sword, you cannot burn it with fire. You just have to be awake and the dream disappears. In fact, to say that the dream disappears is not right, because it was not there in the first place; it only appeared to be there.

That is the meaning of the Eastern word maya: illusion, a mirage – it appears but it exists not. You can see the horizon far away – it appears, it appears real. It seems that the earth is meeting the sky there; just a little effort and you will reach it. It seems within your capacity to reach it, but you can never reach it for the simple reason that it is only an appearance, it is not a reality. The earth and the sky never meet, there is no meeting place. So the closer you come to the so-called horizon, the more the horizon goes on and on disappearing ahead of you. The distance between you and the horizon always remains constant.

Albert Einstein says that the only thing constant in existence is the speed of light. I am not a physicist, I don’t know whether he is right or wrong, but I know one thing which is absolutely constant and that is the distance between you and the horizon. That is absolutely constant – not a single inch less can it be, not a single inch more can it be. The difference, the distance, between the real and the unreal cannot be reduced.

The mind is unreal, hence it is not really a question of coming out of it, it is only a question of seeing.