Osho,
In discourse when you say things like, “Live totally in the moment,” I always think, “Of course!…that’s it! From now on I am only going to do that.” And of course, a moment later I have forgotten already. In every discourse I decide the time has come to be more meditative, more religious, more loving, more aware – and I immediately forget.

Is it possible that just by sitting with you, one of these days I will really get it in spite of myself?

It is possible you may get it in spite of yourself. But your question is very significant. If you look at it, you can see what is going wrong. You listen to me talking about living totally, intensively…moment to moment, living now, living here and you say to yourself, “Of course, that is it! I am going to do it.” It is not that later on you forget it; you have already forgotten it. By saying, “Of course! this is it,” by deciding that you are going to do it, you have already postponed it for tomorrow; by deciding that you are going to live this way, you have already missed the point.

You have missed the point now.

You think that later on you find you have forgotten it just a moment afterwards. You are not forgetting it just a moment afterwards; you have not listened to it at all! Otherwise you would not say, “Of course! This is it!” You would simply understand it nonverbally. You would not verbalize it, because in verbalizing it you are missing the moment…the moment is a very small thing.

Your mind is really deceiving you. Your mind is saying, “I have understood it, don’t be worried. Of course, this is it! We are going to live this way.” But when? The question was now, and your mind has already postponed it. The question was here, and the mind has already brought the future in. It is not that you forget later on; later on you only recognize that you have forgotten. But the truth is that you have not even understood, because if you understand it there is no possibility of forgetting it.

A truth has a quality: understood, it is impossible to forget it. That’s why if you are a man of truth you need not remember it. But if you are accustomed to lying, then you need a very good memory, because then you have to remember continually what lie you had told this man yesterday, and you have to repeat the same lie – because meanwhile you may have been lying to other people, about other things. A liar has to be very very alert, and if he is caught, then he has to be very logical, almost a sophist, so he can manage.

One Sufi story is that Mulla Nasruddin was chosen by the Shah of Iran to go to the king of India as his messenger, to make a friendship between two great countries. All the other important people in the court of the Shah of Iran were very jealous. They were trying in every way to spoil Nasruddin’s journey, to create in the mind of the king antagonism against Nasruddin, and they were spying on Nasruddin to find out what he was doing.