39. Fantasy blinds you to Reality🔗

The first energy center is the root center or muladhara chakra. If your imagination is added to it, it results in a distortion of your basic perception of reality. You start seeing everything as larger than life. You start expecting the things which can never happen.

Projecting your magnified expectation on reality is called fantasy. For example, in a relationship, you will always feel that the other is not fulfilling you. You start imagining things, you start projecting things, you start creating things, and when you see that it is not happening through the other person, you start blaming the other person. That is why you constantly feel the other person is cheating you, depriving you. Please understand, it is your fantasy which is creating the expectation of things which can never happen or which never happened.

If your imagination is added to greed, even simple things feel like heaven. Many people come and tell me their experiences about their vacation and show me the photographs. They post all those vacation photographs on the refrigerator, and they again and again look at them and remember the vacation in a way much bigger than it really happened! They forget that even their smile was a posed smile!

I can't connect with the idea of vacation at all. What is vacation? Wherever you go, you are going to carry the same mind, the same wife, the same life.

If you are sitting and worrying in the house, it is called housework; if you are sitting and worrying in the office, it is called business; if you are sitting and worrying on the beach, it is called a vacation, that's all! But when your imagination is added to your greed, things look much greener and more joyful than they actually were when you experienced them.

Even a small action, even a simple rose, starts looking like a symbol of eternal love, 'You see? She loves me! I love her! We will love each other for ever and ever!'

A small story: A man is watching his wife arrange her favorite pieces of modern art around their new home. 'I hate this modern art', he says, 'What a piece of junk that is! Don't you have better taste than this?' His wife says, 'How can you say that! That is a Picasso.' 'What about this one, with all the crazy lines? You like that?' She says, 'Of course! That is a Kandinsky.' This guy says, 'Come on! Just look at this one - a guy with a pencil neck, a blob of a nose and squinty eyes! You call that great art?' 'No', says his wife, 'That is a mirror.'

When you are caught in greed, if you are fantasizing about everything, you will not have the awareness to see your own reality.

When you are caught in greed, not only will you suffer with the other person, you will suffer with yourself also.

You will never face reality.

Please understand, if you are fantasizing about somebody else, you will have to wake up sometime, because fulfilling your fantasy continuously will be a big headache for the other person, and they are going to drop it sometime. At some point, you will realize that your fantasy is just your fantasy. But if you create a fantasy about yourself and torture yourself, you will never be able to come out of it.

That is what almost all the people who misunderstand yoga start doing! I have seen many people who think they are yogis, who torture their bodies in the name of yoga.

Once, during my spiritual wandering, I saw a guy who had been standing on one leg for twelve years! I offered my respects to him and asked, 'What is the purpose of your tapas, your spiritual practice?'

The man did not answer immediately. After the crowd around him left and we were alone, he said, 'Baba, initially I started doing it just as an exercise. When so many people started giving me attention and respect, I started enjoying it, and finally it became my lifestyle. Now, after being worshipped by so many thousands of people all these years, I cannot tolerate going back to being an ordinary man!'

Please understand, he is torturing himself just to fulfill his fantasy of greatness. He is just a crippled man, because his unused leg is practically dead after all these years. He has sacrificed his leg to fulfill his fantasy!

Sometimes, even too many unfulfilled fantasies about life can make you renounce everything. There are some people who go on fantasizing about having billions of dollars and living a wealthy life with all luxuries. But in their life, they are able to make only very little. Because of their fantasy about wealth, they are not able to tolerate the reality of their life. After many failures, they decide, 'I am not interested in this anymore.' This is not out of the right understanding about their fantasy; it is just frustration. Renunciation out of frustration is not renunciation!

Vikalpa needs to be understood in a very deep sense. Not only imagination related to others, even imagination related to yourself and life, will bring endless suffering to you.

Recall any three incidents where you projected your magnified expectation on someone else, causing suffering for them and for you. Now, complete with those incidents and move on.