If all these realities are made known, then life will become impossible. So we create fantasies, fables, fictions, to create some consolation, to create a little cozy atmosphere. If it is not real, at least you can dream, you can fantasize, you can believe that if it is not real today, tomorrow it is going to be real. Go on kissing the frog, and sooner or later he will become a prince. These are make-believes.
People believe in the immortality of the soul because they are conscious of death — not that they know the soul is immortal, but just because they see everybody dying, they know the certainty of death. Now, how to escape from a certainty? Create a fiction.
Remember, I am not saying that the soul is not eternal, I am simply saying that people's belief that the soul is eternal is a fiction. The belief is a fiction.
People believe in a God who cares, because they feel so uncared for. Nobody cares about them, they feel so left alone, nobody seems to be interested in them; whether they live or die will not matter. They have to create a father figure high in heaven who cares for them. Even if nobody cares, God cares. It is a great solace.
In the name of religion, in the name of literature, in the name of poetry, music, we have been creating fictions — we create a few buffers around ourselves, so the shocks of reality don't reach to us.
You must have seen buffers in railway trains.
Between two bogies, two compartments, there are buffers, so if somehow some accident happens, the compartments don't run into each other and the shock of the accident can be absorbed by the buffers. Cars have springs so that you don't feel the bumps on rough roads. Those springs go on absorbing the bumps, the shocks; they are shock-absorbers.
Man has created many psychological shock-absorbers around himself. And what I would like to say to you is this: that unless you drop all shock-absorbers you are never going to be free.
Only truth liberates. And in the beginning, truth shocks very much — but that's how it is, that's how things are, that's how nature functions. You have to open yourself, you have to be vulnerable to all the shocks of life.
It will hurt, it will wound, you will cry, you will weep, you will be in a rage against life. But slowly slowly you will start seeing that truth is truth, and it is pointless to be in a rage against truth. And once the rage has subsided, the truth has a beauty of its own. Truth liberates.
It frightens, it scares, but that is the only way you can grow. Growth has to be with reality, not against reality. And once you have tasted something of reality as it is, you will never gather any other buffers, shock-absorbers, around you again.
OSHO