Imagination

The faculty of intuition and the faculty of creating your own reality are absolutely not only different, but diametrically opposite things. Intuition is only a mirror. It does not create anything, it only reflects. It reflects that which is. It is pure, silent, crystal clear water reflecting the stars and the moon. It does not create anything. It is the clarity that in the East has been called the third eye. Eyes don't create anything, they simply inform you what is there.
Creating one's own reality is called imagination – that is the faculty of dreaming. In the night, you create so many things in your dreams. And the most amazing thing is that your whole life you have been dreaming every night, and you know every morning that was a dream – not real. But when the night comes again, and you fall asleep and your imagination starts spreading its wings, no doubts arises in you – without any doubt you accept its reality.
This faculty of imagination can function in other ways also. It creates your dreams – which you know are not real. But when they come, and you are surrounded by them, they appear absolutely real – more real than the real world. Because in the real world once in a while you can suspect, you can doubt. For example, this very moment you are capable of doubting whether what you are seeing here or hearing here is real, or if you have fallen asleep and you are seeing a dream. It can be a dream. You will know only when you wake up.
This is the only distinction: in reality, you can doubt -- “it could be a dream” -- but in a dream you cannot wonder if it is a dream. That's the only distinction between dream and reality. Reality allows your reason; imagination does not allow your reason.
The same faculty can create daydreams: you are just sitting silently, not doing anything, and a dream starts floating in your eyes; you are awake but you start thinking about being the president of the country. Because you are awake, an undercurrent knows that you are having stupid ideas; but still they are so sweet that one goes on dreaming that one has become a world conqueror, or the richest man in the world. He's awake, but he's creating a dream. If this becomes too much, you loose your sanity. You can go into any madhouse, any psychiatric hospital, and you will be suprised how people are living in their imaginations: talking to people who are not there – not only talking, but even answering from their side – and there is no doubt, no skepticism.
Imagination can create a kind of insanity if it starts believing in its own daydreams – it can create hallucinations. As far as I'm concerned, your so called saints, great religious leaders who have seen God, who have met God, who have talked with God, are in that category. Their God is just their imagination.
There is a certain method if you want to check it. The time needed is at least three weeks, and you have to do two things to prepare the ground to create a hallucination. Then you can see Jesus Christ standing before you, or Gautam Buddha, and you can have a good chitchat. You can ask questions and you will be answered – although nobody else will see that somebody is there, but that is their fault. They don't have the spiritual height to see the invisible. Two basic things are needed: One is a three-week fast. The more hungry you are, the less your intelligence functions, because intelligence needs a certain amount of vitamins continuously – if they are not supplied, it starts getting dim. In three weeks' time it stop functioning. So the first thing is to put the intelligence to sleep. That's why the religions prescribe fasting as a great religious discipline. But the psychology behind it is that within three weeks your intelligence starts to go sleep. And the imagination can function perfectly well – there is nobody to doubt.
The second requirement is aloneness – move to a place in a mountain, in a forest, in a cave, where you are absolutely alone. Because man is brought up in a society, he has always lived with people. He's talking the whole day – yakkety-yak, yakkety-yak. At night he's talking in his dreams, and from the morning he starts and goes on till he goes to sleep. If there is nobody to talk to, he starts praying to God. That is talking to God, that is a respectable way of being crazy.
Within three weeks' time.... after the second week, he starts talking aloud. After the first week, he starts talking to himself, but he knows that nobody should hear it; otherwise, they will think him mad. But by the end of the second week that fear is gone, because intelligence is getting dull. By the second week he starts talking aloud. By the third week, he starts seeing the person he wanted to meet: Jesus Christ, Krishna, Mahavir, Gautam Buddha, a dead friend, or anybody else. After three weeks, he's capable of visualizing the person so clearly that our ordinary reality look pale. Hence, religions have supported both these strategies: fasting, and going into isolation. That is the way, the scientific way, to go into a hallucinatory experience.

(Osho)