You said the other day to ignore negative mind contents and not give energy to them. I find it difficult to stay on the razor’s edge of ignoring without falling into suppressing and thus putting things back into the unconscious. Can you please tell me how to discriminate between these two?
You already know it. Your question contains the discrimination. You know perfectly well when you are ignoring and when you are suppressing.
Ignoring simply means not paying attention to it. Something is there; let it be there. You are unconcerned this way or that, whether it should remain or go. You have no judgment. You have simply accepted it is there, and it is none of your business whether it should be there or not.
In suppressing you are taking an active part. You are wrestling with that energy; you are forcing it into the unconscious. You are trying not to be able to see it anywhere. You want to know that it is no longer there.
For example, anger is there. Just sit silently and watch that the anger is there. Let it remain. How long can it remain? Do you think it is something immortal, eternal? Just as it has come, it will be gone. You simply wait. You don’t do anything about it, for or against. If you do something for, you are expressing it, and when you are expressing it you are getting into a mess because the other person may not be a meditator – most probably he will not be. He will also react with greater rage. Now you are in a vicious circle.
You are angry, you made the other angry, and you go on becoming angry with each other more and more. Sooner or later your anger will become almost a solid rock of hatred, violence, and while you are moving in this vicious circle you are losing consciousness. You may do something for which you will repent later on. You may murder, you may kill or at least you may attempt to. And after the episode is over you may wonder: “I had never thought that I could murder somebody!” But you created the energy, and energy can do anything. Energy is neutral: it can create, it can destroy; it can light your house, it can set your house on fire.
Ignoring means you are not doing anything about it. The anger is there. Just take note of it, that anger is there, just the way you see a tree is there outside. Do you have to do something about it? A cloud is moving in the sky; do you have to do something about it? Anger is also a cloud moving on the screen of your mind. So watch; let it move.
And it is not a question of being on a razor’s edge. Don’t make small things into big things. This is a very small thing and can be done very simply; you just have to accept that it is there. Don’t try to remove it, don’t try to act upon it, and don’t feel ashamed that you are angry. Even if you feel ashamed, you have started acting. Can’t you be a non-doer?
Sadness is there, anger is there: just watch. And be ready for a surprise; if you can watch, and your watchfulness is uncontaminated, is pure – you are really not doing anything but simply looking – the anger will slowly pass by. The sadness will disappear, and you will be left with such a clean consciousness.
You were not so clean before because the possibility of anger was there. Now that possibility has become actual and it is gone with the anger. You are far cleaner. You were not so silent, so peaceful; now you are. Sadness had taken up some energy. It would not have allowed you a deep sense of happiness, it would have clouded your consciousness.
And all the other negative emotions are eating your energy. They are all there because you have repressed them, and they are repressed so you don’t let them out. You have closed the door and you have put them in the basement; they cannot escape. Even if they want to escape, you won’t let them out. And they will disturb your whole life. In the night they will become nightmares, ugly dreams. In the day they will affect your actions.
And there is always a possibility that some emotion may become too big to control. You have been repressing and repressing and repressing, and the cloud is becoming bigger. And a point comes when you cannot control it anymore. Then something happens, which the world will see as you doing, but only those who know can see you are not doing it: you are under a very great impulsive force. You are behaving like a robot; you are helpless.
You are murdering, you are raping, you are doing something ugly, but in fact you are not doing it. You have collected all that material which has become so powerful that now it can force you to do things – things in spite of you, things against you. Even while you are doing it you know it is not right. You know, “I should not be doing it. Why am I doing it?” but still you will do it.
Many murderers in many courts of the world have said very honestly that they have not murdered. But the court cannot believe it, the law cannot believe it. I can believe it – because the courts and the law are all primitive. They have not come to maturity. They are not yet psychologically based. They are simply the revenge of the society – put into beautiful words, but it is really nothing but the same thing the man has done… he has murdered, now the society wants to murder him.
He was alone. But the society has the law, the court, the police, the jail. And it will go through a long ritual to prove to itself, “We are not murdering the man, we are simply trying to prevent crime.” But this is not the fact. If you want to prevent crime, then your law should be based more on psychology, psychoanalysis, meditation. Then you will be able to see that no man has ever done anything wrong, just your whole society is wrong.
The society is wrong because it teaches people to repress, and when they repress there comes a point when what they have repressed starts overflowing and they are simply helpless. They are victims. All your criminals are victims, and all your judges and all your politicians and priests are criminals. But this has been going on for centuries so it has become accepted.
Don’t do anything, just ignore… and it is not difficult, it is a very simple phenomenon. For example, this plant is here. Can’t you ignore it? Do you have to do something about it? There is no need to do anything about it.
Just take a look at the contents of your mind from a distance, just a little distance, so that you can see, “This is anger, this is sadness, this is anguish, this is anxiety, this is worry,” and so on and so forth. Let them be there. ”I am unconcerned. I am not going to do anything for or against.” And they will start disappearing.
And if you can learn a simple thing, of letting these things disappear from the conscious, you will have such a clarity of consciousness… your vision will be so penetrating, your insight so far-reaching that not only will it change your individuality, it will allow the repressed contents in the unconscious to surface. Seeing that you have learned not to repress, things are moving out. They want to go out into the world.
Nobody wants to live in your basement in the darkness. Seeing that you are allowing things to move out, they need not wait for the night when you are asleep; they will start coming up. You will see them coming up from the basement of your being and moving out from your consciousness. Slowly your unconscious will be empty.
And this is the miracle, the magic: if the unconscious is empty, the wall between the conscious and unconscious collapses. It all becomes consciousness. First you had only one-tenth of your mind conscious; now you have all ten parts together conscious. You are ten times more conscious. And the process can go deeper; it can release the collective unconscious. The key is the same. It can release the cosmic unconscious.
And if you can clean all the unconscious parts below your consciousness, you will have such a beautiful awareness that to enter into the superconscious will be as easy as a bird taking wing.
It is your open sky. It is just that you were so loaded… so much weight that you could not fly. Now there is no weight. You are so light that gravitation loses its force over your mind; you can fly to the superconscious, to the collective conscious, to the cosmic conscious.
Godliness is within your reach. You just have to release the devils you have been keeping in your consciousness, forcing them into unconsciousness. Release those devils, and godliness is within your reach. And both things can happen together: as the lower part is cleaned, the upper world becomes available to you. And remember, again I say, it is a simple process.
-Osho
From The Path of the Mystic, Discourse #35, Q3
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