What do you mean by “The Psychology of the Buddhas?” How is it different from the present psychology that prevails in the world?
The present psychology is not yet comprehensive enough; it touches only the periphery of human individuality. It remains confined to the mind. It is not right to call it “psychology.” Psychology means “the science of the soul” and the present psychology is not only, not the science of the soul, it denies even the existence of the soul.
The moment you deny the soul, consciousness, something which is beyond the mind but within you… This denial is not an ordinary denial because it destroys the whole dignity of man. It takes away his very center. He becomes center-less, soul-less, just a robot.
The right name for modern psychology is “robotology” because it studies only the mechanical behavior of man and the mechanics of mind. Its studies cannot go very deep for the simple reason that if mind is all and there is nothing more to life than mind, you cannot ever become one, undivided.
To be divided is the nature of the mind; to be always balanced between opposites – love and hate, courage and fear, yes and no, atheism and theism.
Mind does not feel at ease unless it has divided a thing in two. It cannot conceive of light unless it is contrasted with darkness, it cannot conceive of life unless it is defined by death.
And because psychology remains within the boundaries of the mind it cannot help man to grow to his potential heights. Psychology will discourage you: spiritual search is nothing but a mirage, the seeking of truth is hallucinatory.
It is not a coincidence that we are the most intelligent generation, because ten thousand years of growth is within us. So on the one hand it is the most intelligent generation that has ever existed and on the other hand, because of psychology spreading these poisonous ideas – that there is no consciousness, no soul, no life beyond death, and man is just matter; that mind is also nothing but a certain combination of material elements – this has created a very strange situation. Intelligence is pulling man towards more growth and the people who deal with growth are pulling man backwards, telling him, ”There is no beyond, just be normal – that is more than you can dream of.”
”Just to be normal” is the goal of psychology.
A great goal: just to be normal.
People have lived for thousands of years without any psychology – and normally. In fact, as you go backwards you will not find so many murders, you will not find so many suicides, you will not find so many rapes, you will not find so many sexual perversions. As you go back they start becoming less. Primitive man was more innocent than you are. He was not as intelligent as you are, but he was more innocent. You inherit his innocence but you are keeping it repressed.
The combination of intelligence and innocence is meditation. The moment innocence and intelligence start growing within you… it is not that you become capable of solving all the problems of the mind, but a totally new thing happens: you start going beyond mind. The problems of the mind are left far behind, as if they never belonged to you – in fact they never belonged to you.
And once you know how to slip out of your mind, a totally different psychology will be founded on the art of slipping out of the mind. A person who can get out of his mind helps the mind to cool down. The mind is getting no more energy – it cools, calms down on its own accord. That’s why I have said meditation is a medicine too – and both words come from the same root.
Once your intelligence and your innocence are available to you, just like two wings, the whole sky is yours. There are no more boundaries for you.
I have called the psychology that is based on meditation the psychology of the buddhas. Modern psychology is the psychology of people who are asleep.
It has to be understood; the people who came to Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychology, were all sick people – obviously, otherwise why should they come to the psychoanalyst? They were seriously sick, their minds were falling apart. Sigmund Freud came in contact only with sick people – that gave him the impression that man himself is sick. In a way he is logical because everybody he examined, everybody he analyzed, everybody he treated was sick. And these were high-class people, bourgeois – professors, scientists, very rich people – because a psychoanalyst’s time is the costliest thing in the world today. All these people were basically living an insane life, but because everybody else is also living the same insane life you don’t become aware of it.
If Sigmund Freud denied that there is any possibility of a soul in man he cannot be blamed. He never came across a Gautam Buddha; he never came across a man who had gone beyond mind.
The trouble was these people who have gone beyond mind have no reason to go to Sigmund Freud. And Sigmund Freud is afraid to go to such people because they are against the very foundation upon which he has raised a whole empire – certainly there was a great vested interest. If just a simple method of meditation can help a person… not only to be normal, because to be normal can never be accepted as the goal. That means you remain a mediocre person for your whole life; you never go beyond the boundaries of the society. In everything you remain half-hearted, there is no intensity, there is no totality.
A normal person is wishy-washy, just in a limbo, neither here nor there… hanging in between.
It is unfortunate that the great psychologists of the West had no opportunity to know the mystic and to become acquainted with his world – which is absolutely extraordinary. He lives twenty-four hours among you, but not with you; his kingdom is far away. He has tasted love, of which you have been only dreaming. He has experienced truth, of which you have been only thinking and philosophizing.
He has encountered existence directly without any mediation of a priest, a prophet, a savior. He has seen existence in its freshness. He is not a Christian, he is not a Hindu – because these are so old, so full of dust and borrowed, they cannot give you a transformation.
Remember one thing: unless the truth is your own experience, whatever you believe about truth is only a belief. And all beliefs are lies, and all believers are blind.
The psychology of the buddhas means that we accept man as a three-storied building. There are a few who remain only on the ground floor, only in their bodies; all their interests are centered in the body – this is the lowest life for someone to choose, as if you are living on the porch when the whole building is yours.
The second level of life is that of a well-understood mind – but who is going to understand the mind?
You can see the difficulty of the psychologist: he studies the mind but if you ask who is studying the mind…. Mind cannot study itself.
There must be something beyond – a witness, a watcher who studies the mind. The scientist is studying only from the outside. He is studying the behavior of other people and from their behavior he is deducting principles upon which human behavior is based. But his observation is of the behavior, not of the real being inside. He can be deceived.
You can be sad but you can smile, you can hold back the tears. Or if you are a little artful, you can manage to bring crocodile tears. Your behavior is not reliable. We don’t know what is happening inside you, whether your behavior is an expression of your inside or it is a camouflage, hiding you in beautiful garage.
Buddha accepts three steps: the body, the mind, the consciousness. Even the consciousness is only a step.
These three steps lead to the temple of the divine, of the immortal, of beauty, of celestial music…. You start touching heights, Himalayan heights where you can find virgin snow which has never melted.
In your inner being also you are carrying greater peaks than Everest, with eternal beauty.
The psychology of the buddhas is comprehensive of the whole individuality of man – and it does not end there. By studying, by experiencing the body, the mind, the consciousness, and the beyond, Buddha is preparing you to dissolve into the universal.
Just like a dewdrop slipping from a lotus leaf into the lake…. On a beautiful morning the sun is rising and the whole sky is so colorful… just a cool breeze is there, but it is enough for the rose petals, for other flowers… for the lotus….
In the early morning sun the dewdrops on the lotus petals look like pearls – or it will be better to say that pearls look like the dewdrops. They are slipping slowly, slowly towards the vast ocean, in which they will be lost and yet not lost. As dewdrops they will be lost, but they will emerge as the whole ocean.
Unless psychology can bring human beings to this oceanic experience it is immature, it has just started its ABC’s. And in the West it is going around in a circle – because you do not accept higher realities; where can you go? You are stuck with the mind – analyze it, analyze its dreams, analyze its repressions. But it should be taken as a very significant question that there is not a single man in the whole world who is completely analyzed. This is a failure of the whole system of psychoanalysis – twelve years, fifteen years people have been in psychoanalysis and they have not moved anywhere. Yes, they have learned psychological jargon; it has become more difficult to talk with them! But they are the same persons with all the weaknesses, with all the frailties. Twelve or fifteen years of psychoanalysis has not been able to a make even a single dent in their personality.
It is a rich man’s game. Just as poor people have their games; rich people have their own games. Psychology is still a game, guesswork, with no foundation in reality.
The mystics in the East have never bothered too much about the mind; they have only developed methods to bypass the mind. Those methods are the techniques of meditation – they are just to bypass the mind.
Once you have bypassed the mind, once you can have a bird’s-eye view of your own mind, things start settling.
It is your energy that disturbs the mind, that gives it the power to be violent, to be sad, to be angry, to be hateful, to be jealous. Now you are no longer giving it any energy.
It won’t take a long time. The mind withers almost like a cloud – it was there and it is no more.
The moment mind disperses; your meditation has come to maturity. Now your meditation will be the medium, not the mind. The mind will be used as a mechanism by your meditative forces, but mind is put aside; it is no longer the master. And it is one of the strangest stories that for ten thousand years in the East we have worked on meditation and we have been absolutely successful, not only in becoming meditative, but also in dissolving all the problems of the mind.
There is only one way to solve the mind and its problems, and that is to get out of it.
But modern psychology has no idea of where to go, so they go on around and around but they remain just ordinary beings. Now Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler and Assagioli have devoted their whole lives… but you don’t see the eyes of Gautam Buddha, you don’t see the gestures of Mahavira, you don’t see the insight of the seers of Upanishads. You don’t see the transforming presence which all the mystics in all the countries have always radiated.
In my way of looking at things, mind itself is sick. Unless you get out of it, you cannot help the poor mind to become healthy. You are too much identified.
Not being identified with the mind is the shortest way to your own being. And your being is always healthy; it does not know what sickness is. It cannot know, it is not in its nature. Just as mind cannot know peace, your being cannot know tensions, anxieties, anguish. The question is not of curing the mind; the question is shifting your whole energy, your whole focus, from mind to being.
Meditation helps you to shift.
This great shift of your attention, of your awareness, is what I call the psychology of the buddhas. And any other psychology is going to be wrong, because only a man of eyes knows what light is. There may be millions of people who are blind – there are millions, but it is not a question of democracy. They cannot vote, they cannot assert a single word about light. That one man is right and those millions of people are wrong.
The question is not of numbers. The only question that is significant is the transformation of your being from mind to no-mind.
Modern psychology thinks it is the science of the mind.
The psychology of the buddhas will be the science of no-mind.
-Osho
From Sermons in Stones, Discourse #14
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Sat Sangha Salon 