Tag: Freud

Witnessing is a Revolution – Osho

You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the nonexistence of our problems.

Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family, and having spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system – are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and all the repressions do not exist, can be dropped immediately – now?

What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?

This is a very significant question – it is from Jayananda. The question is significant because it shows two different approaches concerning the inner reality of man.

The Western approach is to think about the problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning, to uncondition the mind, or to recondition the mind, to recondition the body, to take out all those imprints that have been left on the brain – this is the Western approach. Psychoanalysis goes into the memory; it works there. It goes into your childhood, into your past; it moves backwards. It finds out from where the problem has arisen – maybe fifty years before, when you were a child, the problem arose in your relationship with your mother, then psychoanalysis will go back.

Fifty years of history! It is a very long, dragging affair. And even then, it doesn’t help much – because there are millions of problems. It is not only a question of one problem. You can go into one problem’s history; you can look into your autobiography and find out the causes. Maybe you can eliminate one problem, but there are millions of problems. If you start going into each problem to solve one life’s problems, you will need millions of lives. Let me repeat it: to solve one life’s problems you will have to be born again and again, millions of times. This is most impractical. This cannot be done. And all those millions of lives when you will be solving the problems of this life, those lives will create their own problems . . . and so on and so forth. You will be dragged more and more into the problems. This is absurd!

Now, the same psychoanalytical approach has gone into the body: Rolfing, bioenergetics, and other methods are there which try to eliminate imprints on the body, in the musculature. Again, you have to go into the history of the body. But one thing is certain about both the approaches – which are on the same logical pattern – that the problem comes from the past, so somehow it has to be tackled in the past.

Man’s mind has always been trying to do two impossible things. One is: to reform the past – which cannot be done. The past has happened. You cannot really go into the past. When you think of going into the past, at the most you go into the memory of it; it is not the real past, it is just the memory. The past is no more there, so you cannot reform it. This is one of the impossible goals of humanity; man has suffered very much because of it. You want to undo the past – how can you undo it? The past is absolute. The past means: all potentiality of it is finished; it has become actual. Now there is no longer any potentiality to reform it, to undo it, to redo it. You cannot do any thing with the past.

And the second impossible idea that has always dominated the human mind is: to establish the future – which again cannot be done. Future means that which is not yet; you cannot establish it. Future remains unestablished. Future remains open. Future is pure potentiality! Unless it happens, you cannot be certain about it.

Past is pure actuality – it has happened. Now nothing can be done about it.

Between these two, man stands in the present always thinking of the impossibles. He wants to make everything certain about the future, about tomorrow – which can not be done. Let it sink as deeply in your heart as possible: it cannot be done. Don’t waste your present moment for making the future certain. The future is uncertainty; that is the very quality of the future. And don’t waste your time looking back. The past has happened, it is a dead phenomenon. Nothing can be done about it. What, at the most, you can do is you can reinterpret it. That’s all. That’s what psychoanalysis is doing: reinterpreting it. Reinterpretation can be done – but the past remains the same.

Psychoanalysis and astrology: astrology tries somehow to make the future certain, and psychoanalysis tries to redo the past. Neither is a science. Both things are impossible, but both have millions of followers – because man likes it that way. He wants to be certain about the future, so he goes to the astrologer, he consults the I Ching, he goes to a Tarot reader, and there are a thousand and one ways to fool oneself, to deceive oneself.

And then there are people who say they can change the past – he consults them also.

Once these two things are dropped, you become free of all sorts of foolishnesses. Then you don’t go to the psychoanalyst and you don’t go to the astrologer. Then you know the past is finished . . . you also be finished with it. And the future has not happened; whenever it happens, we will see – nothing can be done about it right now. You can only destroy the present moment, which is the only moment available, real.

The West has been continuously looking into the problems, how to solve them. The West takes the problems very seriously. And when you are going in a certain logic, given the premises, that logic looks perfect.

I was just reading one anecdote:

A great philosopher, and world-renowned mathematician, is aboard an airplane. He is sitting in his seat and thinking great mathematical problems, when suddenly an announcement comes from the captain: “I am sorry, there will be a slight delay. Engine number one has cut out and we are now flying on three engines.”

About ten minutes later another announcement: “I am afraid there will be further delay – engines two and three have cut out and there is only number four left.”

So the philosopher turns to the fellow sitting next to him and says, “Good golly! If the other one cuts out, we will be up here all night!”

When you are thinking in a certain line, the very direction of it makes certain things possible, absurd things also possible. Once you have taken human problems very seriously, once you start thinking about man as a problem, you have accepted some premise, you have taken the first step wrongly. Now you can go into the direction, and you can go on and on. Now such great literature has come up in this century about mind phenomena, psychoanalysis; millions of papers are written and treatises and books. Once Freud opened the doors of a certain logic, it dominated the whole century.

The East has a totally different outlook. First, it says no problem is serious. The moment you say no problem is serious, the problem is almost ninety-nine percent dead. Your whole vision changes about it. The second thing the East says is: the problem is there because you are identified with it. It has nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with its history. You are identified with it – that is the real thing. And that is the key to solve all problems.

For example: you are an angry person. If you go to the psychoanalyst, he will say, “Go into the past . . . how did this anger arise? In what situations did it become more and more conditioned and imprinted on your mind? We will have to wash out all those imprints; we will have to wipe them off. We will have to clean your past completely.”

If you go to an Eastern mystic, he will say, “You think that you are anger, you feel identified with the anger – that is where things are going wrong. Next time anger happens, you just be a watcher, you just be a witness. You don’t get identified with the anger. Don’t say, ‘I am anger.’ Don’t say, ‘I am angry.’ Just see it happening as if it is happening on a TV screen. Look at yourself as if you are looking at somebody else.”

You are pure consciousness. When the cloud of anger comes around you, just watch it, and remain alert so that you don’t get identified. The whole thing is how not to become identified with the problem. Once you have learnt it . . . and then there is no question of “so many problems” – because the key, the same key will open all the locks. It is so with anger, it is so with greed, it is so with sex: it is so with everything else that the mind is capable of.

The East says: just remain unidentified. Remember – that’s what Gurdjieff means when he says “self-remembering.” Remember that you are a witness! Be mindful! – that’s what Buddha says. Be alert that a cloud is passing by! Maybe the cloud comes from the past, but that is meaningless. It must have a certain past; it cannot come just out of the blue; it must be coming from a certain sequence of events – but that is irrelevant. Why be bothered about it? Right now, this very moment, you can become detached from it, you can cut yourself away from it. The bridge can be broken right now – and it can be broken only in the now.

Going into the past won’t help. Thirty years before, the anger arose, and you got identified with it that day. Now you cannot get unidentified from that past; it is no more there. But you can get unidentified this moment, this very moment. And then the whole series of angers of your past is no more part of you.

The question is relevant. Jayananda has asked: “You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the non-existence of our problems. Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family . . .”

You can, right now, become a non-Catholic. “Now!” I say. You will not have to go back and undo whatsoever your parents and your society and the priest and the church have done. That will be a sheer wastage of precious present time. In the first place it has destroyed many years; now, again, it will be destroying your present moments. You can simply drop out of it, just as a snake slips out of the old skin.

“Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family, and having spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system – are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and all the repressions do not exist . . .?”

No, they exist. But they exist either in the body or in the brain; they don’t exist in your consciousness because the consciousness cannot be conditioned. Consciousness remains free! Freedom is its innermost quality; freedom is its nature. In fact, even asking it, you are showing that freedom.

When you say “twenty-one years in a crazy educational system”; when you say “having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family” – in this moment you are not identified. You can look: so many years of Catholic repression, so many years of a certain education. In this moment when you are looking at it, this consciousness is no longer Catholic; otherwise, who will be aware? If you had really become Catholic, then who would be aware? Then there would be no possibility of becoming aware.

If you can say “twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system,” one thing is certain: you are not yet crazy. The system has failed; it didn’t work. Jayananda, you are not crazy, hence you can see the whole system as crazy. A madman cannot see that he is mad. Only a sane person can see that this is madness. To see madness as madness, sanity is needed. Those twenty-one years of a crazy system have failed; all that repressive conditioning has failed. It cannot really succeed. It succeeds only in the proportion that you get identified with it. Any moment you can stand aloof . . . it is there, I am not saying it is not there: but it is no more part of your consciousness.

This is the beauty of consciousness: consciousness can slip out of anything. There is no barrier to it, no boundary to it. Just a moment before you were an Englishman – understanding the nonsense of nationalism, a second later you are no longer an Englishman. I am not saying that your white skin will change; it will remain white – but you are no more identified with the whiteness; you are no more against the black. You see the stupidity of it. I am not saying that just by seeing that you are no more an Englishman you will forget the English language, no. It will still be there in your memory, but your consciousness has slipped out, your consciousness is standing on a hillock looking at the valley. Now, the Englishman is dead in the valley, and you are standing on the hills, far away, unattached, untouched.

The whole Eastern methodology can be reduced to one word: witnessing. And the whole Western methodology can be reduced to one thing: analyzing. Analyzing, you go round and round. Witnessing, you simply get out of the circle.

Analysis is a vicious circle. If you really go into analysis, you will be simply puzzled – how is it possible? If, for example, you try to go into the past, where will you end? Where exactly? If you go into the past, where did your sexuality start? When you were fourteen years of age? But then it came out of the blue? It must have been getting ready in the body. So when? When you were born? But then when you were in the mother’s womb wasn’t it getting ready? Then when? The moment you were conceived? But before that? Half of your sexuality was mature in your mother’s egg and half of the sexuality was maturing in your father’s sperm. Now go on. Where will you end? You will have to go to Adam and Eve. And even then, it does not end: you will have to go to Father God Himself. Why in the first place did He create Adam? . . .

Analysis will always remain half, so analysis never helps anybody really. It cannot help. It makes you a little more adjusted to your reality, that’s all. It is a sort of adjustment. It helps you to attain a little bit of understanding about your problems, their genesis, how they have arisen. And that little intellectual understanding helps you to adjust to the society better, but you remain the same person. There is no transformation through it, there is no radical change through it.

Witnessing is a revolution. It is a radical change – from the very roots! It brings a totally new man into existence because it takes your consciousness out of all the conditionings. Conditionings are there in the body and in the mind, but consciousness remains unconditioned. It is pure, always pure. It is virgin. Its virginity cannot be violated.

The Eastern approach is to make you mindful of this virgin consciousness, of this purity, of this innocence. That’s what Saraha is saying to the king again and again. Our emphasis is on the sky and the Western emphasis is on the clouds. Clouds have a genesis; if you find out from where they come, you will have to go to the ocean, then to the sunrays and the evaporation of the water and the clouds forming . . . and you can go on, but it will be moving in a circle. The clouds form, then again, they come, fall in love with the trees, start pouring again into the earth, become rivers, go to the ocean, start evaporating, rising again on sunrays, become clouds, again fall on the earth . . . It goes on and on, round and round and round. It is a wheel. From where will you be out? One thing will lead to another, and you will be in the wheel.

The sky has no genesis. The sky is uncreated; it is not produced by anything. In fact, for anything to be, a sky is needed as a must, a priori; it has to exist before anything else can exist. You can ask the Christian theologian – he says, “God created the world.” Ask him whether before He created the world there was any sky or not. If there was no sky, where did God used to exist? He must have needed space. If there was no space, where did He create the world? Where did He put the world? Space is a must . . . even for God to exist. You cannot say, “God created space.” That would be absurd because then He would not have any space to exist. Space must precede God.

Sky has always been there. The Eastern approach is to become mindful of the sky. The Western approach makes you more and more alert to the clouds, and helps you a little, but it doesn’t make you aware of your innermost core. Circumference – yes, you become a little more aware of the circumference but not aware of the center. And the circumference is a cyclone. You have to find the center of the cyclone. And that happens only through witnessing.

Witnessing will not change your conditioning. Witnessing will not change your body musculature. But witnessing will simply give you an experience that you are beyond all musculature, all conditioning. In that moment of beyondness, in that moment of transcendence, no problem exists – not for you.

And now it is up to you. The body will still carry the musculature and the mind will still carry the conditioning – now it is up to you: if sometimes you are hankering for the problem, you can get into the mind-body and have the problem and enjoy it. If you don’t want to have it, you can remain out. The problem will remain as an imprint in the body-mind phenomenon, but you will be aloof and away from it.

That’s how a buddha functions. You also use memory; a buddha also uses memory – but he is not identified with it. He uses memory as a mechanism. For example, I am using language. When I have to use language, I use the mind and all the imprints, but continuously I am not the mind – that awareness is there. So I remain the boss, the mind remains a servant. When the mind is called, it comes; its utility is there – but it cannot dominate.

So, your question is right: problems will exist, but they will exist only in the seed form in the body and the mind. How can you change your past? You have been a Catholic in the past; if for forty years you have been a Catholic, how can you change those forty years and not be a Catholic? No. Those forty years will remain as a period of being Catholic. No – but you can slip out of it. Now you know that that was just identification. Those forty years cannot be destroyed, and there is no need to destroy them. If you are the master of the house, there is no need. You can use even those forty years in a certain way, in a creative way. Even that crazy education can be used in a creative way.

“What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?”

They will be there but as a seed: potentially there. If you feel too lonely and you want problems, you can have them. If you feel too miserable without misery, you can have them. They will remain always available, but there is no need to have them, there is no necessity to have them. It will be your choice.

The future humanity will have to decide whether it has to go on the path of analysis or it has to change to the path of witnessing. I use both methods. I use analysis, particularly for seekers who come from the West – I put them in the groups. Those groups are analytical, those groups are by-products of psychoanalysis. They have grown: Freud will not be able to recognize encounter if he comes; or primal therapy will be difficult for him to recognize – what is happening? Have all these people gone mad? But they are offshoots of his work; he was the pioneer; without him there would be no primal therapy. He started the whole game.

When Western people come to me, I put them into the groups. That is good for them. They should start with what is easier for them. Then by and by, slowly I change. First, they go into cathartic groups like encounter, primal therapy, and then I start putting them into intensive enlightenment, then vipassana. Vipassana is a witnessing. From encounter to vipassana there is a great synthesis. When you move from encounter to vipassana, you are moving from West to East.

-Osho

– From The Tantra Experience, Discourse #6, Q2 (previously titled Tantra Vision, V.1)

Copyright © OSHO International Foundation

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Happiness is Where You Are – Osho

Man is in misery, and man has remained in misery down the centuries. Rarely can you find a human being who is not miserable. It is so rare that it almost seems unbelievable. That’s why Buddhas are never believed. People don’t believe that they ever existed. People can’t believe it. They can’t believe it because of their own misery. The misery is such, and they are entangled into it so deeply, that they don’t see that any escape is possible.

The Buddhas must have been imagined — people think  Buddhas are dreams of humanity. That’s what Sigmund Freud says: Buddhas are wish-fulfilments. Man wants to be that way, man desires to be out of misery, man would like to have that silence, that peace, that benediction — but it has not happened. And Freud says there is no hope — it cannot happen by the very nature of things. Man cannot become happy.

Freud has to be listened to very keenly and very deeply. He cannot be simply rejected outright; he is one of the most penetrating minds ever. And when he says that happiness is not possible, and when he says that hoping for happiness is hoping for the impossible, he means it. His own observation of human misery led him to this conclusion. This conclusion is not that of a philosopher. Freud is not a pessimist. But observing thousands of human beings, getting deeper into their beings, he realized that man is made in such a way that he has a built-in process of being miserable. At the most he can be in comfort, but never in ecstasy. At the most we can make life a little more convenient — through scientific technology, through social change, through better economy, and through other things — but man will remain miserable all the same.

How can Freud believe that a Buddha has ever existed? Such serenity seems to be just a dream. Humanity has been dreaming about Buddha.

This idea arises because Buddha is so rare, so exceptional. He is not the rule. Why has man remained in so much misery? And the miracle is that everybody wants to be happy. You cannot find a man who wants to be miserable, and yet everybody is in misery. Everybody wants to be happy, blissful, peaceful, silent, everybody wants to be in joy, everybody wants to celebrate — but it seems impossible. Now, there must be some very deep cause, so deep that Freudian analysis could not reach it, so deep that logic cannot penetrate it.

Before we enter into the sutras, that basic thing has to be understood: Man wants happiness, that’s why he is miserable. The more you want to be happy, the more miserable you will be. Now this is very absurd, but this is the root cause. And when you understand the process of how the human mind functions you will be able to realize it.

Man wants to be happy, hence he creates misery. If you want to get out of misery, you will have to get out of your desire for happiness — then nobody can make you miserable. Here is where Freud missed. He could not understand that the very desire for happiness can be the cause of misery. How does it happen? Why in the first place do you desire happiness? And what does it do to you, the desire for happiness?

The moment you desire for happiness, you have moved away from the present, you have moved away from the existential, you have already moved into the future — which is nowhere, which has not come yet. You have moved in a dream. Now, dreams can never be fulfilling. Your desire for happiness is a dream. The dream is unreal. Through the unreal, nobody has ever been able to reach to the real. You have taken a wrong train.

The desire for happiness simply shows that you are not happy right at this moment. The desire for happiness simply shows that you are a miserable being. And a miserable being projects in the future that some time, some day, some way, he will be happy. Out of misery comes your projection. It carries the very seeds of misery. It comes out of you — it cannot be different from you. It is your child: its face will be like you; in its body your blood will be circulating. It will be your continuity.

You are unhappy today; you project tomorrow to be happy, but tomorrow is a projection of you, of your today, of whatsoever you are. You are unhappy — the tomorrow will come out of this unhappiness and you will be more unhappy. Of course, out of more unhappiness you will desire for more happiness in the future again. And then you are in a vicious circle: the more unhappy you become, the more you desire for happiness; the more you desire for happiness, the more unhappy you become. Now it is like a dog chasing its own tail.

In Zen they have a certain phrase for it. They say: Whipping the cart. If your horses are not moving and you go on whipping the cart, it is not going to help. You are miserable, then anything that you can dream and anything that you can project is going to bring more misery.

So the first thing is not to dream, not to project. The first thing is to be here-now. Whatsoever it is, just be here-now — and a tremendous revelation is waiting for you. The revelation is that nobody can be unhappy in the here-now.

Have you ever been unhappy here-now? Right this moment you are facing me: is there any possibility of being unhappy right now? You can think about the yesterday and you can become unhappy. You can think about tomorrow and you can become unhappy. But right this very moment, this throbbing, beating, real moment — can you be unhappy right now? Without any past, without any future?

You can bring misery from the past, from the memory. Somebody insulted you yesterday and you can still carry the wound, you can still carry the hurt, and you can still feel unhappy about it: Why? Why did it happen to you? Why did the man insult you? And you have been doing so much good for him, and you have been always a help, always a friend — and he insulted you! You are playing with something that is no more. The yesterday is gone.

Or you can be unhappy for tomorrow. Tomorrow your money will be finished — then where are you going to stay? Where are you going to eat? Tomorrow your money will be finished! — Then unhappiness enters in.

Either it comes from yesterday, or it comes from tomorrow, but it is never here-now. Right this moment, in the now, unhappiness is impossible. If you have learnt this much, you can become a Buddha. Then nobody is hindering your path. Then you can forget all the Freuds. Then happiness is not only possible — it has already happened, it is just in front of you. And you are missing it because you go on looking sideways.

Happiness is where you are; wherever you are, happiness is there. It surrounds you. It is a natural phenomenon. It is just like air, just like sky. Happiness is not to be sought: it is the very stuff the universe is made of. Joy is the very stuff the universe is made of. But you have to look direct; you have to look in the immediate. If you look sideways then you miss.

You miss because of you. You miss because you have a wrong approach.

-Osho

From The Buddha Said, Discourse #16

The Buddha Said

Also published in The Discipline of Transcendence, V.3, Chapter Nine

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

The Discipline of Transcendence, V.3

 

 

 

 

 

An MP3 audio file of this discourse can be downloaded from Osho.com  or you can read the entire book online at the Osho Library.

Many of Osho’s books are available in the U.S. online from Amazon.com and Viha Osho Book Distributors. In India they are available from Amazon.in and Oshoworld.com.

Beware of the Mind: It is Blind – Osho

Do I have to know and understand the roots of my old patterns in order to be able to drop them or is awareness enough?

Deva Suparni, this is the dividing line between Western psychology and Eastern mysticism. Western psychology is an effort to understand the roots of your old patterns, but it does not help anybody to get rid of them.

You become more understanding; you become more sober, you become more normal; your mind is no longer a great mess. Things are settled a little better than they ever have been before, but every problem remains the same – it simply goes dormant. You can understand your jealousy, you can understand your anger, your hate, your greed, your ambitions, but all this understanding will remain intellectual. So even the greatest psychologists of the West are far away from the Eastern mystics.

The man who founded Western psychology, Sigmund Freud, was so much afraid of death that even the mention of the word ‘death’ was enough to throw him into a coma; he would become unconscious, the paranoia of death was so great. It happened three times. He was so much afraid of ghosts that he would not pass by the side of a cemetery. Now, a man like Sigmund Freud who has tremendous intellectual acumen, who knows every root of the mind, who knows every subtle functioning of the mind, still remains confined in the mind.

Awareness leads you beyond the mind. It does not bother to understand the problems of the mind, their roots, it simply leaves the mind aside, it simply gets out of it. That is the reason why in the East there has been no development of psychology.

It is strange that for ten thousand years at least, the East has been consistently and one-pointedly working in the field of human consciousness, but it has not developed any psychology, any psychoanalysis or psychosynthesis. It is a great surprise that for ten thousand years nobody even touched the matter. Rather than understanding the mind, the East developed a totally different approach, and their approach was disidentifying with the mind: “I am not the mind.” Once this awareness becomes crystallized in you, the mind becomes impotent.

The whole power of the mind is in your identification with it. So it was found to be useless to go unnecessarily digging for roots, finding causes behind causes, working out through dreams, analyzing dreams, interpreting dreams. And every psychologist finds a different root, finds a different interpretation, finds a different cause. Psychology is not yet a science; it is still fictitious.

If you go to Sigmund Freud, your dream will be interpreted in sexual terms. His mind is obsessed with sex. Bring anything and immediately he will find an interpretation that it is sexual.

Go to Alfred Adler, the man who founded another school of psychology – analytical psychology . . . He is obsessed with another idea: will to power. So whatever you dream will be interpreted according to that idea – it is will to power. Go to Carl Gustav Jung, he interprets every dream as a faraway echo from your past lives. His interpretation is mythological. And there are many other schools.

There has been a great effort made by Assagioli – psychosynthesis – to bring all these schools together, but his psychosynthesis is absolutely useless. At least psychoanalysis has some truth in it, and analytical psychology also has some truth in it; but psychosynthesis is simply a hodgepodge. It has taken one part from one school, another part from another school, and it has joined them together.

Assagioli is a great intellectual; he could manage to put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle in the right places. But what was significant in Sigmund Freud was significant in a certain context; that context is no longer there. He has only taken what appears to be significant, but without the context it loses all meaning. Hence, Assagioli has worked his whole life for some synthesis, but he has not been able to create anything significant. And all these schools have been working hard.

But the East simply bypassed the mind. Rather than finding out the causes and roots and reasons, they found out one thing: from where does the mind get its power? From where does the energy come to feed it? The energy to feed the mind comes from your identification that “I am it.” They broke that bridge. That’s what awareness is: being aware that “I am not the body, I am not the mind. I am not even the heart; I am simply pure awareness, a sakshi.”

As this awareness deepens, becomes crystallized, the mind has more and more a shadow existence. Its impact on you loses all force. And when the awareness is a hundred percent settled, mind simply evaporates.

Western psychology has still to figure out why it is not succeeding. Thousands of people are going through psychoanalysis and through other therapeutic methods, but not a single one of them – not even the founder of those schools – can be called enlightened, can be said to be without problems, can be said to be without anxieties, anguishes, fears, paranoia. Everything exists in them as it exists in you.

Sigmund Freud was asked many times by his disciples, “You psychoanalyze all of us; we bring our dreams to you to be interpreted. It will be a great experiment if you allow us to psychoanalyze you. You give us your dreams and we will try to analyze and find out what they mean, from where they come, what they indicate.” But Sigmund Freud never agreed to that. That shows an immense weakness in the whole framework of psychoanalysis. He was afraid that they would find the same things in his dreams that he was finding in their dreams. Then his superiority as a founder, as a master would be lost.

He was not aware at all of people like Gautam Buddha or Mahavira or Nagarjuna. Because these people don’t dream, there is nothing to analyze. These people have come so far away from the mind that all connections are cut. They live out of awareness, not out of intellect. They respond out of awareness, not out of mind and its memories. And they don’t repress anything; hence there is no need for any dreaming.

Dreaming is a by-product of repression. There are aboriginal tribes where people don’t dream. Or if they dream, they dream only once in a while. They are surprised to know that civilized people dream almost the whole night. In eight hours’ sleep, six hours you are dreaming. And the aboriginal is simply sleeping eight hours in deep silence, with no disturbance. Sigmund Freud was aware only of the sick Western people. He was not aware of a man of awareness; otherwise the whole history of Western psychology would have been different.

I will not tell you, Suparni, to make an effort to understand the roots of your mind and its patterns; it is simply a useless wastage of time. Just awareness is enough, more than enough. As you become aware, you come out of the grip of the mind, and the mind remains almost a dead fossil. There is no need to bother from where the greed came, the real question is how to get out of it. The question is not from where the ego arose – these are intellectual questions which are not significant for a seeker.

And then there will be many philosophical standpoints: from where greed arose, from where ego came in; from where your jealousy, from where your hate, from where your cruelty came in – looking for the beginnings of all this. And mind is a vast complex; in fact, life is too small to figure out all the problems of the mind and their origins. Their origins may be of thousands of lives. Slowly Western psychology is coming closer to it – for example, primal therapy.

Janov understood that unless we find the beginnings of the problems … That means to him, being a Christian, believing only in one life – the roots must be found somewhere in childhood. So he started working to remind you of your childhood, and then he stumbled upon a new fact – that in deep hypnosis people not only remember their childhood, they remember their birth. They also remember the nine months in the mother’s womb, and a few very sensitive people even remember their previous life.

And then he became afraid himself, that he was going into a tunnel which seemed to be unending. You go into the past life and that will take you again, through the whole long passage, to another life.

Your mind is many lives old, so you are not going to be able to find its root in the present. Perhaps you will have to travel backwards through thousands of lives, and it is not an easy thing. And then too, even if you come to understand from where the greed has come, it does not make any change. You will have to then know how to drop it.

And there are so many problems that if you start dropping each problem separately, you will need millions of lives to be completely finished with the mind. And while you are figuring out about one problem, other problems are growing, gathering more energy, more vitality, more influence. It is a very stupid game.

In the East, not a single person in the whole past – in China, in India, in Japan, in Arabia – has ever bothered about it. It is fighting with shadows. They worked from a very different angle and they succeeded immensely. They simply pulled their awareness out of the mind. They stood outside the mind as a witness and they found a miracle happening: as they became a witness, the mind became impotent, it lost all power over them. And there was no need to understand anything.

Awareness goes on growing higher and the mind goes on growing smaller – in the same proportion. If awareness is fifty percent then mind is cut to fifty percent. If awareness is seventy percent, only thirty percent of the mind remains. The day awareness is a hundred percent, there is no mind to be found at all.

Hence, the whole Eastern approach is to find a state of no-mind – that silence, that purity, that serenity. And mind is no longer there with all its problems, with all its roots; it has simply evaporated the way dewdrops evaporate in the sun in the morning, leaving no trace behind. Hence I will say to you, awareness is not only enough, it is more than enough. You don’t need anything else.

Western psychology has no place for meditation in it yet, and that’s why it goes on going round and round, finding no solution. There are people who have been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years. They have wasted fortunes on it – because psychoanalysis is the most highly paid profession. Fifteen years in psychoanalysis and all that has happened is that they have become addicted to psychoanalysis. Now they cannot remain without it. Rather than solving any problem, a new problem has arisen. Now it has become almost like a drug addiction. So when they get fed up with one psychoanalyst, they start with another. If they are not being psychoanalyzed, then they feel something is missing.

But it has not helped anybody. Even they accept that there is not a single man in the whole West who has been completely analyzed. But such is the blindness of people that they cannot see the simple point, why a single person is not there – when there are thousands of psychoanalysts analyzing people – who has been perfectly analyzed and who has gone beyond mind.

Analysis cannot take you beyond. The way beyond is awareness, the way beyond mind is meditation. It is a simple way and it has created thousands of enlightened people in the East. And they were not doing anything with the mind, they were doing something else: they were simply becoming aware, alert, conscious. They were using mind also as an object.

The way you see a tree, the way you see pillars, the way you see other people – they were trying to see the mind also as separate, and they succeeded. And the moment they succeeded in seeing the mind as separate, that was the death of the mind. In its place grows a clarity; intellect disappears, intelligence arises. One does not react anymore, one responds. Reaction is always based on your past experiences, and response is just like a mirror: you come in front of it and it responds, it shows your face. It does not carry any memory. The moment you have moved away, it is again pure, no reflection.

The meditator becomes finally a mirror. Any situation is reflected in him and he responds in the present moment, out of presence. Hence, his every response has a newness, a freshness, a clarity, a beauty, a grace. It is not some old idea that he is repeating. This is something to be understood, that no situation is ever exactly the same as any other situation that you have encountered before. So if you are reacting out of the past, you are not able to tackle the situation; you are lagging far behind.

That is the cause of your failure. You don’t see the situation, you are more concerned with your response; you are blind to the situation. The man of meditation is simply open with his eyes, available to see the situation and let the situation provoke the response in him. He is not carrying a ready-made answer to it.

A beautiful story about Gautam Buddha…. One morning a man asked him, “Is there a God?”

Buddha looked at the man, looked into his eyes and said, “No, there is no God.”

That very day in the afternoon another man asked, “What do you think about God? Is there a God?” Again he looked at the man and into his eyes and said, “Yes, there is a God.”

Ananda, who was with him, became very much puzzled, but he was always very careful not to interfere in anything. He had his time when everybody had left in the night and Buddha was going to sleep; if he had to ask anything, he would ask at that time.

But by the evening, as the sun was setting, a third man came with almost the same question, formulated differently. He said, “There are people who believe in God, there are people who don’t believe in God. I myself don’t know with whom I should stand. You help me.”

Ananda was very intensely listening now to what Buddha says. He had given two absolutely contradictory answers in the same day, and now the third opportunity has arisen – and there is no third answer. But Buddha gave him the third answer. He did not speak, he closed his eyes. It was a beautiful evening. The birds had settled in their trees – Buddha was staying in a mango grove – the sun had set, a cool breeze had started blowing. The man, seeing Buddha sitting with closed eyes, thought that perhaps this is his answer, so he also sat with closed eyes with him.

An hour passed, the man opened his eyes, touched the feet of Buddha and said, “Your compassion is great. You have given me the answer. I will always remain obliged to you.”

Ananda could not believe it, because Buddha had not spoken a single word. And as the man went away, perfectly satisfied and contented, Ananda asked Buddha, “This is too much! You should think of me – you will drive me mad. I am just on the verge of a nervous breakdown. To one man you say there is no God, to another man you say there is a God, and to the third you don’t answer. And that strange fellow says that he has received the answer and he is perfectly satisfied and obliged, and touches your feet. What is going on?”

Buddha said, “Ananda, the first thing you have to remember is, those were not your questions, those answers were not given to you. Why did you get unnecessarily concerned with other people’s problems? First solve your own problems.”

Ananda said, “That’s true, they were not my questions and the answers were not given to me. But what can I do? I have ears and I hear, and I have heard and I have seen, and now my whole being is puzzled – what is right?”

Buddha said, “Right? Right is awareness. The first man was a theist. He wanted my support – he already believed in God. He had come with an answer, ready-made, just to solicit my support so that he can go around and say, ‘I am right, even Buddha thinks so.’ I had to say no to him, just to disturb his belief, because belief is not knowing. The second man was an atheist. He had also come with a ready-made answer, that there is no God, and he wanted my support to strengthen his disbelief and so he can go on proclaiming around that I agree with him. I had to say to him, ‘Yes, God exists.’ But my purpose was the same.

“If you see my purpose, there is no contradiction. I was disturbing the first man’s preconceived belief; I was disturbing the second person’s preconceived disbelief. Belief is positive, disbelief is negative, but both are the same. Neither of them was a knower and neither of them was a humble seeker; they were already carrying a prejudice.

“The third man was a seeker. He had no prejudice, he had opened his heart. He told me, ‘There are people who believe, there are people who don’t believe. I myself don’t know whether God exists or not. Help me.’ And the only help I could give was to teach him a lesson of silent awareness; words were useless. And as I closed my eyes he understood the hint. He was a man of certain intelligence – open, vulnerable. He closed his eyes.

“As I moved deeper into silence, as he became part of the field of my silence and my presence, he started moving into silence, moving into awareness. When one hour had passed, it seemed as if only a few minutes had passed. He had not received any answer in words, but he had received the authentic answer in silence: don’t be bothered about God; it does not matter whether God exists or does not exist. What matters is whether silence exists, awareness exists or not. If you are silent and aware, you yourself are a god. God is not something far away from you; either you are a mind or you are a god. In silence and awareness mind melts and disappears and reveals your divineness to you. Although I have not said anything to him, he has received the answer, and received it in a perfectly right way.”

Awareness brings you to a point where you are able to see with your own eyes the ultimate reality of yourself and the universe . . . and a miraculous experience that you and the universe are not separate, that you are part of the whole. To me this is the only meaning of holy.

You have been trained for analysis, for understanding, for intellectual gymnastics. Those things are not going to help anybody; they have never helped anybody. That’s why the West lacks one most precious dimension – that of enlightenment, awakening. All its richness is nothing in comparison to the richness that comes from enlightenment, from achieving the state of no-mind.

So don’t get entangled with the mind; rather become a watcher by the side of the road and let the mind pass on the road. Soon the road will be empty. The mind lives as a parasite. You are identified with it; that is its life. Your awareness cuts the connection, it becomes its death.

The ancient scriptures of the East say that the master is a death – a very strange statement, but of immense meaning. The master is a death because meditation is the death of the mind; meditation is the death of the ego. Meditation is the death of your personality and the birth and the resurrection of your essential being. And to know that essential being is to know all.

Becky Goldberg phoned down to the hotel manager. “I am up here in room five hundred and ten,” she shouted angrily, and I want you to know there is a man walking around the room across the way stark naked, and his blinds are up.”

“I will be up right away,” said the manager. He entered Becky’s room, peered through the window and said, “You are right Madam, the man does appear to be naked. But his window still covers him from the waist down, no matter where he is in the room.”

“Ah, yes,” yelled Becky. “Just stand on the bed, just stand on the bed!”

Mind is a strange fellow. Where there is no problem, it creates a problem. Why should you stand on the bed? Just to find that somebody is naked in his room? One has to be aware of all these stupidities of the mind. I don’t agree with the theory of evolution of Charles Darwin, but I have a certain respect for the theory, because it may not be historically true that the monkeys became men, but it is certainly psychologically true – because man’s mind is just like a monkey . . . stupid in every way.

There is no point in digging deep into the rubbish of the mind. It is not your being, it is not you; it is just the dust that you have gathered through many, many lives around you.

A young woman went to the doctor, afraid that she had gangrene because of two small spots, one on each of her thighs. The doctor examined her carefully and then told her it was not gangrene and she had nothing to worry about. “But by the way,” he asked the girl as she was leaving, “is your boyfriend a gypsy?” “Yes,” replied the girl, “as a matter of fact he is.”

“Well,” said the doctor, “tell him that his earrings are not gold.”

These are mind’s functionings. It is a great discoverer.

The old definition of a philosopher is that he is blind in a dark night, in a dark house where there is no light, and he is searching for a black cat which is not there. But this is not all: he finds her! And he writes great treatises, theses, systems, proves logically the existence of the black cat.

Beware of the mind: it is blind. It has never known anything but it is a great pretender. It pretends to know everything.

Socrates has categorized humanity into two classes. One class he calls the knowledgeably ignorant: the people who think they know and they are basically ignorant; that is the work of the mind. And the second category he calls the ignorant knowers: the people who think, “We don’t know.” In their humbleness, in their innocence, descends knowing.

So there are pretenders of knowledge – that is the function of the mind – and there are humble people who say, “We don’t know.” In their innocence there is knowledge, and that is the work of meditation and awareness.

-Osho

Copyright© OSHO International Foundation

From The New Dawn, Discourse #18

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