Tag: psychology

Man can be Transcended – Osho

In the West, psychoanalysis has grown through Freud, Adler, Jung and Wilhelm Reich, to solve the problems arising from the ego such as frustrations, conflicts, schizophrenia and madness. In comparison to your meditation techniques, please explain the contributions, limitations and incompleteness of the system of psychoanalysis in solving the human problems rooted in the ego.

The first thing to be understood is that any problem rooted in the ego cannot be solved without transcending the ego. You can postpone the problem, you can bring in a little normality, you can create a little normalness about it, you can dilute the problem but you cannot solve it. You can make a man function more efficiently in the society through psychoanalysis but psychoanalysis never solves a problem. And whenever a problem is postponed, shifted, it creates another problem. It simply changes its place, but it remains there. A new eruption will come sooner or later and when the new eruption of the old problem comes it will become more difficult to postpone and shift it.

Psychoanalysis is a temporary relief because psychoanalysis cannot conceive of anything which transcends ego. A problem can be solved only when you can go beyond it. If you cannot go beyond it, then you are the problem. Then who is going to solve it? Then how is one going to solve it? Then you are the problem; the problem is not something separate from you.

Yoga, tantra and all meditation techniques, they are based upon a different ground. They say that the problems are there, the problems are around you, but you are never the problem. You can transcend them; you can look at them like an observer is looking down from the hill into the valley. This witnessing self can solve the problem. Really, just by witnessing a problem it is half solved already because when you can witness a problem, when you can observe it impartially, when you are not involved in it, you can stand by the side and look at it. The very clarity that comes out of this witnessing gives you the clue, gives you the secret key. And almost all problems are there because there is no clarity through which to understand them. You do not need solutions: you need clarity.

A problem rightly understood is solved, because a problem arises through a nonunderstanding mind. You create the problem because you are not understanding. So the basic thing is not to solve the problem: the basic thing is to create more understanding. And if more understanding, more clarity is there, and the problem can be encountered impartially, observed as if it doesn’t belong to you, as if it belongs to someone else; if you can create a distance between the problem and you – only then can it be solved.

Meditation creates a distance; it gives you a perspective. You go beyond the problem. The level of consciousness changes. Through psychoanalysis you remain on the same level. The level never changes; you are adjusted on the same level again. Your awareness, your consciousness, your witnessing capacity, doesn’t change. As you move in meditation you go higher and higher. You can look down at your problems. They are now in the valley, and you have come to a hill. From this perspective, this height, all the problems look different. And the more the distance grows, the more you become capable of observing them as if they do not belong to you.

Remember one thing: if a problem doesn’t belong to you, you can always give good advice on how to solve it. If it belongs to someone else, if someone else is in difficulty, you are always wise. You can give very good advice but if the problem belongs to you, you simply do not know what to do. What has happened? The problem is the same but now you are involved in it. When it was someone else’s problem, you had a distance from which to look at it impartially. Everyone is a good advisor for others but when it happens to oneself then all your wisdom is lost because the distance is lost.

Someone has died and the family is in anguish: you can give good advice. You can say the soul is immortal; you can say nothing dies, that life is eternal. But someone has died whom you loved, who means something to you, who was near, intimate, and now you are beating your breast and crying and weeping. Now you cannot give the same advice to yourself – that life is immortal and no one ever dies. Now it looks absurd.

So remember, while advising others you may look foolish. When you say to someone whose beloved has died that life is immortal, he will think you stupid. You are talking nonsense to him. He knows what it feels like to lose a beloved. No philosophy can give consolation. And he knows why you are saying this thing: because the problem is not yours. You can afford to be wise; he cannot afford it.

Through meditation you transcend your ordinary being. A new point arises in you from where you can look at things in a new way. The distance is created. Problems are there but they are now very far away – as if happening to someone else. Now you can give good advice to yourself, but there is no need to give it. The very distance will make you wise. So the whole technique of meditation consists of creating a distance between the problems and you. Right now, as you are, you are so much entangled with your problems that you cannot think, you cannot contemplate, you cannot see through them, you cannot witness them.

Psychoanalysis helps just for readjustment. It is not a transformation; that is one thing. And another thing: in psychoanalysis you become dependent. You need an expert and the expert will do everything. It will take three years, four years, or even five years if the problem is very deep, and you will become just a dependent – you are not growing. Rather, on the contrary, you are becoming more and more dependent. You will need this psychoanalyst every day or twice a week or thrice a week. Once you miss him you will feel lost. If you stop psychoanalysis, you will feel lost. It becomes intoxicating, it becomes alcoholic.

You start being dependent upon someone – someone who is an expert. You can tell your problem to him and he will solve it. He will discuss it, and he will bring the unconscious roots out of you. But he will do it; the solving will be done by someone else.

Remember, a problem solved by someone else is not going to give you more maturity. A problem solved by someone else may give him some maturity but it cannot give you maturity. You may become more immature. Then whenever there is a problem, you will need some expert advice, some professional advice. And I do not think that even psychoanalysts grow mature through your problems because they go for psychoanalysis to other psychoanalysts. They have their own problems. They solve your problems but they cannot solve their problems. Again, the question of distance.

Wilhelm Reich himself tried again and again to be psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud. Freud refused to psychoanalyze him and all his life he felt hurt because Freud refused him. And Freudians, orthodox Freudians, never accepted that he was an expert because he himself had not been psychoanalyzed.

Every psychoanalyst goes to someone else with his own problems. It is just like the medical profession. If the doctor himself is ill he cannot diagnose himself. He is so near that he is afraid, so he will go to someone else. If you are a surgeon you cannot operate upon your own body – or can you? The distance is not there. It is difficult to operate upon one’s own body. But it is also difficult if your wife is really ill and a serious operation is to be done – you cannot operate because your hand will tremble. The intimacy is so much that you will be afraid, you cannot be a good surgeon. You will have to take advice; you will have to call some other surgeon to operate on your wife.

What is happening? You have been operating; you have done many operations. And now what is happening? You cannot do it on your child or your wife because the distance is so little – as if there is no distance. Without distance you cannot be impartial. So a psychoanalyst can help others but when he is in trouble he will have to take advice, he will have to be psychoanalyzed by someone else. And this is really strange that even a person like Wilhelm Reich goes mad in the end.

We cannot conceive a buddha going mad – or can you conceive of it? And if a buddha can go mad, then there is no way out of this misery. It is inconceivable that a buddha goes mad.

Look at Sigmund Freud’s life. He is the father and founder of psychoanalysis; he went on talking about problems very deeply. But as far as he himself was concerned not a single problem was solved. Not a single problem was solved! Fear was as much a problem for him as for anybody else. He was so afraid and nervous. Anger was as much a problem for him as for anybody else. He would get so angry that in anger he would fall unconscious in a fit. And this man knew so much about the human mind but as far as he himself was concerned, that knowledge seems of no use.

Jung himself would fall unconscious when in deep anxiety; he would have a fit. What is the problem? Distance is the problem. They had been thinking about problems but they had not been growing in consciousness. They thought intellectually, keenly, logically, and they concluded something. Sometimes those conclusions may have been right, but that is not the point. They did not grow in consciousness, they did not become in any way superhuman. And unless you transcend humanity, the problems cannot be solved; they can only be adjusted.

Freud said, in the last days of his life, that man is incurable. At the most we can hope that he can exist as an adjusted being; there is no other hope. This is at the most! Man cannot be happy, Freud says. At the most we can arrange it so that he is not very much unhappy. That’s all. But he cannot be happy; he is incurable. What type of solution can come out of such an attitude? And this is after forty years’ experience with human beings! He concludes that man cannot be helped, that man is naturally, by nature, miserable, that he will remain in misery.

But yoga says that man can be transcended. It is not man who is incurable; it is his minimal consciousness that creates the problem. Grow in consciousness, increase in consciousness, and problems decrease. They exist in the same proportion: if there is a minimum of consciousness, there is a maximum of problems; if there is a maximum of consciousness, there is a minimum of problems. With total consciousness, problems simply disappear just like the sun rises in the morning and dewdrops disappear. With total consciousness there are no problems because with a total consciousness, problems cannot arise. At the most psychoanalysis can be a cure, but problems will go on arising; it is not preventive.

Yoga, meditation, goes to the very depth. It will change you so that problems cannot arise. Psychoanalysis is concerned with problems; meditation is concerned with you directly. It is not concerned with problems at all. That is why the greatest of Eastern psychologists – Buddha, Mahavira or Krishna – do not talk about problems. Because of this, Western psychology thinks that psychology is a new phenomenon. It is not!

It was just in this century, in the first part of this century, that Freud could prove scientifically that there is such a thing as the unconscious. Buddha talked about it twenty-five centuries before. But Buddha has never tackled any problem because, says Buddha, problems are infinite. If you go on tackling every problem, you will never really be able to tackle them. Tackle the man himself. Just forget the problems. Tackle the being itself and help the being to grow. As the being grows, as it becomes more conscious, problems go on dropping; you need not be worried about them.

For example, a person is schizophrenic, split, divided. Psychoanalysis will deal with this split – with how to make this split workable, with how to adjust this man so that he can function, so that he can live in the society peacefully. Psychoanalysis will tackle the problem, the schizophrenia. If this man comes to Buddha, Buddha will not talk about the schizophrenic state. He will say, “Meditate so that the inner being becomes one. When the inner being becomes one, the split will disappear on the periphery.” The split is there – but it is not the cause, it is just the effect. Somewhere deep in the being there is a duality and that duality has made this crack on the periphery.

You go on cementing the crack but the inner split remains. Then the crack will appear somewhere else. Then you cement that crack; then somewhere else the crack will go on appearing. So if you treat one psychological problem, another problem arises immediately; then you treat another and a third arises.

This is good as far as the professionals are concerned because they live off it. But this is not a help. The West will have to go beyond psychoanalysis and unless the West comes to the methods of growing consciousness, of inner growth of being, of expansion of consciousness, psychoanalysis cannot be of much help.

Now, this is happening already: psychoanalysis is already out of date. The keen thinkers of the West are now thinking about how to expand consciousness and not about how to solve problems – about how to make a man alert and aware. Now this has come; the seeds have sprouted. The emphasis has to be remembered.

I am not concerned with your problems. There are millions and it is just useless to go on solving them – because you are the creator and you remain untouched. I solve a problem and you will create ten. You cannot be defeated because the creator remains behind them. And as I go on solving, I am just wasting my energy.

I will push aside your problems; I will simply penetrate you. The creator must be changed. And once the creator is changed, the problems on the periphery drop. Now no one is cooperating with them, no one is helping to create them, no one is enjoying them. You may feel this word strange but remember well that you enjoy your problems; hence you create them. You enjoy them for so many reasons.

The whole of humanity is sick. There are basic reasons, basic causes, which we go on overlooking. Whenever a child is sick he gets attention; whenever he is healthy no one gives him any attention. Whenever a child is sick, the parents love him – or at least they pretend. But whenever he is okay, no one is worried about him. No one thinks to give him a good kiss or a good hug. The child learns the trick. And love is a basic need and attention is a basic food. For the child, attention is even more potentially necessary than milk. Without attention something will die within him.

You may have heard about new experiments in one English laboratory, Delabar, where they are experimenting with plants. Even plants grow faster if you give them attention – just look at them lovingly. Two plants are used for the experiment. Give one plant attention, love – just a smiling, loving approach – and to the other do not give any attention. Give everything else necessary water, fertilizers, sunrays; give everything equally to each but to one give more attention. To the other do not give any attention; whenever you pass nearby just don’t look at it. And you will see that the one grows faster, brings bigger flowers, and the other grows in a delayed way and brings smaller flowers.

Attention is energy. When someone looks lovingly at you he is giving you food – a very subtle food. So every child needs attention and you give attention only when he is ill, when there is some problem. So if the child needs attention he will create problems, he will become a creator of problems.

Love is a basic need. Your body grows with food, your soul grows with love. But you can get love only when you are ill, when you have some problem; otherwise, no one is going to give you love. The child learns your ways; then he starts creating problems. Whenever he is ill or with a problem, everyone gives attention.

Have you ever observed? In your house the children are playing silently, peacefully. Then if some guests come, they start creating trouble. This is because your attention goes to the guests and now the children are hankering for attention. They need your attention, your guests’ attention, everybody’s attention toward them. They will do something; they will create some trouble. This is unconscious but then it becomes a pattern. And when you are grown up, you still go on doing it.

For women, it is true that ninety-nine percent of their illnesses, their mental problems, are basically love needs. Whenever you love a woman, she has no problems. Whenever there is some problem in love, many problems arise. Now she is hankering for attention. And psychoanalysts are exploiting this need for attention, because a psychoanalyst is a professional attention-giver. You go to him: he is a professional. For one hour he looks at you attentively. Whatsoever you say, whatsoever nonsense, he listens as if the Vedas are being preached. And he persuades you to talk more, to say anything, relevant or irrelevant, to bring your mind out. Then you feel so good.

You know, ninety-nine percent of patients fall in love with their psychoanalysts. And how to protect the client-expert relationship is a great problem because sooner or later it becomes a lovers’ relationship. Why? Why does a woman patient fall in love with a male psychoanalyst? Or the reverse: Why does a male patient fall in love with a woman psychoanalyst? The reason is that so much attention is given for the first time. The love need is fulfilled.

Unless your basic being is changed, nothing will come out of solving problems. You have an infinite potential to create new ones. Meditation is an effort to make you independent, first; and second, to change your type and quality of consciousness. With a new quality of consciousness old problems cannot exist: they simply disappear. For instance, you were a small child; you had a different type of problem. When you became older, they simply disappeared. Where have they gone? You never solved them, they simply disappeared. You cannot even remember what the problems were that belonged to your childhood. But you have grown and those problems disappeared.

Then you were a little older, you had a different type of problem; when you become old they will not be there. Not that you will be able to solve them – no one is able to solve problems – one can simply grow out of them. When you are old you will laugh at your own problems which were there, so urgent, so destructive that you had many times contemplated committing suicide because of them. And then when you have grown old, you will simply laugh: Where have those problems gone? Have you solved them? No – you have simply grown. Those problems belonged to a particular state of growth.

Similar is the case as you grow deeper into consciousness. Then too problems go on disappearing. A moment comes when you are so aware that problems do not arise. Meditation is not analysis. Meditation is growth. It is not concerned with problems; it is concerned with the being.

-Osho

From The Supreme Doctrine, Discourse #13, Q1

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.

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Psychology Cannot Take You Beyond Mind – Osho

I am a psychologist. I was hoping that studying psychology would help to change my life, but nothing like that has happened. What should I do now?

Psychology is still a very, very immature science. It is very rudimentary; it is only the beginning. It is not yet a way of life – it cannot transform you. It can certainly give you a few insights into the mind, but those insights are not going to be transforming. Why? – because transformation always happens from a higher plane. Transformation never means solving problems – remaining on the same plane – that means adjustment. Psychology is still trying to help you adjust – to adjust to the society which is itself insane, to adjust to the family, to adjust to the ideas that are dominant around you. But all those ideas – your family, your society – they themselves are ill, sick, and to adjust to them will give you a certain normality, at least a superficial appearance of health, but it is not going to transform you.

Transformation means to change the plane of your understanding. It comes through transcendence. If you want to change your mind, you have to go to the state of no-mind. Only from that height will you be able to change your mind, because from that height you will be the master. Remaining in the mind and trying to change the mind by mind itself is a futile process. It is like pulling yourself up by your own shoestrings. It is like a dog trying to catch hold of its own tail; sometimes they do, sometimes they behave very humanly. The dog is sitting in the warm sun early in the morning and he looks at the tail just resting by his side – naturally, the curiosity arises: Why not catch hold of it? He tries, fails, feels offended, annoyed; tries hard, fails harder, becomes mad, crazy. But he will never be able to catch hold of the tail – it is his own tail. The more he jumps, the more the tail will jump.

Psychology can give you a few insights into the mind, but because it cannot take you beyond the mind it can’t be of any help.

Sam became a psychiatrist and began to prosper. He bought a big expensive limousine and drove it out for the first time. After he had been riding for a few moments, another car slammed into him. He jumped out of his smashed Cadillac, went over to the car that had rammed his, shook his fist at it, and roared, “You idiot! You moron! You crook of a rat! You son of a . . .!” Then he suddenly remembered he was a psychiatrist and lowered his voice and softly asked, “Why do you hate your mother?”

Psychology cannot help. I have heard another story about this same Sam – a story of when he was no more in the world, he had died.

The widow was tending to the plants around her husband’s grave. As she bent over, some blades of grass tickled the bare flesh under her skirt. Startled, she turned around quickly, but there was no one in sight. Sighing, she turned back to the grave and whispered, “Sam, behave yourself! And remember, you are supposed to be dead.”

Neither in life nor in death is psychology going to help you much. You can be helped only by religion.

Now the psychologist is trying to play the role of the master, which is utterly pretentious. The psychologist, the psychoanalyst and the psychiatrist are not masters! They don’t know themselves. Yes, they have understood a little bit about the mechanism of the mind, they have studied, they are well informed. But information never changes anybody, it never brings any revolution. Deep down the person remains the same. He can talk beautifully, he can give you good advice, but he cannot follow his own advice.

The psychoanalyst cannot be the master. But in the West particularly he has become so successful professionally that even the priest is in tremendous awe. Even the priests – the Catholic and the Protestant – are studying psychoanalysis and other schools of psychology, because they see that people are not coming to the priest anymore, they are going to the psychoanalyst. The priest is becoming afraid that he is losing his job.

The priest has dominated people for hundreds of years. He was the wise man – he has lost his attraction. And people cannot live without advisors; they need somebody to tell them what to do because they never grow up. They are like small children, always in need of being told what to do and what not to do. Up to now the priest used to do that; now the priest has lost his charm, his validity. He is no longer contemporary; he has become out of date. Now the psychoanalyst has taken his place, he is the priest now.

But as the priest was false, so is the psychoanalyst. The priest was using religious jargon to exploit people; the psychologist is using scientific jargon to exploit the same people. Neither was the priest awakened, nor is the psychoanalyst awakened. Man can be helped only by somebody who is a buddha already; otherwise, he cannot be helped.

All your advisors will make more and more mess out of you. The more you listen to advisors, the more you will become messed up – because they don’t know what they are saying! They don’t even agree amongst themselves. Freud says one thing, Adler says another, Jung says still another. And now there are a thousand and one schools. And every school is fanatical about its philosophy – that it has the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Not only does it say that it is true; it says it has the truth, and everybody else is lying, deceiving.

If you listen to these psychoanalysts, if you go from one psychoanalyst to another, you will be more puzzled. The only help that they can give to you is that if you are intelligent enough you will become so fed up with them, so bored with them, that you will simply drop the idea of being transformed, and you may start living your life normally, without bothering much about transformation – if you are intelligent, which is very rare, because intelligence is crushed from the very beginning. You are made mediocres. From the very beginning, intelligence is destroyed. Only a few people somehow escape the society and remain intelligent.

Nagesh, you ask me, “What should I do now?”

My suggestion is: you have done enough. Now learn something which is not doing but non-doing. Be here, and learn – not to do but to be. Sit silently, doing nothing. Within three to nine months, if one is patient enough and if one can simply go on sitting for hours together every day – as much as one can find time just sit . . . In the beginning, great turmoil will arise in your mind; everything from the unconscious will start surfacing. You will see it as if you are going mad. Go on watching – don’t be worried. You cannot go mad because you are already mad, so there is nothing to lose and nothing to fear.

A politician, a great politician, was consulting a psychoanalyst. The politician was suffering from an inferiority complex – all politicians suffer from inferiority complexes. If they don’t suffer from inferiority complexes, they will not be politicians in the first place. To be a politician means striving to be superior, to be in power, so one can prove to others and to oneself, “I am not inferior. Look! I am the prime minister. Look! Only I am the prime minister of the country and nobody else – how can I be inferior?”

Politics arises out of the inferiority complex – all power politics arises out of the inferiority complex. So it was not rare that the politician was suffering from an inferiority complex.

The psychoanalyst worked on the politician year in, year out. After two or three years, listening to all his gibberish nonsense . . . because what can a politician say? For hours together he would lie down on the couch and talk nonsense.

After three years, one day when he came, the psychoanalyst received him with great joy and said, “I am glad to declare, after three years’ research on you, that you don’t suffer from an inferiority complex. I have come to this conclusion after such a long effort that it can’t be wrong. You don’t suffer from an inferiority complex – simply forget all about it.”

The politician was very happy and he said, “I am grateful to you, but can you tell me how you arrived at this conclusion?”

The psychoanalyst said, “Because you are simply inferior – how can you suffer from an inferiority complex?”

Nagesh, you need not be worried. If sitting silently you start feeling madness arising, don’t be worried – you can’t be more mad than you already are. Man cannot fall more. He has fallen to the rock bottom. Now there is no further to fall.

Sitting silently you will see madness arising in you, because it has remained repressed. And you keep occupied with things – psychology etcetera – now you will become occupied with meditation and sannyas, but these are all occupations and you are not allowing your unconscious to reveal itself to you. It is frightening.

My suggestion to you is, just sit silently as much as you can find time to. Zen people sit silently at least six to eight hours per day. In the beginning it is really maddening. The mind plays so many tricks on you, tries to drive you crazy, creates imaginary fears, hallucinations. The body starts playing tricks on you . . . all kinds of things will happen. But if you can go on witnessing, within three to nine months everything settles, and settles of its own accord – not because you have to do something. Without your doing, it simply settles, and when a stillness arises, uncultivated, unpracticed, it is something superb, something tremendously graceful, exquisite. You have never tasted anything like it before – it is pure nectar . . .

You have transcended the mind! All mind problems are solved. Not that you have found a solution, but simply they have fallen by themselves – by witnessing, by just witnessing.

You are already too knowledgeable. No more knowledge is needed; you need unlearning. Knowledgeable people are very cunning people – they can always go on finding excuses to remain the same.

A professor of philosophy and psychology was addicted to moonshine whiskey. One night, after guzzling a large amount, he went into his cabin, undressed for bed, and tried to blow out the candle. His alcoholic breath burst into flame.

Sadly, shaken by the experience, he called out to his wife, “Bring me the Bible, Martha. This here has been a terrible lesson to me. I am going to swear off.”

The happy housewife brought the Bible in a hurry, stood by while her man put his hand on it and looked heavenward: “I swear by all that is holy,” intoned he, “that I will never again blow on a lighted candle.”

Mind is cunning. You have to go beyond mind – that’s what meditation is all about.

-Osho

From The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, V.2, Discourse #8, Q3

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.

A Single Solution to All the Problems – Osho

Osho, you say that your main concern is our spiritual not our psychological growth. What is the difference between them?

Deva Yachana, man is a three-storied building: one body, the mind and the soul. The body contains only the body. The mind contains body and mind both. And the soul contains all the three. The higher implies the lower, but not vice versa: the lower does not imply the higher.

This is one of the fundamental laws to be remembered. If you work on the higher, the lower will be automatically solved. If you work on the lower, the higher will not be automatically solved.

Spirit contains all the three dimensions of your being. That’s why I say my concern is your spiritual growth — because it contains your totality. To be concerned with your psychological growth will leave the most essential and the highest part of you outside. And then there are many more problems.

Mind is a multiplicity; mind means the many. Millions of problems are there. If you start solving each single problem it will take millions of lives —even then you cannot be certain that you have solved the mind problems.

Greed is there, anger is there, lust is there, jealousy is there . . . and so on and so forth. If you solve one it will take years and years; and even then, nothing is solved. If you try to solve your anger, if you want to grow beyond your anger, at the psychological stage what can you do? At the most you can repress it — because awareness belongs to the spiritual realm. At the psychological level you can only fight. You can choose: you can repress one part against the other, but the repressed part is not dying. In fact, the more it is repressed, the more alive it will become — because it will be going closer and closer to the source of your energies and it will be getting more nourishment. And you can repress anger, but it will find some outlet from the backdoor. You cannot transform this way.

That’s where Western psychology is lost — lost in a chaos. Small problems are not being solved, very small problems. It takes years and years of psychoanalysis . . . then too nothing is solved. At the most, you can do only a kind of window-dressing, a whitewashing. You give the patient a better mask to wear, but his original face remains the same.

Western psychology has failed.

The Eastern approach goes far deeper. It does not try to cut the foliage of a tree: it cuts the very roots. And to cut the very roots is to destroy the tree. If you go on pruning the leaves — that’s what psychological work means: pruning the leaves — you are not going to destroy the tree at all. On the contrary, the more you prune it, the thicker the foliage will become. You cut one branch and three branches will come — because the tree will take the challenge that you are going to destroy it. Each and everything tries to survive. And when there is danger, the tree will make every effort to survive. That’s what happens.

If you want to drop your anger, you become angrier than before. If you want to drop your sexuality, you become more and more sexual than before. That’s what has happened to millions of people. They want to get out of the prison of sex; they make all kinds of efforts. Their desire is good; they are sincere people but misguided. They start fighting with sex, and sexuality retaliates with a vengeance. These people become more sexual than ordinary people, their whole mind becomes full of sex. They think of sex, they dream of sex, and they are continuously fighting. The more they fight, the more they give energy to the enemy — because the more and more they become focused on the enemy. They cannot be off-guard.

This has happened down the centuries. You can see the monks, your so-called mahatmas, your so-called saints — their minds are ugly. And the reason is not that they are not sincere people; the reason is that they have started from a wrong end.

“I think we should treat not the symptoms but the real problem.” This was the approach of the Southern planter just after the Civil War. This gentleman of the old school found his wife in the arms of her lover and, mad with rage, killed her with his revolver.

A jury of his Southern peers had brought in a verdict of justifiable homicide, and he was about to leave the courtroom a free man when the judge stopped him. “Just a point of personal curiosity, sir, if you are willing to clear it up.”

In reply, the gentleman bowed.

“Why did you shoot your wife instead of her lover?”

“Sir,” he replied, “I decided it was better to shoot a woman once than a different man each week.”

If you try to change your mind, you will have to shoot a different man each week. It is better to shoot the woman and be finished with it.

That’s why I say my concern is not your psychological growth but your spiritual growth.

Spiritual growth means growth of awareness; it means nothing else. Becoming more and more alert. Becoming a light unto yourself. And when you are a light unto yourself, darkness starts disappearing of its own accord.

The man of awareness cannot be angry — that is impossible because to be angry the basic requirement is to be unaware. Try it, and you will be very much surprised. Try to be angry and aware — you will not be able to manage; nobody has ever been able to manage it. It is impossible. It is not in the very nature of things.

When you are aware, anger will disappear. If you lose awareness, anger will appear. Both are not possible — just as light and darkness cannot exist together; they cannot have a coexistence.

Why can light and darkness not exist together? Because darkness has no substance in it; darkness has no existence in it. It is nothing but the absence of light, so how can absence and presence exist together? If light is there then absence cannot exist.  If absence exists, light cannot be present there.

Awareness is a single solution to all the problems.

Greed cannot exist when you are aware — why? Because when you are aware, you are aware that you are the ultimate bliss, that you have the whole kingdom of God within you. What more can you desire, what greed? It will be utterly stupid. Greed exists in the person when he is not aware of his own kingdom, when he is not aware that he is a born emperor, and lives like a beggar.

The moment that you become aware that you have all the treasures of the world in you, that nothing is missing, how can greed exist? Greed means you know your inner poverty and you go on accumulating. Greed means you know that you are poor and you have to be rich.

The man of awareness becomes alert that he is rich already! and there is no possibility of becoming richer. He is divine! Greed cannot exist when you know that you are divine.

How can anger exist with a man who is aware? From where does anger come? Anger is a wound in the ego. When your ego is hurt, you become angry. But the man of awareness knows there is no ego at all —- now, how can wounds happen to something which is found no more?

You escape from a rope in the night thinking it is a snake; you run, you are frightened to death. And then somebody laughs, takes hold of you — tells you, “It is not a snake, it is a rope! Come with me and we will take a lamp and we will see.” You go with the person, still afraid, still ready to escape in case it is not a rope but a snake. But the closer you come, the better you see . . . you start laughing. Now, can you be afraid when you have seen that it is a rope?

And it is not that when you had thought it was a snake your fear was unreal — it was absolutely real. It was almost like a heart attack. You were trembling, suffocating, out of breath. You might have died of fear it was so real. But there was no real snake!

An unreal snake can create real fear. And that’s how it is happening: an unreal ego can create real anger. You feel offended and anger arises. When the light of awareness is inside you, you know there is no ego — there is no snake. Simply anger disappears. And how can you be afraid when you are aware? In awareness it is known that you will never die because you were never born, that birth and death are just on the surface, at the deepest core of your being you are deathless. Then fear disappears.

Yachana, you became worried when I said that I am not concerned with your psychological growth — because what is psychological growth? Helping you not to be angry, helping you not to be an egoist, helping you not to be afraid — that is psychological growth.

Spiritual growth means: helping you to be aware. And a single medicine cures all the illnesses.

And if we go on working on the surface, it may appear that you are changing, but deep down you remain unchanging. It may appear that you are attaining to some psychological maturity, but it will be only skin-deep. Scratch a little and you will find the same old man there.

Once a patient was treated by a psychoanalyst because he thought he was a popcorn.

Finally, after years of intensive analytic work, success was there. In the final session, the psychoanalyst asked him once who he was and he replied, “A man, of course!”

Five minutes after he had left the office, the patient came rushing in, terrified. “Doctor, doctor, you should have told me that there are chickens outside. I barely escaped them!”

“But you know you are not a popcorn, don’t you?”

“Sure I do — but what about the chickens?”

All your psychological work will be just on the surface. You will appear as if you have changed, but that will be only an appearance. Any real situation will bring your real face back again. This is not transformation: this is just consolation. And I am not concerned with consoling you.

My effort here is to transmute you, to let you become something utterly new that you have never dreamed about yourself. Something immensely valuable is hidden in you – that has to be discovered. That is your soul.

And unless you discover that hidden source of all life, you will only be playing games — psychological games, physiological games. Yoga got lost in physiological games. Your so-called yogis are only doing physiological exercises. They have their own benefits; I cannot deny it. They will make you healthier, but that health remains of the body. And the body will be gone when death comes,and with the body all your yoga postures too! And the whole effort that you had made will be lost.

Psychology and psychoanalysis have become too much focused on the mind of man.

Mind is not your real core. It is just a bridge between the body and the soul, and a very fragile bridge it is. It is a very non-substantial phenomenon because it consists only of thoughts. Behind the mind there is your reality — you can call it soul, spirit, God or whatsoever you will.

My concern here is to help you to penetrate to that core. Once you have known that everything will settle in your life — because with that awareness you will be watchful of the body and you will be watchful of the mind, and all that is ugly will simply disappear.

That is the miracle of spiritual experiences: all that is ugly simply disappears, and all that is beautiful is enhanced. The evil disappears and the good is enhanced. The world and the worldly desires are no more relevant to you — a totally new dimension opens up.

-Osho

From Philosophia Perennis, V.2, Discourse #5, Q1

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.

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Psychology of the Buddhas – Osho

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

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.