Osho on Acupuncture

 

 

[A sannyasin who is a doctor asks about studying acupuncture.]

 

The idea is good, mm? worth trying, but remember one thing - that acupuncture is utterly eastern.

 

So when you approach any eastern science with the western mind you miss many things. Your whole approach is different: it is methodological, it is logical, analytical.

 

And these eastern sciences are not really sciences but arts. Even to call them sciences is not right: they are arts, intuitive arts. The whole thing depends on whether you can shift your energies from the intellect to the intuition, whether you can shift from male to female, from yang to yin, from the active, aggressive approach; on whether you can become passive, receptive. Only then do these things work... otherwise you can learn all about acupuncture and it will not be acupuncture at all.

 

You will know all about it but not it. And sometimes it happens that a person may not know much about it and knows it, but then it is a knack, just an insight into it.

 

So this is happening to many eastern things: the West becomes interested because they are profound the West becomes interested in an eastern thing but then it brings in its own mind to understand it. The moment the western mind comes into it the very base of it is destroyed. Then only fragments are left and those fragments never work. And it is not that acupuncture was not going to work; acupuncture can work but it can work only with an eastern approach.

 

So if you really want to learn acupuncture it is good to know about it but that is not the most essential thing. Learn whatsoever information is possible then forget all the information and start groping in the dark. Start listening to your own unconscious, start feeling en rapport with the patient. It is different....

 

When a patient comes to a western medical man the western medical man starts reasoning, diagnosing, analysing, finding out where the illness is, what the illness is and what can cure it.

 

He uses one part of his mind, the rational part. He attacks the disease, he starts conquering it: a fight starts between the disease and the doctor. The patient is just out of the game, the doctor does not bother about the patient. It is as if the disease exists on its own without the patient. He starts fighting with the disease, the patient is completely neglected.

 

When you come to an acupuncturist the disease is not important, the patient is important - because it is the patient who has created the disease: the cause is in the patient, the disease is only a symptom. You can change the symptom; another symptom will come up. You can force this disease by drugs, you can stop its expression; then somewhere else and with more danger, more force, with a vengeance, the disease will assert itself. The next disease will be more difficult to tackle than the first. You drug it too, then the third disease will be even more difficult.

 

That's how allopathy has created cancer. You go on forcing the disease back from one side, it asserts itself from another: then you force it from that side. The disease starts becoming very very angry... and you don't change the patient, the patient remains the same so the cause exists and the cause goes on creating the effect.

 

Acupuncture deals with the cause. Never deal with the effect, always go to the cause. And how can you go to the cause? Reason cannot go to the cause, the cause is too big for the reason: it can only tackle the effect. Only meditation can go to the cause.

 

So the acupuncturist will feel the patient. He will forget about the illness, he will forget about treating him, he will forget his knowledge; he will just try to get in tune with the patient. He will fall en rapport, he will start feeling a bridge with the patient. He will start feeling the disease of the patient in his own body, in his own energy system. That is the only way for him to know intuitively where the cause is because the cause is hidden. He will become the mirror and he will find the reflection in himself.

 

This is the whole process of it, and this is not being taught because it cannot be taught. So my suggestion is that it is really worth going into. First learn in the West for two years, then for at least six months go to some far eastern country and be with some acupuncturist. Just be in his presence, just let him work and you watch... just absorb his energy.

 

And then you will be able to do something, otherwise it will be difficult. It will be difficult but worth devoting your energies to, mm?

 

So whenever you can manage, come. And start acupuncture!

 

- Osho, Far Beyond the Stars, chapter15, chapter title “Now begin the enquiry into god”

 

 

 

[A sannyasin studying acupuncture, said that he was a little dubious about the value of what he was doing... ]

 

Just these weeks you spend here will create much. It will give you more confidence and centring.

 

And everybody hesitates in the beginning. It is good... only fools don't hesitate. You are moving in a very delicate world. When you touch anybody's body or you work with needles, you are working on God. One has to be very respectful, very hesitant. One has to work not out of knowledge but out of love. Knowledge is never adequate, is not enough, mm?

 

So feel for the person. And always feel inadequate, because knowledge is limited, and the other person is an entire world, almost infinite. Man is never going to know man totally - that's impossible.

 

Once you have known something totally, it is exhausted, already dead - has become an object. And man is not an object.

 

People can see you but they never see you. Just a part, the visual part - a very small part, almost negligible - they see. They touch you but they never touch you. They touch only the periphery, and you are there somewhere deep in the centre where nobody enters except love.

 

Man is a mystery... and is going to remain a mystery forever. It is not something accidental that man is a mystery. Mystery is his very being. If it were accidental then some day the mystery would dissolve; we would come to know. But the very thinking that one day man will be known is sacrilegious. That means man disappears; he has become an object like a table or a chair or a house. You have known him. In knowing him, he disappears; then he is no more. He is reduced to an object. Impossible! It is not going to happen - ever.

 

Whatsoever science goes on doing, it is bound to be a failure. And now even scientists are feeling the inadequacy of knowledge. Leaving man aside, even matter has defeated them. Now they are not as certain as they used to be hundreds of years ago, or even thirty years ago.

 

Now matter is a mystery again. We are back into the poet's world, and physicists talk as if they are poets or mystics.

 

Eddington has said that when he started working as a scientist, he used to think that someday or other, matter will be known absolutely. In those days, science used to divide the whole world into two compartments: the known and the unknown. The known - that which we have known; and the unknown - that which we are going to know ... but nothing unknowable.

 

But in the end, when he was dying, Eddington said, 'Now I feel totally differently. After a whole life's effort of coming closer and closer to knowing, I have come closer and closer to more and more ignorance. Now matter looks more like thought than like a thing.'

 

With Eddington's assertion, physics died. Since then, physicists have never been certain again.

 

Then Einstein came, and things started disappearing more and more.

 

 

[The sannyasin says: Some western scientists have tried to do the same thing with acupuncture as with everything else.]

 

They will do it with everything. They will do it with everything because they have a certain attitude about life and they want to look at life through that attitude. They have done that to acupuncture...

 

they are doing that even to meditation. They are trying to make it an object, trying to observe it from the outside... not tasting it from the inside.

 

That is the whole scientific dilemma - that science tries to see from the outside, and believes only whatsoever can be known from the outside. She is still afraid of the inside statement; not yet trusting the inside statement. But scientists will have to come to realise that. More and more limitations of their methodology will be revealed. More and more they will come against walls which they cannot penetrate.

 

Science is doomed to be a failure. When I say that, I don't mean that science is not going to be useful. It has been useful, it will be useful, but it cannot be ultimate. That dream is shattered.

 

Religion is, and is going to remain, the ultimate, because it accepts a different category - of the unknowable.

 

Man is not the unknown. He's all three: known, unknown, and unknowable. And the real essence remains the third - the unknowable.

 

Whatsoever you do, it will elude your grasp... you will not be able to grab it. And the more you try, the more you will find that it has slipped out of the hands. That's the mystery ... and that's the beauty.

 

That's the grandeur, the splendour.

 

So be hesitant; don't be worried about that. That's good. It shows that you respect the fact that you are moving on sacred ground. When you touch another's body you are almost entering the temple of God. The body is the temple of God. So first pray and then move, mm? [....]

 

 

[A sannyasin, also studying acupuncture with the sannyasin Osho just spoke to, said that they hoped to work together sometime.]

 

That will be very good... It can be very helpful. If you finish the course first, next time when you come I will tell you how to work together.

 

If a couple can work together in deep love, acupuncture will be more successful than a single man working alone, because it is a question of yin and yang.

 

Every patient has a man and a woman inside. If only a man is working, it will be easier for him to find the female points in the body, very easy. But it will be very difficult for him to find the male points, unless he is a homosexual. And if a woman is working on the body, she will be more perceptive about the male points than the female points. So if a couple can work in deep togetherness much can happen.

 

It has not been tried. Even in China it has not been tried; it has just remained a possibility. But if you are both working together, learn together, be together, and whenever you treat a person, treat him together. Move In deep harmony, as if you are one. That is possible. Once you finish your acupuncture, then both come and I will teach you how to be together so that your energy functions as one unity... and tremendous are the possibilities.

 

Man alone cannot be a good healer, and woman alone cannot be a good healer, because alone they are half; alone they are not whole. They themselves are not healthy, so how can they help health to happen to somebody else? Health is nothing but wholeness. The very word health comes from the same root as the word whole or holy; they belong to the same root.

 

So if you can function as a whole, together, meeting and merging, surrounding the patient from all sides; if you can pray and move together, you can bring something great to the very science of acupuncture. I am talking about something absolutely new. The concept exists but it has never been actualised, mm? Very good.

 

- Osho, Get Out of Your Own Way, Darshan 8 April 1976