The Nightmare "Gift"of Television

 

 

A famous psychoanalyst, Franz Strunz from Munich, has been studying child behavior in dreams, and he has found that Sigmund Freud's original idea was not right.

 

Sigmund Freud's original idea was that the child - every child, particularly in the civilized and cultured world - lives under repressive morality, repressive priesthood, repressive parents, and he cannot understand exactly why his natural and spontaneous behavior is unacceptable.

 

He is not yet grown up in the mind - the mind will come slowly - but he has been born as a natural being. So he finds it absolutely difficult to understand why his natural behavior is condemned. But because he has to be dependent on the parents - and he is utterly helpless - he has to accept the God that the parents believe in, and he has to accept all the commandments in which the parents believe. And they drive the child to the church, or to whatever religious organization they belong. This is the beginning of programming the child.

 

Sigmund Freud's original thesis was that under these circumstances the child finds only freedom in his dreams. The parents are no longer there, the priest is no longer there, God is no longer there...no morality, no condemnation, no repression, no inhibition. In his dreams he lives a very natural and very pleasant life. That becomes a substitute for him. And I am absolutely in agreement with Sigmund Freud. The child does not know yet what is dream and what is real, it takes a little time. That is why you cannot remember if you go backwards.

 

Up to the age of four you may be able to remember a few things; beyond that is a complete blank. But things were happening. Since your birth, up to the age of four, things were happening, but you don't have any memory because you did not yet have a mind. The mind is a social product. It takes at least four years to program the child to be ready to accept anything that is told to him, because he knows if he denies it, he will suffer punishment - not only here but in hellfire. But in his dreams, up to the age of four, he enjoys absolute freedom.

 

Hence Sigmund Freud said that the children's dreams are very pleasant, very beautiful. In fact, the child can cope with reality only because of his dreams. The dreams are compensatory. But this man, Franz Strunz, has been surveying hundreds of children and their dreams. His conclusion is that Sigmund Freud was wrong. So first I have to give you his statement:

 

Sigmund Freud's views on child dreams have been challenged by Munich psychologist, Franz Strunz.

Sigmund Freud claimed that children's dreams revealed the pleasure-oriented nature of nocturnal figments of an imagination, which was not hampered by the suppression and repression of the adult emotional make-up, and which aimed at making secret wishes come true.

 

Obviously dreams are very private. Nobody can enter in your dreams, and nobody can know what you are dreaming. The child has absolute freedom, but he is not free when he is awake-naturally he compensates. Whatever has been denied in his waking life, he fulfills those wishes in his dream. And because he cannot make the distinction that the dream is just a dream and the reality is a totally different matter, he is completely happy. And he can tolerate this society and this repressive culture, and these unnatural demands made by religions, their God, their priests, just because he has a freedom at least when he is asleep.

 

This has been challenged by this Munich psychologist....

 

Strunz's research showed that children's nocturnal fantasies are mainly accompanied by stifling feelings of uneasiness and upset, and that all kinds of threat animals, thieves, robbers, murderers, catastrophes, death and frightening strangers greatly disturb sleeping children. Most children, he said, are paralyzed with fear by the dangers they dream about.

 

I absolutely disagree with this Munich psychologist. In a hurry to criticize Sigmund Freud, he has forgotten that Sigmund Freud was surveying the dreams of totally different children. A great thing has happened in between that he has not taken note of: that is television. It is television that has changed the children's dreams - what God could not do, what the priest could not do, what the parents could not do. They used alphabetical language, logic, which the child was not yet capable to understand.

 

The child lives in a primitive way. Pictures he can understand; his language is pictorial. His dreams are very vivid, very colorful and very alive. Television has created a great impact on children, on their behavior, on their dreams, because the dreams and the television look alike. Now the child cannot tell the difference between television and dreams. And on the television he sees all these things that this Munich psychologist is trying to use as a criticism of Sigmund Freud's fundamental hypothesis: "stifling feelings of uneasiness and upset, and all kinds of threat animals, thieves, robbers, murderers, catastrophes, death and frightening strangers greatly disturb sleeping children."

 

All this is the gift of television. It has nothing to do with Sigmund Freud's fundamental hypothesis; it is still right. But this is how even your psychologists, world-famous people, behave unconsciously. He has completely forgotten that a new thing has happened between him and Sigmund Freud - and that is television. And it has changed not only the child's dreams, but his behavior too. The child sees all kinds of robberies, rapes, murders, thieves - all kinds of dangerous people on the television. Those are pictorial. The sermons of the priest were not pictorial, they were linguistic.

 

His parents' teachings were linguistic, and he was not yet able to understand language and logic. But pictures he understands. So television has given all kinds of threatening, sensational, dangerous ideas to the child's mind. It is television that should have been noted by the psychologist. But rather than focusing on television, he has immediately gone to criticize Sigmund Freud. I am taking it as an example to give you a sense that even your psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists, are as unconscious a people as anybody else. There is no difference.

 

Not only have the dreams changed, but even the behavior of children. In America, even small children.... Just a few days ago one child randomly went into school with his father's gun and killed four children. And it was not that they were enemies or anything - just random, he just fired because he has been watching continuous killing, murder on the television...a great excitement. And it is not an exceptional case.

 

Children have been found trying to rape small girls. The idea is being given by the television. Children of the age of seven and eight are taking drugs. They have left hippies far behind! At least to be a hippie you used to be eighteen, nineteen, twenty.... Hippiedom exists only from twenty to thirty. After thirty the hippie disappears - in his place comes the yuppie. By the time he is thirty, he starts understanding that this way of life is not going to last long. Now his parents are refusing to support him, and the hippie has to change into a square world. He has to go back to the same society, clean shaved, well dressed, looking very professional and efficient.

 

And yuppies have proved that they are capable of doing things. Now they have their homes, their cars, their wives, their children. And nobody can imagine that these people used to walk around the streets dirty, unclean. Uncleanliness had become their philosophy. It was a reaction, because parents were telling them, "Cleanliness is just next to God." And they have heard the news that God is dead. Now who is next to God? Cleanliness?

 

The reaction was against the parents and their constant effort to repress their nature. They started moving to the one extreme, the other extreme. They started to have a philosophy of uncleanliness, dirtiness. But then they became dropouts, and society would not accept them; they became unfit. But they could manage up to the age of thirty. By that time their parents are fed up. They have been trying hard, and they were not listening at all to them. They were not going to the church. They were moving towards Kabul, Kulu Manali, Kathmandu, Goa, and ending up in Poona! This was their route. You know what route has brought you here! Poona was the dead end. But the new children are taking drugs because they are seeing all kinds of drug stories on television, and certainly they become interested.

 

And children are very curious to explore anything that they see on the television. Seven-year-old children are taking drugs, hard drugs. And it is becoming a widespread danger in America. Their dreams are full of dangers, murders, suicide - that's what they are watching for almost seven and a half hours on average per day! You cannot expect.... If you are wasting one-third of your life on television, then it is going to have a deep impact. Children understand the language of pictures, and television brings all these colorful sensational stories.

 

Their dreams have changed, their behavior has changed. I would like this Munich psychologist to survey a place where television has not entered, and I am absolutely certain he will have to support Sigmund Freud's hypothesis. And if he really wants to go deeper into his search, he should go to the aboriginals, where not only television has not entered - even the priest has not reached, even the God is unheard of. People are living naturally: no repressive, no inhibitory morality. If he goes to those places he will be surprised.

 

First, he should explore countries where television has not yet come, because these will be the children whom Sigmund Freud has studied. I know children in India - almost ninety percent, or even more than ninety percent of India has no idea of television or movies. Small villages...there I have come across people who have not even seen a railway train. Electricity has not reached to many places, so there is no question. And television has just been introduced to India, so only big cities - Bombay, New Delhi, Calcutta, Madras - may have television, but the major part of the country.... You can study children there.

 

I have studied children for my own purposes, and I can give a guarantee that if television and movies have not reached, you will find Sigmund Freud's hypothesis absolutely correct. And if you go to the aboriginals.... Particularly one tribe of aboriginals in Burma has been studied by psychologists and they could not believe it: that tribe had never been in any war. They don't fight with each other - not even in their dreams. They don't have so many dreams as you have.

 

There are hundreds of people in that tribe who have never dreamt. When you talk about dreams, they just look at you, "What are you are talking about? When we are asleep we are asleep. What do you mean by dream?" In their language there is no word for dream. And if once in a while a child dreams, or a man dreams anything - for example, having a fight with some neighbor, or having a love affair with some woman - first thing in the early morning he has to confess the dream to his parents.

 

And then all the elders of the village gather together to figure out who the person is that he has murdered in his dream, or who was fighting with him in his dream, or who the woman is that he has fallen in love with in his dream. They figure it out. He gives the complete detailed description, very vivid and very real. So they can figure out who the person is - it is a small tribe.

 

Then the elders tell the person who has been dreaming, "You should take sweets and flowers and gifts to that woman, let her know that you have misbehaved with her in the dream, and you have come to be forgiven. Go with an apology to the woman or to the man with whom you have been violent. And unless they forgive you, don't return, sit there." And obviously, the person has nothing to do-you have not murdered him, you just dreamt-so obviously, he is willing to forgive you.

 

This has been their culture for thousands of years, that even a dream has to be taken into account. And the ultimate result is that the people ordinarily don't dream. Only once in a while somebody dreams, and that happens only when he has repressed something natural. For example, he has been looking at a woman with lust, but could not express it in reality; hence the dream comes as a substitute for wish fulfillment.

 

That society knows a far better psychoanalysis than our so-called civilized world. They have been psychoanalyzing for thousands of years, and their method is far more effective. They have relieved people's sleep completely of dreams. They know authentic sleep, what Patanjali calls dreamless sleep. He divides your states of mind into four: the so-called waking state, the dream state, deeper then is dreamless sleep, and deeper than that is samadhi, a real awakening.

 

The first is called "so-called waking"; the last is called "real awakening," which makes you a buddha. But these aboriginal tribes don't have the dream state at all. From the waking state they simply move into dreamless sleep. And they are innocent, utterly graceful. Not a single war in their whole history, not a single murder in their whole history, not a single suicide in their whole history! They are just like flowers - innocent, natural. And you call yourself civilized, and you call them uncivilized...primitive...pagans...?

 

So if this psychologist is really interested, first he should study people who don't know television, who don't know movies, and he will find the hypothesis of Sigmund Freud absolutely correct. Then he should study those aboriginals who have lived so naturally, without any repressive church, without any Christianity, without any God, without any priest. Just like animals, just like birds, just like trees, part of this immense existence, naturally flowing, they don't have dreams at all.

 

Once in a while somebody may have a dream, but only once in a while. And then the elders of the society gather together to decide what has to be done. First, one has to figure out who really was the person he dreamt about. He gives the whole details, and then goes with an apology and with some gifts - sweets, fruits, flowers; they are poor people. He just offers these gifts and asks for their forgiveness. In his dream he has been nasty to them, angry to them, violent to them, lustful to them. Now it is absolutely obligatory that he should ask for their forgiveness: Unless they forgive you, just sit down in front of their houses.

 

This is a more authentic psychoanalysis - not lying on the couch of a psychiatrist or psychoanalyst and just talking about your dreams. It goes on and on, because every day you are repressing so much that it bubbles up in the dreams. No psychoanalysis has ever been complete, not a single man is there in the whole world whose psychoanalysis is complete. It cannot be complete, because every day you are creating fresh material for new dreams.

 

You go on getting analyzed, and you go on getting repressed by the priest in the name of God. God and the priest together have conspired against human consciousness so deeply and so violently that they have disturbed your waking state, they have disturbed your dream state. And because these states are so much disturbed, you cannot go beyond. This disturbance keeps you engaged and occupied. People who are moving directly from the waking state to the dreamless sleep are very easily capable of slipping down to the fourth state.

 

That's why the ancient Zen masters continuously say you just have to relax, you don't have to do anything. It is not a question of doing, it is a question of non-doing. Just relax and rest, so that you can reach to the fourth stage where you suddenly are awake for the first time. Then you know that your so-called wakefulness was not authentic, it was a very small, thin layer, very fragmentary, not of much use. You will be surprised to know that in these aboriginal societies there are no buddhas.

 

There is no need. Those people are naturally entering finally into the fourth stage. As they become more and more experienced, and become more and more peaceful, centered, they start moving into the fourth state without any effort, without any teaching, without any scripture. If you understand me, a natural life will end up in enlightenment without any effort. You will suddenly find you are enlightened. That's why no recognition is given to the enlightened person. That is a natural phenomenon, just as every rosebush if watered well, if allowed to have some sunlight, if given good soil, will come to flowering.

 

That is not a miracle. Every man comes to flowering, he becomes a Gautam Buddha without any effort. And because every natural human being is bound to become an enlightened person, no recognition is taken of it. It is just as childhood is followed by youth, youth is followed by middle age, middle age is followed by old age and you know that old age is followed by death. It is just a natural sequence. Buddhahood should be a natural sequence. It is not, because of your God and your priest and your scriptures; they are preventing you.

 

Freedom from all these is absolutely necessary. And strangely enough, every government knows that television is harming people immensely, ruining their physical health, ruining their mental sanity. Still, because all the great corporations which support the politicians for their elections, own these televisions. The churches have their own television stations, radio stations, magazines, newspapers - in different names so you will not know it. I have been informed from Germany that all great newspapers are owned by the church, but you will not know.

 

Television stations are owned by the church, radio stations are owned by the church. Satellites are owned by the church...and big corporations. There are ten corporations rising...a survey says that in the coming ten years, there will be only ten corporations all over the world, because they are purchasing small corporations. Small corporations cannot compete. These ten corporations will have all the wealth of the world in different names, so you cannot even suspect a new kind of imperialism - and a very subtle kind that you will not be able to figure out who is behind it.

 

These corporations own almost all the television...and their interest is not in people's psychology or their disturbance. Their whole interest is that fifty percent of time is devoted to advertisement - that is their income. But that income is possible only if millions of people are watching their programs, otherwise nobody is going to advertise. To attract millions of people to the programs they have to make it as sensational as possible. It has to be a triangle story: two women...one man, or two men...one woman, and then murder, and suicide, and mental sickness, and insanity and all kinds of sensations have to be brought every day. It is the same story that goes on and on.

 

And they don't allow you to see the whole story. They give you a fragment, and then comes the advertisement. When you are getting hot, excited, then suddenly comes the advertisement. In that hot state, vulnerable, you immediately swallow the advertisement. You don't care whether it is healthy, whether you need it or not, it simply makes an imprint on your mind. And again the story comes, so you don't even have time to think over what has got into your mind, they don't give you the chance to think. Again the story starts, and you forget all about the advertisement.

 

A fragment again, and again the same advertisement is repeated. It goes on from six o'clock in the morning till twelve o'clock in the night. And people are just being imprinted by all kinds of nonsense and stupidity. Television has become one of the great dangers to humanity; it could have been a great bliss, a great blessing. It could have been tremendously useful in education. According to me, all television stations should belong to the universities, to the colleges, to the schools. And they should have programs which educate people.

 

No advertisements - that is not education, that is mis-education, that is exploitation. They should teach people history, geography.... Small children who cannot get it through language will be easily interested in learning the history, in learning geography, in learning other kinds of subjects. Sciences, literature, fiction, poetry, painting, all kinds of arts can be brought to children of all grades. So there must be television stations for small children, and then there should be some for the college graduates.

 

And there should be television to the highest grade, postgraduate and research people, professors, because professors have to be continuously made aware of all new kinds of discoveries. Otherwise they are lagging behind, almost twenty years behind. They had read twenty years before when they were in their postgraduate classes, but that knowledge has become out of date. To update professors will be very easy by television. To bring tremendous interest into all kinds of subjects, in whatever the students are interested.... If they are interested in music, they can be taught music, musical instruments. If they are interested in painting, they can be taught painting, sculpture. They can be taught meditation. All kinds of possibilities are there once television is taken out of the hands of the exploiters, and out of the hands of the religious preachers.

 

And then these children will prove Sigmund Freud's hypothesis absolutely. This man has taken a revengeful attitude. It always happens! Because Sigmund Freud is the founder of psychology, every psychologist feels to take revenge, just as every child feels to take revenge on the parents. This research simply shows a very deep hidden secret of this psychologist, that he wants to take revenge on the fatherly figure, Sigmund Freud. Otherwise this was so simple to understand - that technology has brought so many things to the children which were not available in Sigmund Freud's time.

 

The new children were not available for him to study, nor was he aware of the aboriginal children. He was aware only of Christian and Jewish children - both are repressive religions. Christianity is a child of Judaism, so is Mohammedanism. All three religions born outside of India are branches of Judaism, repressive. The God is angry, the God is jealous, the God is going to punish you with eternal hellfire. But these words did not get into the minds of the children.

 

They start to absorb these words after four years of age, but television can be watched before four years of age. Small children are watching television because they know the language of pictures and color; their world consists of pictures. That is why in children's books you have to first print a big picture. If you want to teach them what a mango is you have to put up a big picture of a mango. Saliva comes first; then comes the word "mango."

 

Looking at the picture, the child starts feeling to eat it, and the picture becomes associated by and by with the word "mango." As the child grows, the mango picture becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. In the university, pictures completely disappear from the books; words become very small, longer, complicated, and complex sentences.

 

Now the child has moved from pictorial language to an alphabetical language, to words from pictures. Now words don't have color, and words don't have that kind of impact which a child can understand. So what this psychologist has to understand is that his hypothesis is absolutely wrong and biased, and it is just a revenge against Sigmund Freud. Otherwise a conscious researcher would have looked at what changes have happened between the time of Sigmund Freud and our time.

 

Are the children the same that you are surveying? They are not the same children! Then you cannot condemn Sigmund Freud's hypothesis because he was studying a different kind of children. Those children are disappearing from the West completely, so this hypothesis will be accepted. That's why I have taken it for your consideration that this hypothesis is wrong. This hypothesis is bound to be accepted, because you can study the children and that study will support it. But the reason is television, not the children! Remove the television and you will find children exactly as Sigmund Freud has found them.

 

But he also missed the aboriginal children, which don't have any dreams at all. He could not have conceived that there are people who don't have any dreams, because the Christian-Judaic religion is so repressive. People who have been brought up in that culture cannot conceive that there are still aboriginal people around the world, hidden in deep forests, who are absolutely natural beings.

 

They have never heard that there is anything to be repressed. Just in the middle of India there is a state, Bastar. It used to be a independent state under British rule, and the king of Bastar was my friend. He invited me to his state, and he introduced me to the people of Bastar. They are aboriginals, and they live almost naked. They put only a small piece of cloth around them when they come to the main capital, Jagdalpur - otherwise, in the forest, in the mountains they live naked.

 

You can ask a woman, even by touching her breast, "What is this?" - and she will not feel embarrassed, she will not feel offended. She will say, "This is just to give milk to my child," with no idea that "you are being offensive, you are touching my breast." She is not going to scream, and she is not going to any police station; in fact, there is no police station there. The people are so innocent, that rarely does it happen that somebody kills someone. It has happened perhaps twice in this maharajah's lifetime. Then the person who has killed comes to the capital himself, because only the capital has the police station and the court. He goes to the police station and informs them: "I have killed a man and I need to be punished." Otherwise no one would ever have known that he had killed anybody. Nobody goes into those deep forests.

 

They live in caves; nobody goes there. And they have such beautiful caves. And they are such beautiful people. You will not find anybody fat, you will not find anybody thin - they look all alike, and they live long, and they live very naturally. Even about sex they are very natural, perhaps the only natural people left in India. And exactly what they do, has to be done all over the world if you want people not to be perverted. Behind all kinds of mental sicknesses is sexual perversion. In Bastar, I found for the first time, people are totally natural. After a girl and a boy come of age - that is fourteen and thirteen...they have in their villages, just in the middle of the village, a small hall just made of bamboos, as their huts are made.

 

The moment a girl starts having periods, she has to stay in the central hall. By the time a boy is fourteen, sexually potent, he has to live.... All the girls and the boys who have become sexually mature, they start living together, sleeping together, with one condition - and that is a beautiful condition - that no boy should sleep with a girl for more than three days. So you have to become acquainted with every girl of the village, and every girl has to become acquainted with every boy of the village.

 

Before you decide to marry someone, you must know every woman of the village, so there is no question arising afterwards that you start feeling lustful for some woman. You have lived with all the woman of your age, and it is your choice after the experiment with all the woman. And there is no jealousy at all, because from the very beginning every boy is living with every girl. Every boy has the chance to be acquainted with every girl of the village, and every girl has the chance to be acquainted with every boy of the village.

 

So there is no question of any jealousy, there is no competitive spirit at all. It is just an experiment, an opportunity for every child to know sex with different people and to then find out who suits you, and with whom you were the most happy, with whom you settle harmoniously, with whom you felt your heart. Perhaps this is the only scientific way to find a soul mate.

 

But these people are called uncivilized, and missionaries are doing a great job of civilizing them: opening schools, hospitals. They don't need hospitals. They are such healthy people that these missionaries bring all kinds of diseases to them. They have never heard about gonorrhea, they have never heard about all kinds of perverted diseases.

 

The missionaries bring them, and then the hospital.... The missionaries bring the idea to them that you are poor. They have never thought about it - they are all equal, equally poor. There is no question of comparison, and they are living perfectly well, and healthy, on one meal a day. They are more healthy than anybody else in the world. Just recently scientists have been experimenting on rats, and they were puzzled. They kept two categories of rats, the same kind. To one category they were giving as much food as they wanted - American rats. And to the other category, the Bastar rats, they were giving food only one time. And they were surprised. The rats who were given whatever they wanted, lived to be only half of the age of the rats who were fed only one time...they were twice the age - twice the American fellows.

 

So Bastar people live longer, although they don't know how long they have lived, because they cannot count. They live up to one hundred years very easily, one hundred and twenty very easily. If you search deeper in the forests, perhaps you can find a person who has lived one hundred and fifty years.

 

They don't know - you have to figure out. And they don't look that old either. Even the oldest person goes on working. Life is hard, but it is beautiful. Every night - particularly when it is moon nights - they dance to abandon. The whole day they have been working hard, and in the night they dance. All the women, all the men together - no question that you have to dance with your wife.

 

People go on changing partners. It is a social phenomenon. It is not a question of possessiveness - that you should dance with your own wife, and if she is dancing with somebody else, then you are looking jealous, you are looking murderous. I have watched their dances. They look so beautiful. There is no question of any lust, because they are fulfilled, sexually fulfilled, physically fulfilled. They don't have dreams. I have asked many. I have asked the maharajah. He said, "They don't have dreams, but I have because I am an educated person. They destroyed me. I was born in these hills, and I would have loved to remain just as uneducated, as uncultured as these people. Their joy is infectious, their laughter is infectious. But they don't have any dreams." There is no need for dreams. A dream is a need created by a repressive morality, by a repressive God, by a repressive priesthood.

 

These are the people who have created dreams. And then another priesthood has come into being, the psychoanalyst. They exploit your dreaming. One priesthood has created the dreams, another priesthood...and both were Jews. Jesus is a Jew, and Sigmund Freud is a Jew. One Jew has created Christianity - the most repressive religion in the world - and the other Jew has created psychoanalysis to analyze your dreams. And both are having great fun. Both are the most highly paid people...psychoanalysts and the missionaries, and the priests and the bishops, and the cardinals and the pope.

 

Psychoanalysis will remain incomplete unless it comes to understand the people who don't have dreams. Then you will have to change the whole idea. It is not that by analyzing people's dreams you are going to give them mental health. The question is how to help them move from dreamless sleep to relax into the fourth stage called turiya, samadhi, satori, where one becomes utterly awakened, the state of a Gautam Buddha.

 

-Osho, "I Celebrate Myself: God Is No Where: Life Is Now Here, #6"