Osho on Carl Gustav Jung and Western psychology

 

 

The only, without exception, the only way is meditation -- which western psychology has been avoiding. It has been avoiding to protect its whole structure, its whole literature. Its founders, its great psychoanalysts, they all will be drowned, forgotten if meditation enters into the area. Because meditation can help you to discover something beyond your mind.

 

The ego exists between the mind and the body. It is a false creation. The self exists not between body and mind, but beyond mind. And to reach to the self you have to learn the ways how the mind can be silenced, so its constant chattering is not there. Because the real self is absolute silence.

 

Unless western psychology incorporates meditation, it is going to remain attached with the ego. It cannot leave the ego, because without ego then there is no center to man. At least there is something -- it may be false -- but something to hang around... but it destroys the whole life of man. It drives him into more and more, it makes him speedier without knowing where he is going, why he is going, without even inquiring who he is.

 

Western psychology has not asked a basic question -- who am I? -- because that question will destroy the false ego. And to ask that question means you are entering into the world of meditation, and meditation in other words is a state of no-mind. And western psychology has been at great pains to deny any such state as no-mind -- mind is the end of your being -- and without exploring and without even looking at the whole long history of the eastern mystics -- this is a very unscientific attitude. The western psychology is not only a... one century old science. It is just born.

 

The eastern mysticism is almost ten thousand years old. And it is not a question of one man saying it or one country saying it; different countries, different races, different times, and they had no exchange of ideas, have reached to the same conclusion. You can not simply go on ignoring it. Half of the humanity - and perhaps the best half because it became civilized long before the West, it became cultured long before the West, it has lived all the glories that West thinks he is attaining now.... Looking at its literature, looking at its sculpture, looking at its music, its poetry, you have to think about that the people who have created such sculpture, the people who have created such great poetry, such great painting, such great music, should not be ignored out of hand. They should be listened carefully and whatever they are saying should be explored without any prejudice. They are saying that mind is not the end of man; no-mind is his basic reality.

 

The mind is a changing phenomenon, it is a flux -- and we know it! Each moment it is changing. The thoughts are continuously in a traffic. You cannot keep one thought in your mind more than for few seconds. It is unstable flux. It cannot constitute man's basic reality. Something more solid is needed. And it is there, it has been discovered. People have lived it. And you can see the difference: the greatest psychoanalyst in the West is still prone to the same kind of sicknesses as any ordinary man, to the same madness, to the same schizophrenia. As far as his expertise is concerned he is well- trained, but as far as his humanity is concerned, he is just as ordinary as anybody else. There is no transformation in him.

 

Psychologists have been known to rape their patients -- now how these people are going to help? Psychologists go mad more than any other profession, twice than any other profession. They commit suicide twice than any other profession. They are not joyful people, they are not calm and quiet, they don't show the mystics' silence, the mystics' joys, the mystics' certainty, authority. It is all mind work.

 

The mystic seems to be far above than the psychoanalyst. In fact they are afraid to encounter the mystic, because in front of the mystic they are in the same position as when a camel comes by the side of a mountain. Camels don't like to go to the mountains; they like the desert. There they are the mountains.

 

Carl Gustav Jung was in India. He went to see the Taj Mahal, he went to see Khajuraho, he went to see the temples of Konarak, but he did not go to see Ramana Maharshi. And wherever he went, he was again and again told that "You being one of the topmost psychoanalysts in the West, you should not miss this opportunity of meeting a eastern mystic who has come to his full flowering."

 

He was in the South, within two hours distance he could have reached Ramana Maharshi. For three months he was in India, but he avoided. This cannot be just coincidence. And he himself felt that he needs to give some explanation, otherwise it will be felt that he has been avoiding. And naturally, he was a great intellectual and a great psychoanalyst -- he could find any excuse and any explanation and he found the explanation which is very dangerous. His explanation was back in *Zurich, he gave the statement that he did not go to see Ramana Maharshi because the ways of the East and the West are different and the eastern way is dangerous for the western man because he has developed differently, his tradition is different, his culture is different, his religion is different, his whole psychic development is different. It is dangerous to bring into this different psychology any method from the East because that is developed for a different kind of man, for a different kind of psychology -- that's why I did not go." But this is all rubbish because who was saying to you that you have to follow Ramana Maharshi, who was saying to you that you have to use his techniques, his methods?

 

All that people were insisting was that you should at least see him. Just meeting him would not have destroyed your western psychology. And if it is so weak, so fragile, that just seeing the Ramana Maharshi it is going to be destroyed, then it is not worth -- it should be destroyed and sooner the better. Why waste time with such a weak thing? Ramana Maharshi is not afraid of you.

 

When he was told that Carl Gustav Jung is here and he has been continuously told by every psychologist he is meeting in India that "It is useless to meet professors of psychoanalysis in India because they are simply repeating like parrots what you are producing in the West. It is better to go to see something unique and different so you have a certain comparison. Perhaps he may be coming." And Ramana was overjoyed. He said, "He is welcome. Whenever he wants to come, I am available."

 

And this man is uneducated. He left his home when he was only seventeen. He is not an expert in anything. He is not a logician, he is not a philosopher and he is not afraid of one of the founders of psychoanalysis. He is happy to see him. But the psychoanalyst is a coward.

 

To me this is not just an incident between Jung and Ramana; it is very symbolic, very significant. The western psychoanalysis is afraid because it is based on shifting sands, it has no foundation. So if you ask me, I cannot suggest you small changes here and there. I cannot tell you how you can renovate leaving the old structure intact -- just giving it a new paint, a new arrangement of furniture and things like that. No. The whole structure is from the foundation is wrong.

 

The western psychology has to drop the ego and has to find the real self and that is possible only through meditation. And the East has done it for thousands of years. So it is not something new, it is not something unexplored, it is not something Quixotic. It is something for which centuries stand in support. And not a single meditator has gone mad, not a single meditator has committed suicide, not a single meditator has committed rape. It is not only expertise, intellectual understanding; it is a transformation of the man himself.

 

The psychoanalyst has to be reminded of one of the Socratic sayings: physician, first heal thyself. The psychoanalyst himself is sick, utterly sick. He is not different from the patient. They are in the same boat. He is having the same nightmares, he is suffering from the same mental tensions, he is feeling the same meaninglessness and he is trying to help people who are having the same diseases. How he can be a authority? With what face he can emphasize to the patient that things can be different? His whole personality is not involved in his work. It is only his education. It is something like a man gets educated in the history of art, becomes a great historian about all the art that has happened in the world, but he cannot draw a straight line himself. Because that does not come in the history. That is not a point at all. His expertise is history. This is the situation with the psychoanalyst: he knows everything about the mind, but he does not know how to change it, he cannot change his own mind, because for every change you have to be separate from the thing you are going to change. And he is identified with the mind -- who is going to change whom?

 

Meditation creates the gap. It takes you beyond and behind the mind, then you can change, because mind becomes an object to you. Then you are no more identified with the mind. Then you can rearrange or you can completely change and the mind cannot affect you at all. You are so far away, so above, that the mind cannot reach to you.

 

The mind not reaching to you gives you a tremendous power. You can reach to the mind and you can change anything you want and the mind is for the first time helpless. And you can help your patients for meditation.

 

Right now they are telling to their patients futile exercises of dream analysis. The patient comes twice a week or thrice a week for one hour, talks about all his dreams. And while he is talking about the dreams, sitting behind the couch, do you think the psychoanalyst is listening to him? Is he capable of listening? For that he will need a silent mind which he has not got. Perhaps he is dreaming himself, sitting behind.

 

It was a great device of Sigmund Freud that the patient cannot see the psychoanalyst, whether he has gone to sleep, whether he is dreaming, whether he is listening or not.

 

I have heard about a very rich man who was going through the psychoanalysis for almost ten years. The psychoanalyst was tired but could not get rid either, because he was paying too much -- he could not afford it. But something has to be done, because he was driving him nuts! Listening to the old, the same rotten stuff, again and again which we had.... He had listened thousands of times, but because he pays and pays more than anybody else, he cannot say that your dream analysis work is finished. That will cut almost half of his income. He had to suffer. He had to tolerate.

 

One day he came with an idea. He said to the rich old man that "I have got some urgent work and I know your dreams -- for ten years I have listened to you -- so what I will do: I will put my tape-recorder. You continue to talk, my tape-recorder will tape it. And in the night, when I am free of all this work -- silently, at ease -- I will listen to the tape, and that will be more significant."

 

The rich man said, "I have no objection." And he was having every day session, so next day when the psychoanalyst was entering his office, he saw the rich man getting out. He said, "But this is the time you come in. You are getting out." He said, "Yes, because I have left my tape-recorder. In the night, finished with all the business and work, silently, I taped all my dreams. Now my tape-recorder is talking to your tape-recorder. We both are saved! Do you think only you have got ideas? And now there is no question of any fee! Tape-recorders are talking with tape-recorders. Neither I am involved nor you are involved."

 

All that psychoanalysts are doing is just telling their patients to go deeper into their dreams and bring their dreams. And then each school of psychoanalysis interprets their dreams differently -- so it is not a science yet. It is just anybody's guess.

 

The same dream you take to Sigmund Freud and the meaning is always sexual. Whatever the dream, he will bring it to sex. Sex is the source of all the dreams. You cannot dream something, you cannot even imagine something, which he cannot reduce to sex. He is a perfect master about that. You may think that you have worked out perfectly, that this thing cannot be reduced to sex, but he will reduce it to sex. His whole life's expertise is only one thing: how to reduce everything to sex.

 

If you go to Jung with the same dream, it will not be interpreted as anything sexual; it will be interpreted in terms of mythology. He may take you thousands of years back -- perhaps to Atlantis, the continent that has drowned and disappeared, perhaps to some aboriginal tribe in Thailand which you have never heard about -- but he will reduce it to some mythology. All dreams are mythological and you are carrying a collective memory of the whole humanity. So he is capable to find from anywhere, something that corresponds to your dream. And this is his expertise, mythologies.

 

If you go to Adler with the same dream, he will reduce it to will to power, because everything is to him nothing but will to power. And these are the greatest founders of three schools. Then there are small schools and they go on growing, and they all have their interpretations. And you simply confuse the patient; you don't help him. You simply make things worse than they were before, because before there was only a dream, ordinary dream. Now there are universal mythologies, sexual perversions, will to power and whatnot.

 

You have not helped the person. You have filled his mind with more rubbish, you have puzzled him more, and there is not a single man in the whole western world whose psychoanalysis is complete. And there will never be a single man whose psychoanalysis will be complete. What kind of science is this? Because the criterion for psychoanalysis to be complete is that all your dreams disappear.

 

They have been analyzed, they have been brought to consciousness -- now they have nothing to do with you. They should evaporate. Your sleep should become dreamless sleep, what Patanjali calls sushupti, which is very close to samadhi. But not a single man has been able through psychoanalysis to reach to the state of sushupti, dreamless sleep. So the question of samadhi does not arise.

 

Samadhi means when sushupti, dreamless sleep, becomes alert, awake. When you are asleep as far as the body is concerned, you are asleep as far as the mind is concerned, because there is no disturbance of any dream, there is no tension in the body -- but beyond the mind, the no-mind is fully alert. He knows that the mind is without any dreams, he sees it, it is without any dreams, he sees it the body is absolutely relaxed. And this seeing, this alertness, continues twenty-four hours. Then sushupti becomes samadhi.

 

The western psychology has not even reached to sushupti. And it can never reach! Because dreams are such a thing: you can go on analyzing and new dreams will be coming up. Because every day you will be living and every day you will be repressing. You cannot express everything while you are living in the day. That repression will become dreams. And what can you do with mythologies which are millions of years old, which are there in your collective unconscious? They are inexhaustible. And what you can do with will to power, because that is another name of the ego.

 

The whole teaching, the whole culture, the whole civilization is nothing but will to power -- through money, through politics, through education, through everything -- just more power.

 

How can you get rid of dreams? Nobody can be fully psychoanalyzed. That is a complete failure of the whole system, of the whole science.

 

In the East we have never bothered about dreams. This is something to be noted, that for ten thousand years we have been working with the mind, but we have never bothered about dreams. On the contrary, rather than making too much fuss about dreams, we have called the whole world a dream. Do you see the point? The western psychology is making your dreams a great reality that has to be solved, encountered, analyzed and we have, with a single gesture, rejected the whole world and whole life as a dream. No analysis is needed, no profound philosophy is needed. It is all dreamstuff. What you have to do: you have to find the one who is dreaming. The dream is not important, but the dreamer. This is where eastern and western psychologies depart: they become entangled with dreams and the East simply puts dreams aside and start looking for the dreamer, because the dreamer is the real thing. And if we can manage and change and transform the dreamer, the dreams will disappear. The dreams are projections of the dreamer. Who is the dreamer? Where is the dreamer? Rather than wasting time with analysis of the dreams -- which is endless, ad infinitum -- they have simply reached directly to the dreamer. And what they have found is the real self. And in finding it, they have found a tremendous energy of awareness.

 

Because you were not aware of it, that's why there were dreams. In your unawareness was the existence of dreams. In your awareness they evaporate just like dewdrops evaporating in the morning sun. The moment you become aware of your authentic being, all dreams disappear.

 

So in the East there have been thousands of people without any psychoanalysis, who have dropped all their dreams, who have not only reached to a dreamless sleep but has simultaneously reached samadhi -- the ultimate goal of human health, wholeness, immortality.

 

The western psychology needs a complete change. It is not going to be just a partial change here and there. It is going to be en toto. And the thing that will bring the change is meditation: going into the no-mind, beyond mind, so that you can be a witness of your mind and its activities, of your body and its activities. And this no-mind has no ego. This real self is not an ego. It is part of cosmic consciousness, it is part of the whole existence. It is not yours.

 

The western psychology is on the verge of a great revolution. The revolution will come from the experiences of the mystics. Perhaps, Ramana Maharshi may not have been of much help. He may have impressed Jung as a charismatic figure, but he may not have been of much help. But I can be, because I know as much western psychology as any Jung, as any Freud, as any Adler. And I know the East not theoretically, but as my own experience. I can become the bridge. And it will be difficult to find a man like me, for the simple reason because those who study the western psychology don't become mystics and the people who become mystics don't bother to study western psychology.

 

I have been doing all kinds of unnecessary things.

 

-Osho, "The last Testament, Vol 5, #28"