Chapter 28

[NOTE: This is a typed tape transcript and has not been edited or published, as of August 1992. It is for reference use only.]

Q: BHAGWAN, WHAT CAN YOU RECOMMEND TO WESTERN PSYCHOLOGISTS, WHO WANTS TO BE MORE THAN AN AGENT OF EGOIST IDEOLOGIES?

A: They will have to find a totally new orientation. As the Western psychology is, it is based on the ego. The whole effort is how to enhance the ego of the individual, how to make it more solid, more assertive, more ***, more ambitious.

And the whole problem is that the Western psychology does not accept anything beyond mind. It divides man into body and mind. Body is mortal, so is mind.

Between these two there is nothing which is eternal and can be made a base for a new psychology.

Western psychology goes on sharpening the mind, making it more efficient, more successful, but that means you have to depend on a certain kind of self, otherwise there is no binding between this mind and the body. They will fall apart. They need to be glued together and that glue is the ego. Unless Western psychology rises above the mind and finds a self which is not an invention, but it is ***.

It is difficult for it to get rid of the ego; something is needed as a center. Either you have a real center or you have to create a substitute center which will be false, but for the moment it will do. And once you have accepted a false center that is the ego, you are solving one problem, giving man a center, giving his body and soul a bridge. But you are on the other hand creating thousand and one problems. Then you have to go on hiding the fact that the ego is false, because if the man comes to know that the ego is false, he will simply fall apart. He won't have a center, he won't have any roots, he won't have any being.

To keep the ego continuously alive, apparently at least, real, a strange mechanism has to be used. It is just like paddling a bicycle. If you want to bicycle to remain mobile, you have to continuously go on peddling. If you stop peddling, it is not only going to stop the bicycle from moving, it will make the bicycle fall immediately because it has only two wheels. Moving, it is possible that they can support you. The whole trick is then the movement. It is a subtle trick. By the time the cycle is at the point A and is going to fall, you have moved it to the point B. By the time it is going to fall at the point B you have moved it at the point C. By the time it is going to fall at the point C you have pedaled it at the point D. This is the strategy; otherwise it will fall at any point, A,B,C, just a slow down. Just don't pedal. Let it remain at one point just for few seconds and it will fall.

The same strategy is needed for the ego. You have to go on and on towards new ambitions, from A to B, from B to C, from C to D. You cannot stop being ambitious. The moment you stop being ambitious, suddenly your whole structure will fall apart. You won't have any center, you won't have anything that you can call "I". And in that state, except madness, nothing else is possible.

So the Western psychology has to teach ambition, make the ambition the very nourishment of your I, your ego and the ambition has to be a constant process which stops nowhere till you die. It starts by the moment the child starts understanding language and it goes on and on up to the last breath. It is a very strange game. To keep anything false, giving you the appearance of the real, you cannot stop the process and have a look at it. You can look at it only in the process. Then, it looks perfectly there.

Gautam Buddha has an analogy. He could not have used bicycle because there were no bicycles. He uses the analogy that you are having a lighted torch in your hand and you move your hand round and round. That gives an illusion of a round circle of fire which does not exist, but it appears to exist. But you have to move fast. You can't give gaps. You can't move from a to b so slowly that the person can see that there is only a lighted torch, there is no circle. He should not see the gaps. There are gaps: when you are moving, howsoever fast you are moving, there are gap. But our eyes have a certain capacity; they cannot see the gaps if it is moving fast enough.

The fire circle is the ego according to Gautam Buddha. You can watch it only in movement. In movement it exists, that's why we have to goad the child, "Come first into the class. Be at the top of your university." We have to goad everybody from every side -- the father, the mother, the relatives, and then one day the wife and the children. Even children are goading their father that,"Neighbors are having new cars and you are still having five year old model. It is shameful. We feel embarrassed. You are not a successful man. What are you doing? Can't you earn enough to have a new model every year?" The wife is continuously goading; she needs new clothes, new diamonds, new ornaments, because neighbors are having it, and it is a question of prestige -- your prestige!

I used to stay with one of my friends in Calcutta. He was a simple man, using very simple clothes, simple life, but his wife was loaded with all kinds of precious stones. And they both used to go with me to the meetings where I was speaking. I asked him that "This is strange: you live like a poor man, your wife is carrying so much load...." He said, "She is my showcase. She is my prestige. I don't need to carry that load: she carries it for me. It is enough that people know she is my wife. All those diamonds and all those rubies and emeralds she cannot earn. They are my gifts. I can afford to be simple without being poor; just I have to keep my wife loaded continuously. She is the most loaded woman in the whole Calcutta and everybody knows she is my wife -- that's enough. She is my showcase, my advertisement, my success, my bank account -- everything she is. I need not."

From the childhood to the old age you are being continuously harassed that "Keep on moving, more and more." The reason is very basic. The people may not know why it is happening. The reason is very basic, because your ego will fall at any moment if you stop. You cannot stop until your last breath. Then nobody cares: you are dead! If your ego falls it is not a problem.

But while you are alive if your ego falls, it is going to create problems. When a person goes bankrupt, why he commits suicide? Was his life only his bank account? If he has gone bankrupt that does not mean that life has to be finished.

Any failure and you immediately think of committing suicide. Students fail in examinations and immediate idea is to commit suicide. Why? Because the ego has fallen; now they don't have anything to support them, anything to call their center. They have lost their center, now they are an empty circumference. It is so empty that it is better to end the life rather than to carry this emptiness.

This is a known fact that people at the peak of their success feel utterly bored, utterly deceived by life itself. They had never thought that on the way. On the way everything looked beautiful, but by the time they have reached the end of the ladder suddenly they have to stop because there is nowhere else to go. They have reached to the end of the ladder before their death. The ego disappears. It is only in the process. While they were going from one rung to another rung, it was there. But when they have reached to the last rung, it is just not there, and suddenly a realization: that their whole life they had been working for something which has never existed in the first place, that they had been deceived by everyone, that the whole educational system has been a deception, that even the parents who pretended to love them did not love enough.

Nobody was there in their life who could have told them the truth and now wasting their whole life, rising on this ladder, they find at a point from where there is nowhere to go. Suddenly, the wheel of fire has disappeared, they are disillusioned. All successful people if they are intelligent, die disillusioned. Only mediocre people can avoid disillusionment, for two reasons: because they are mediocre they cannot reach to the very end of the ladder -- the competition is tough and they don't have the intelligence to make it. Secondly, even if they can make it, they are not intelligent enough to see that they have lost their center.

The western psychology had to fall upon the ego. In fact, whenever they feel that somebody is psychologically sick, their diagnosis is that his ego is not strong, that he needs some more strengthening of the ego, more assertiveness, more aggressiveness, that he is too humble, that he is too simple, that he is not making his way enough competitively, that he allows others to pass ahead of him, that he does not prevent him, that he does not pull the legs of others and reach ahead of them. That his ego is weak, his ego should be strengthened.

Because of the woman's liberation movement, the women started going to the psychoanalysts and they had more time also to afford. The husbands had to do their job, earn the money; the wife had all the time in the world. And psychoanalysis is in the fashion.... As the women in the West started going to psychoanalysts, the liberation movement has taken a very egoistic turn. It had to, because psychoanalysis goes on teaching to them that "You have been exploited down the ages because you have weak egos. Man has never allowed you to have a strong will, strong ego, aggressive, assertive. You have been told that to be aggressive and assertive is unwomanly. To be humble is to be graceful. You have been told things which go against strengthening the ego and that is your downfall, down the ages. And that is your basic sickness. The only way to get out of this sickness is to assert. Do whatever the man is doing. If the man are smoking cigarettes, you have to smoke cigarettes. Don't think that it is unwomanly."

Now in the East, no woman of higher classes can even think of smoking. It just looks ugly. It just does not fit. And certainly the eastern woman has more grace.

And grace has a beauty of its own.

The western woman may have a beautiful face, but it is harsh. It is not graceful. It is hard. And this has been continuously hammered into her mind that "This is the way to fight. She has to be just like the man: she has to learn Aikido and she has to learn Judo, she has to learn Jujitsu, she has to learn Yoga. She has to be capable of fighting on the same ground as man. She should not be befooled by man's teachings of humbleness and grace and beauty and calmness, equilibrium, tolerance, patience. She should forget all those words; they are the causes of their slavery. And the woman has agreed. That has not made her free. That has simple made her unwomanly. That has turned her natural sexuality into a perversion, because if man is the enemy, then how you can fall in love with man? That is going to be a contradiction. It is better to be lesbians; you love another woman of your own kind. And that's what the woman's liberation movement has turned into: lesbianism.

And the whole thing is that western psychology has chosen -- rather than discovering the real center -- a cheaper substitute: a false ego. It has destroyed man, because it has went into man's mind as ambition. There is no other way for the ego to keep alive. It has destroyed man, because it has went into man's mind as ambition. There is no other way for the ego to keep alive. It has destroyed the woman of all her beauties, of all her unique qualities. In the name of freedom it has not given freedom. It has simply degraded her whole being. It has not raised her consciousness. It is really a laughing thing that the women who are in the liberation movement have conscious-raising sessions. They don't know anything about consciousness and their consciousness-raising sessions are really consciousness-degrading sessions.

Their consciousness means how to be against men, how to be equal in every field. If man uses dirty words, vulgar words, then women have to use the same dirty and vulgar words -- that is equality. I wonder, sooner or later, they are going to pissing standing, because consciousness-raising the cost. Their whole movement has turned into utter stupidity and the reason is psychoanalysis.

You are asking me how the psychoanalysts in the West can find a better framework than ego supplies to it. 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.

Okay, Maneesha?