Question – Beloved Master, The west is overpopulated with psychotherapists and their patients, but why does no one seem to be helped?

Osho – Patrick, the help is possible only through a buddha. The help is possible only through the awakened one.

The psychotherapists are as asleep as you are; they are in the same boat. There is no qualitative difference between you and them — in fact they may be crazier than you are. They may be more in a mess than you are because they constantly deal with mad people; day in, day out, they are surrounded by mad people. Rather than helping the mad people to become sane, just the opposite happens: being constantly in contact with mad people, slowly slowly they become mad themselves.

This is natural. They don’t have yet that awareness which can remain aloof, unaffected. They don’t have that distance, that coolness, that detachment. They are not living on sunlit peaks; they are groping in the same dark valley where you are groping. They are as blind as you are, but they have to pretend that they are not blind — and that is more dangerous.

If a person is blind and knows that he is blind and never pretends otherwise, there is every possibility he will walk more cautiously. If he pretends that he is not blind, if he projects that he is not blind, if he convinces others that he is not blind, slowly slowly he will be hypnotized by his own sayings, auto-hypnotized. He will start believing that he is not blind and he will start walking less cautiously. And that is more dangerous.

I have heard:
Once a blind man came to visit a Zen master. When he was leaving — it was night, a dark night, no moon, and so many clouds — the master said to the blind man, “Please take this lamp with you.”
The blind man laughed loudly. He said, “Are you joking? What can a lamp do for me? I cannot see! It is all the same to me whether I have a lamp or not.”

But the master said, “That I know, that you cannot see, but at least others will be able to see in the darkness that you are coming so they will not stumble into you.”
The argument appeared right. The blind man took the lamp, went away. He had just walked only a hundred yards and a man just walked into him. He said, “What is the matter? Are you too blind? Can’t you see this lamp?”

And the man said, “I am not blind. Excuse me, but your lamp is no longer lit; its flame has gone out.”
The blind man went back to the Zen master and said, “Look, never give a lamp to another blind man again. If there was no lamp I would have walked more cautiously. I always walk cautiously. Because of the lamp I walked as if I were no longer blind — and the lamp went out. But how was I to know that the lamp went out? Because of this lamp, for the first time I have been hurt by a man. Otherwise, I have walked my whole life in every possible situation, but because I was so cautious, always making noise with my stick on the road so people can feel that some blind man is there, always groping with my stick in the darkness so I know where I am, whether I am facing a wall or a door…. It was the first time that I walked without any fear.”

And that’s what is happening to your psychotherapists, Patrick. They think they know — they know nothing. They are more informed, but information is not knowing. They are well educated, but they have not a higher being than you. And help is possible only when somebody higher than you gives you a hand.

More psychotherapists go mad than any other profession and more psychotherapists commit suicide than any other profession. And it is natural. Living with mad people, one can understand — they become affected.

A few scenes will be helpful to you….
The first scene:
A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office.
“You must help me!” he exclaims.
“What do you do for a living?” asks the shrink.
“I am an automobile mechanic.”
“Get under the couch!”

The second scene:
First psychiatrist: “Hello!”
Second psychiatrist: “I wonder what you mean by that?”

The third scene:
The patient: “Of course I am upset, doctor. I have eleven children and I find out my husband does not love me.”
The doctor: “You are very lucky. Imagine if he did!”

The fourth scene:
“Doctor, my wife accuses me of being a compulsive card-player.”
“That’s ridiculous. Now shut up and deal!”

And the fifth scene:
“Doctor, now that you have cured me of my homosexual tendencies and since this is our last session, may I kiss you goodbye?”
“Don’t be ridiculous — men don’t kiss. I shouldn’t even be lying on the couch with you!”

You ask me, Patrick, “The West is overpopulated with psychotherapists and their patients, but why does no one seem to be helped?”

Help is possible only from higher sources. A person who is on the same ground as you cannot be of any help to you. Help is possible only when a fully conscious man tries to help the unconscious. It is as if you are asleep; do you think somebody else asleep can help you in any way? Only somebody who is awake can wake you. If you want to be awakened at a particular hour, you don’t say to somebody else who is asleep, “Please wake me up at five o’clock in the morning. I have to go for that goddamned Dynamic Meditation!” You have to ask somebody who is awake. Only somebody awake can wake you up. In fact, the person who is asleep may help you to fall into a deeper sleep.

You may have watched it happen. If a few people are sitting just by your side yawning, you start feeling sleepy. They create a certain vibe; they create a certain atmosphere in which anybody vulnerable will start feeling it is better to go to sleep. The same happens with awakened people: a buddha creates a totally different vibe. He shakes you up, he wakes you up. He goes on shocking you in many ways; he finds devices to shock you.

Kavita has asked, “Beloved Master, sometimes you use such words that I feel shocked — and I used to think that no word can ever shock me. Don’t you have any couth?”

Kavita, I will go on using these words unless you wake up. You would like to listen to lullabies — but lullabies are not going to help. What appeals to you, what you like is not going to help. Something that shocks you…. I am going to use rough words till you stop yawning.

Whenever I see somebody yawning somewhere, immediately I have to say something which shocks you — and I can see his yawning disappears. The moment I say “bullshit” — immediately I say it he stops yawning! His spine is erect, his kundalini is rising upwards! Unless you all become awakened I am not going to leave you at ease; I will go on hitting you in every possible way.

Help is possible, Patrick, only from the awakened ones. You don’t need psychotherapists, you need buddhas. Secondly: you go to the psychotherapist, but you don’t really want to be helped. You have great investment in your pathology.

A few scenes again.

First:
“Doctor, my wife thinks she is a refrigerator.”
“Why don’t you divorce her?”
“I would but I need the ice.”

Second scene:
“Doctor, my girlfriend thinks she is a rabbit.”
“Bring her in. I will see what can I do.”
“Okay, but whatever happens, I hope you don’t cure her.”

Nobody wants really to be helped. People are only playing games. They go to the psychiatrist in the hope that he can’t do anything, that he is not going really to change them. Nobody wants to be changed; everybody wants to remain the same as he is. You have become so accustomed to your misery, to your pathology… it is your life, it is your way of life. If you want to be changed you will seek a master, not a psychotherapist.

Source – Osho Book “The Dhammapada, Vol 10″

Question – Bhagwan, Why have you been Misunderstood?
Osho – It is absolutely natural. If you support people’s old mind you are never misunderstood because you are saying exactly what they believe, you are supporting them, they feel very happy with you, you gain respectability, you support their ego.

I have been doing just the opposite. I have been trying to show you that your old mind is out of date, that you need a new mind, that your old ways of thinking and living, social behavior are all rotten and they need to be changed. Naturally, there are only two possibilities: if you are very intelligent, open, clear, straightforward you will agree with me. If you are not that intelligent, not open, not straightforward you will disagree with me.

But to disagree also needs intelligence. You have to argue against me if you want to disagree. In that way agreement is easier but disagreement means you have to fight against me, argue against me and you don’t have that intelligence. So the only way is: you cannot fight against what I am saying but you can distort what I am saying and then you can fight with it, with the distortion which I have never said. First create a misunderstanding then fight with it which is easier. You have already put loopholes in it and you are fighting with a bogus thing. I have never said it.

So the people who don’t have enough intelligence and yet want to disagree naturally try to change the statements, make them according to their own ideas so that they can easily fight with them. For example, I have been speaking on sex that how it can be transformed into superconsciousness; and so much has been written about it. But everybody condemns about my statements on sex. Nobody talks about superconsciousness. And sex was not my purpose at all.

I was saying that the sex is a basic energy. Either it can reproduce children or it can create a new consciousness in you. It is a creative force. If it goes downwards it creates children, if it goes upwards it creates the highest consciousness for which we have been for centuries searching. We have called it buddhahood, enlightenment, awakening, illumination, samadhi, sambodhi… whatever the name, but it is the sexual energy that moves upwards. It is a creative force.

But strange that my basic point was not discussed at all. Those who have criticized me have criticized not me at all. They were criticizing their own imagined idea which has nothing to do with me. But this is how lower class of intellectuals will do. First they will make the argument in such a way that it can be uprooted, dissolved. They do both the things: they make the argument and then they destroy it, but it has nothing to do with me.

One of Hindu leaders, Karpatri Maharaj has written a book against me and he goes on making statements which I have never made. I wrote him a letter that `I simply want that wherever you make a statement as mine, at least give the source from where you got it; in which of my books, on what page that statement is because I have read your whole book. All your statements are just made up by yourself.’

Now ordinary people will never be able to find. They will not bother to go, and I have four hundred books, that they will look into those books and find whether this statement is true or not. They will simply think that Karpatri Maharaj has done great work. He has demolished every statement and all those statements are his own. He is demolishing himself. It has nothing to do with me, the whole book. And it propounds to be an argument against me. So it is very natural. I don’t feel any grudge or any complaint, I understand that whatever I have been doing is bound to be misunderstood, misquoted. But how long?

It takes just patience — go on fighting, somebody somewhere who is intelligent and who has a heart to understand will understand. And I don’t need crowds to understand me, I need only few people of guts because it is always few people of courage who bring revolutions in the world; it not the masses.
And I have not been misunderstood by people of intelligence, by people of heart. They have loved me. I have received more love than perhaps anybody else in the world has ever received.

Source – Osho Book “The Last Testament,Vol5″

Osho – Even to cut a flower is uncivilized behavior, what to say about people like Genghis Khan, who killed forty million people; Tamerlane, who killed thirty million people; Nadir Shah, he again killed forty million people, and statistics are not available about many others. Alexander the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, Ivan the Terrible … no data is available, but they must have killed more people than Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah. Data is available on Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and they were not very far away from our present time, just forty years ago. They killed millions of people for no reason at all.

This destructiveness is a death-oriented ideology and it is so deeply rooted in our minds that it keeps us below the animals. Man, Milarepa, is not yet civilized. His civilization will begin by dropping war, by dropping nations. What is the need of nations if you are not going to fight? Nations are needed for wars. Why create these stupid lines on the map of the world?

The world is one. There are no natural lines dividing nations. Then why do you go on? There is a deep desire to dominate and there are so many people in the world to dominate: they need many nations. Otherwise just a single government, a functional government for the whole world will be enough. What is the need of so many laws, if man is civilized? What is the need of so many courts, jails, so many legal advisers, if man is civilized? A civilized man will not commit murders, a civilized man will not rape women … but we keep this whole paraphernalia of courts, laws, constitutions, legal experts; for whom?

Man is still a criminal. And these jails, these judges and these laws prevent nothing. Jails go on growing, judges go on increasing — more and more of them; more courts, more legal experts, thousands of colleges around the world producing legal experts every year. But even they cannot manage, for the criminals increase at a faster rate, and they don’t have a college, they are not educated.

Something is basically wrong, something is missing. What is missing? I call it meditation. Only meditation can make humanity civilized, because meditation will release your creativity and take away your destructiveness. Meditation will bring your compassion and will take away your cruelty. Meditation will make you responsible to your own being and then you cannot be a criminal.

To be a criminal needs great unconsciousness. Meditation destroys your unconsciousness, opens the doors of light and suddenly what you were doing in the darkness starts disappearing.

A civilization can be based only on meditation. The only people who have been civilized were people who were in touch with their own being: a Gautam Buddha, a Socrates, a Pythagoras, a Lao Tzu; these people are civilized. Only individuals once in a while have been found civilized, but the collective mass is still far below the standard of civilization.

It has to happen! And Milarepa, those who are with me, they have to create the foundation for a civilization, for a civilized humanity, by becoming themselves civilized.

Source – Osho Book “Sat Chit Anand”