Osho on Carl Jung and Western psychology

Osho - 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.

Source - Osho Book "The last Testament, Vol5"

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