Meet with all your luggage 3 страница

But help is possible, with a condition: that it comes with love, that it comes with the gratitude that "you trusted me and opened your heart."

The function of a therapist is certainly very complex – and idiots are doing it! The situation is almost as if butchers are doing surgery; they know how to cut, but that does not mean they can become brain surgeons. They can kill buffaloes and cows and all kinds of animals, but their function is in the service of death. The therapist is in the service of life. He has to create life-affirmative values by living them himself, by going to the silences of his heart.

The deeper you are within yourself, the deeper you can reach into the heart of the other. It is exactly the same... because your heart or the other's heart are not very different things. If you understand your being, you understand everybody's being. And then you understand you have also been foolish, you have also been ignorant, you have also fallen many times, you have also committed crimes against yourself and against others, and if other people are still doing it there is no need of condemnation. They have to be made aware and left to themselves; you are not to mold them in a certain framework.

Then it is a joy to be a therapist, because you come to know the interiority of human beings – which is one of the most secret hiding places of life. And by knowing others you know yourself more. It is a vicious circle; there is no other word – otherwise I will not use the word 'vicious'.

Allow me to coin a word: it is a virtuous circle. You open to your patients, participants, and they open themselves to you. That helps you to open more, and that helps them to open more. Soon there is no therapist and there is no patient, but simply a loving group helping each other.

Unless the therapist is lost in the group, he is not a successful therapist. That's my criterion.

You are saying, "Under your guidance I have learned not to dominate others when I use my capacity to see, but am I still dominating myself?" They are not two things. Domination is domination, whether you dominate others or you dominate yourself. If you are dominating yourself, then in some subtle way you will dominate others too. How can it be otherwise?

The first domination that you have to drop is not over others... because it is not certain that they will accept your domination. The first domination you have to drop is over yourself. Why become yourself a prisoner, with great effort create a prison around yourself, and then carry it wherever you go?

First learn the utter joy of freedom, of a bird on the wing in the vast sky. Your very freedom will become a transforming force for others.

Domination is so ugly.

Leave it to the politicians, who don't have any sense of shame at all. They live in the gutters and they think they are living in palaces. Their whole life is a life in the gutters – they will live there and they will die there. They are prime ministers, they are presidents, they are kings, they are queens....

One of the most significant Egyptian poets was asked once, "How many kings are there in the world?" At that time... he said, "There are only five kings. One is in England, and four are in playing cards." Now it can be changed: there are five queens, one in England and four in playing cards.... But they don't have anything more. They are just trying to achieve more and more power simply to fill their inside which they feel is empty.

Looking from the outside, the inside is empty.

Looking from the inside, the whole world is empty.

Only your inside is overflowing, but the things that are overflowing are invisible: the fragrance of your being, the love, the blissfulness, the ecstasy, the silence, the compassion – nothing can be seen with eyes. That's why if you look from the outside it seems everything is empty. And then a great urge arises... how to fill it? – with money, with power, with prestige, by becoming a president or prime minister... do something and fill it! One cannot live with an emptiness inside, a hollowness inside.

But these people have not gone inside; they have looked from outside. And this is the problem: from the outside you can only see objects, and love is not an object, bliss is not an object, enlightenment is not an object, understanding is not an object, wisdom is not an object. All that is great in human existence and life is subjective, not objective. But from the outside you can see only objects.

That gives a tremendous urgency to fill your hollow inside with any rubbish. There are people who are filling it with borrowed knowledge; there are people who are filling it with self-imposed torture -- they become saints. There are people who are beggars to become the prime minister, to become the president. Everywhere the hollow people are in tremendous need to dominate others. That gives them the feeling that they are not hollow.

A sannyasin begins by enquiring into his subjectivity, from within, and he becomes aware of tremendous treasures, inexhaustible treasures. Only then do you stop dominating yourself, and you stop dominating others. There is no need at all. From that moment your whole effort is to make everybody aware of his individuality, of his freedom, of his immense, inexhaustible sources of bliss, contentment, peace.

To me, if therapy prepares the ground for meditation, therapy is going right... ground for the patients and ground for the therapist, both. Therapy should turn at a certain point into meditation. Meditation turns at a certain point into enlightenment. And to have such tremendous potential and just remain a beggar...

I feel so sad sometimes when I think of others. They are not beggars, but they are behaving like beggars, and they are not ready to drop their begging – because they are afraid that is all they have got. And unless they drop their begging, they will never know that they are emperors and their empire is of the within.

If you have stopped dominating people but you are suspicious that perhaps you have started dominating yourself, then nothing has changed. You misunderstood the whole message.

Try to understand yourself as deeply as possible. Therapy comes second. And unless you have refined your being through meditation and silences... I am not saying, stop the work; I am saying, transform its quality. Make it real work. Open your heart, tell them your weaknesses, tell them your problems, ask their advice – can they help you? And once the participants understand that the therapist is not an egoist, they will come with absolute humbleness, opening their hearts. Then you can help them.

But always and always remember: therapy in itself is incomplete. Even the perfect therapy is just the first step. Without the second step it is meaningless.

So leave the patients on the point from where they start moving towards meditation. Your therapy is complete only when your patients start enquiring about meditation. Create a great longing in their hearts for meditation, and tell them that meditation too is only a step – the second step. In itself that too is not enough, unless it leads you to enlightenment; that is the culmination of the whole effort. And I trust in you, that you are capable of it.

A Jew from Odessa was sitting in the same compartment as a Czarist Russian officer who had a pig with him. To annoy the Jew, the officer kept calling the pig Moishe. "Moishe! Keep still! Moishe! Come here! Moishe! Go there!"

This went on all the way to Kiev. Eventually the Jew got fed up and said, "You know, Captain, it is a great shame your pig has a Jewish name."

"Now why is that, Jew?" smirked the officer.

"Well, otherwise it could have become an officer in the Czar's army."

There is a limit to everything!

Make it a point that the limit of therapy is where meditation begins, and the limit of meditation is where enlightenment begins. Of course, enlightenment is not a step to anything: You simply disappear into the universal consciousness, you become just a dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean. But it is the greatest experience.... It makes life finally meaningful, significant. It allows you to become part of the universe from which your ego has separated you. And it is so easy, as easy as this silence....

Nobody can think that there are thousands of people sitting here....

You just have to move in the right direction. A sense of right direction, and everything can become a steppingstone towards higher states of consciousness. I have been using everything, but the direction is the same. I have used many kinds of meditations. On the periphery they look different. There are one hundred and twelve methods of meditation. They look very different from each other, and you may think, "How can all these different methods lead to meditation?"

But they lead... Just as a thread running through a garland of flowers is not seen, you see only the flowers, those one hundred and twelve flowers have a running thread: that thread is witnessing, watching, observation, awareness.

So help the patients as much as you can to understand their problems, but make them clear that even if these problems are solved, you are the same person. Tomorrow you will start creating the same problems again – perhaps in a different way, with a different color.

So your therapy should become nothing but an opening for meditation. Then your therapy has a tremendous value. Otherwise it is just a mind game.

The Great Pilgrimage, # 14, Q 1

· Am I really a good therapist?

To be a good therapist is a very difficult job. A good therapist has to be immensely compassionate, because it is not his techniques of therapy that help people, it is his love. There is nothing compared to love as far as healing the wounds of a man's being are concerned. All other techniques can be helpful, supportive, but the basic is not a technique but a loving heart.

A therapist cannot be a professional. The moment a therapist becomes professional things start going wrong, because the profession of therapy means that the patient should never be cured. He should be given hope but he should never be cured, because once you cure him you have lost one customer. The physician or the therapist, their profession is very strange.

I have heard about an old doctor. His son came back from the medical college, fresh, and he told the father, "Now you have become old and I can take charge of all your patients. You can rest. If I need any advice I will ask you."

The father said, "I was waiting for this. You are now well educated. You know more than I know, you know the latest researches in medicine, but if I can be of any help, I will be available."

After three days the father asked the son how things were going. He said, "Great, just great. The woman you have been treating for thirty years for arthritis I have cured within three days."

The father said, "My god! You are an idiot. That woman is so rich, she can afford to remain uncured for her whole life. And how do you think I was supporting you in the university? That woman has provided money for your education, and that woman was going to provide money for your younger brother. That woman was almost a goldmine."

The son was shocked. He said, "What are you saying?"

The father said, "You are young, you don't understand. This profession is a contradiction. You have to cure, but in such a way that the cure takes as long as possible."

The poor get cured sooner, the richer get cured on a long term basis...!

And psychotherapy in particular is in an even more dangerous contradiction. There is not a single person in the whole world who is totally psychoanalyzed. In the first place, psychoanalysts are making great earnings; they are the most highly paid professionals in the world. They cannot afford to lose rich patients – and they have only rich patients.

Poor countries don't suffer from any diseases which psychoanalysis can help. When people are hungry, what can psychoanalysis do? Psychoanalysis comes only when people are so rich they don't know what to do with their money. Then psychoanalysis comes in and shows them what to do with it – be psychoanalyzed!

A good therapist is one who avoids being a professional. It should be part of your love, not part of your business; only then can you be a good therapist. And as far as I know, you are one of the best therapists around here. I don't see in you things which lead therapists astray. One is a certain kind of gurudom. A therapist should not become a guru, because the moment you become a guru you start changing your patients into your disciples, you start exploiting their misery for your own aggrandizement, for your own ego. You start playing a role of being superior to you, higher than you.

I have not seen in your eyes that ugly ego which changes helping people into exploiting people. I have seen so many therapists who sooner or later fall into the trap. Because they know something more than the ordinary normal human being, they are in a position to exploit, they are in a position to create a following. That is not the work of the therapist.

The work of the therapist is to help the patient to drop his tensions, to drop his unnecessary problems, to drop his habit of creating problems. Most of the patients that come to you are hypochondriacs; they are not suffering from any real problem. Seventy percent of their problems are just imaginary.

I have seen people looking into medical periodicals, medical encyclopedias to find out what kind of disease they have – they don't have any disease! But it seems, particularly in the most advanced countries, women are bragging... just as they used to brag in the past about their ornaments, about their mink coats, about their houses, about their luxuries, now they are bragging about psychoanalysis: "Who is your psychoanalyst?" – some poor guy or some great psychoanalyst, only very few people can afford his services... And it becomes an addiction, particularly in societies where people don't have time to listen to anybody, where everybody is in a rush.

Bertrand Russell mentions in his autobiography, "The way psychoanalysis is growing, I can predict that in the next century, if man still remains on the earth, there will be psychoanalysts on every street in the world.” Everybody will need once in a while to go to the psychoanalysts -- not because he has a disease, not that he has some mental problem, but just to talk. Nobody listens, nobody has time. You have to pay the psychoanalyst for listening.

In fact, if you are attentively listening to somebody a subtle help happens. He unburdens himself; things that he cannot say to other people he can say to you, because it is part of your work that you will keep it secret, that you will not start gossiping about it. So in privacy and secrecy he can open his heart, his wounds which he goes on hiding in the society. And by hiding the wounds, you can never cure them. By exposing them to light they are cured.

I have heard about a young psychotherapist who was working as an assistant to a famous old psychoanalyst. He used to get bored because people were coming with the same dreams, the same problems, the same worries... every day from morning till evening you have to listen and listen and listen, and it becomes heavy, so heavy that even in the night you cannot sleep. You have listened so much that until it gets settled you cannot sleep. But he had never seen the old man ever feeling tired or bored.

So one day, getting out of the office, in the elevator, the young man asked the old psychoanalyst, "What is your secret? You must have been in psychoanalysis for almost sixty years – sixty years of listening to all kinds of garbage and crap! I have just been here for three months, and I am tired and finished and I am thinking I have to change the profession. These people will drive me crazy!"

The old man laughed and he said, "Who listens? There is no need to listen. Just pretend."

That's why Sigmund Freud has devised a beautiful couch. The patient lies on the couch, and behind the couch – the patient cannot see – sits the psychoanalyst. Whether he is there or not does not matter. Once in a while he goes out and comes in, and the psychoanalysis continues. The man goes on talking about his dreams, about his worries, about his problems, uncoiling his mind, and he feels better. The psychoanalyst is not doing anything; he is simply giving his time and pretending to be attentive.

But this becomes an addiction. The patient has to come twice or thrice a week because so much goes on gathering in his head that he has to unburden it. But I will not call that old man a good therapist. He is simply exploiting the weaknesses and the frailties of human beings.

Be attentive, be respectful, be loving. That makes a good therapist. The patient is not different from you. You are in the same boat. You not only allow him to open his heart, you also open your heart to him to give him a feeling that he is not alone in his suffering, that perhaps everybody in the world is suffering and hiding it.

The good therapist will create a friendliness, a deep intimacy with the patient. He should not remain on a high pedestal, far above, as if he has no problems. The fact is therapists have more problems than anybody else. They have their own problems and they have other people's problems too; hence four times more therapists go insane than any other profession, and four times more therapists commit suicide than any other profession. It is not just accidental.

But if you can be friendly, if you can hold the hand of the patient, if you can tell him that these are your problems too and it is good to have a companion, to have a friend, "We can work it out together. It is not only that you will be helped, I will be helped also..."

Unless a therapist comes to this humbleness, he is not going to help. And I can see in your eyes the possibility of this humbleness.

In the middle of her psychiatric session, Mrs. Blossom suddenly exclaimed, "Doctor, I simply can't resist you! How about a little kiss?"

"Absolutely not!" the doctor replied indignantly. "That would be contrary to the ethics of my profession. Now continue what you were telling me."

"Well, as I was saying," the patient reluctantly resumed, "I am always having arguments with my husband about his father, and just yesterday... I am sorry, doctor, I just can't go on talking. I have this overwhelming impulse. Come on! What harm would there be if you gave me just one little kiss?"

"That's absolutely impossible!" the doctor snapped. "In fact, I should not even be lying here on this couch with you!"

Patients are being exploited sexually, financially, in every possible way. The patient has to be given as much respect and dignity as you can manage. You should be a humble helper, not a savior, then you can help people immensely. You can be a good therapist. You have to be.

My therapists have to be in a different way than the therapists in the outside world. There they are business people. Here you are helping your fellow travelers, your brothers, your sisters. And by helping them, you are helping yourself because their problems and your problems are not different.

The village idiot was very famous. His name was Elmer. One day a village resident wanted to show a visiting friend just what an idiot Elmer was.

"Watch this," he said. "Hey, Elmer! I have got something for you." He then held out his hand, and on the outstretched palm were a nickel and a dime. "Go ahead, Elmer," he said, "take one."

So Elmer said, "Thank you, I will take the big one," and picked up the nickel.

The man winked at his friend and then said, "See what an idiot he is?"

But as Elmer shuffled off, the visitor felt sorry for him and ran after him.

"Listen, Elmer," he said earnestly, "don't you know that the small coin is worth twice as much as the big one?"

"Of course I do," said Elmer, "but the first time I pick up the dime, they will stop playing the game."

Even idiots are not so much idiots as you think; they have their own intelligence. Your patients are not just to be treated objectively. You have to bridge yourself with your patient. You have to become a friend before you can be a therapist – and particularly the therapists who are working in the field of sannyas. Their function is not the same as the function of the psychotherapist in the outside world.

In the outside world, psychotherapy is nothing but a strategy of the society to keep people within their normal limits; the psychologist, psychoanalyst, therapist are all helping the society. Whenever somebody starts going beyond the normal standards, they pull him back down. It is not necessarily helpful... One can go below mind, and then it is good to pull him up. But if somebody is going beyond mind, then to pull him down is not a help. It is just the opposite of help.

Here within my field therapy is used only as a cleaning process. It is just preparing the ground, taking out the wild weeds, the stones, so that I can manage to bring the roses of meditation into your life. Here therapy is only a preparation for meditation; its function is totally different from in the outside world. There you have to bring the person back into mind. Here you have to help the person to be courageous so that he can step beyond mind.

You are preparing people for me. The ultimate push is going to be through me. You have just to give them courage and encouragement. This can be done not by being special, not by being higher, not by being holier. You are not priests and you are not professionals. You are just fellow travelers in this vast caravan, and you have to help people, prepare people because now there is a gap that never used to be in the past.

Buddha never needed any psychotherapy for his sannyasins; those people were innocent. But in these twenty-five centuries, people have lost their innocence, they have become too knowledgeable. People have lost their contact with existence. They have become uprooted.

I am the first person who uses therapy but whose interest is not therapy but meditation, just as it was with Chuang Tzu or Gautam Buddha. They never used therapy because there was no need. People were simply ready, and you could bring the rosebushes without clearing the ground. The ground was already clear.

In these twenty-five centuries man has become so burdened with rubbish, so many wild weeds have grown in his being that I am using therapy just to clean the ground, take away the wild weeds, the roots, so the difference between the ancient man and the modern man is destroyed.

The modern man has to be made as innocent as the ancient man, as simple, as natural. He has lost all these great qualities. The therapist has to help him -- but his work is only a preparation. It is not the end. The end part is going to be the meditation.

The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here, # 27, Q 3

· What is your vision of therapy in the Future?

It has a tremendous potential to replace all the religions of the world, but it is not going to become a religion itself. Its function is to destroy all that religions have done to man.

It is a very suicidal work. Once you have destroyed all that religions have done to man, and man is healthy and whole, therapy is needed no more. But it has to be done. It is just like a medicine. You are sick, you need a medicine, and when you are healthy, you throw the bottle out of the window.

Therapy has to do something very great, but if it succeeds, that will mean the end of therapy too. And therapists should be proud of the phenomenon that they are not replacing any parasites, they are simply deprogramming humanity. Their work that of a cleaner who has cleaned the place and now his work is finished. There is no need.

Humanity can be absolutely spiritually, psychologically healthy. Just we have to destroy all the hindrances that are preventing man to be healthy and whole. So therapy has a great future in the sense that it can destroy all the religions. It can deprogram people. But it has also to remember that there is a temptation always of reprogramming people. That has not to be done.

If people are reprogrammed, then some other therapy will be needed. Then you have replaced the priests; you have not changed the course of human evolution. You have not brought a revolution in the world, but just a small change. Now the priest is replaced by the therapist.

I don't want my therapists to replace these ugly monsters who, for millions of years, have destroyed all joy, all life, all love, that every human being is born with. Cut the roots. Make man free. And feel blessed that you are not getting tempted to take their place.

So my therapists particularly have to remember that. Other therapists are going to take the place of the priests; they have already taken it. The psychoanalyst is the new priest, and he is safeguarding the vested interests. He is already doing that. And he can do it better than any priest because he is more aware of the workings of mind.

But my therapists' work is really great and dangerous. Great, because we have to destroy all. We have to undo everything that religions have done to humanity. And then, your work done, you feel contented, relaxed. You can become a gardener, you can become a farmer, you can become a woodcutter.

If my therapists succeed around the world, then soon there will be no religion, and then there will be no need of any therapy.

The Last Testament, Vol 2, # 16

OSHO EXCERPTS REFERENCE LIST

Seeds of Wisdom, # 13 (I used to ask myself “Who am I?”)

Blessed Are the Ignorant, Ch # 8 (The question of “Who am I?”)

The Search, #4 (You have to know yourself directly)

(Ordinarily you follow the crowd)

(Get out of the mind)

The Secret, # 70 (Why does man go on thinking)

The Secret, # 7 (The only right question: “Who am I?”)

The Search, # 6 (The decision should be total)

From Darkness to Light, # 7 (To be conscious is to go through a deep surgery)

The Transmission of the Lamp, # 6, Q3 (Live each emotion)

Tao: The Three Treasures, Vol 2, # 4 (Acceptance)

The Search, # 10 (You can be only yourself)

The Great Pilgrimage, # 14, Q 1 (The role of a therapist)

The Great Pilgrimage, # 27, Q 3 (Am I really a good therapist?)

The Last Testament, Vol 2, # 16 (Your vision of therapy in the future?)

Дата добавления: 2014-12-23