Today’s Psychology Is Not Comprehensive Enough to Shift Human Consciousness. It Only Studies the Mechanical Aspects of Human Behavior and the Mind
This havoc can be witnessed in angry explosions on social media, among political, religious, and, celebrity rivals, and riotous outbursts in the streets. It seems the world has gone made.
Osho explains:
“The present psychology is not yet comprehensive enough, it touches only the periphery of human individuality.
It remains confined to the mind. It is not right to call it “psychology.” Psychology means “the science of the soul” and the present psychology is not only not the science of the soul, it denies even the existence of the soul.
“The moment you deny the soul, consciousness which is beyond the mind but is within you. This denial is not an ordinary denial because it destroys the whole dignity of man. It takes away his very center. He becomes center-less, soul-less, just a robot.
“The right name for modern psychology is “robotology” because it studies only the mechanical behavior of man and the mechanics of mind. Its studies cannot go very deep for the simple reason that if mind is all and there is nothing more to life than mind, you cannot ever become one, undivided.
To be divided is the nature of the mind; to be always balanced between opposites – love and hate, courage and fear, yes and no, atheism and theism.
“Mind does not feel at ease unless it has divided a thing in two. And because psychology remains within the boundaries of the mind it cannot help man to grow to his potential heights. Psychology will discourage you: spiritual search is nothing but a mirage, the seeking of truth is hallucinatory.
“It is not a coincidence that we are the most intelligent generation, because ten thousand years of growth is within us. So on the one hand it is the most intelligent generation that has ever existed and on the other hand, because of psychology spreading these poisonous ideas – that there is no consciousness, no soul, no life beyond death, and man is just matter; that mind is also nothing but a certain combination of material elements – this has created a very strange situation. Intelligence is pulling man toward more growth and the people who deal with growth are pulling man backward, telling him, “There is no beyond, just be normal – that is more than you can dream of.”
“Just to be normal” is the goal of psychology. A great goal: just to be normal!
“People have lived for thousands of years without any psychology – and normally. Primitive man was more innocent than you are. He was not as intelligent as you are, but he was more innocent. You inherit his innocence but you are keeping it repressed.
“The combination of intelligence and innocence is meditation. The moment innocence and intelligence start growing within you…. It is not that you become capable of solving all the problems of the mind, but a totally new thing happens: you start going beyond mind. The problems of the mind are left far behind, as if they never belonged to you – in fact they never belonged to you.
“And once you know how to slip out of your mind, a totally different psychology will be founded on the art of slipping out of the mind. A person who can get out of his mind helps the mind to cool down. The mind is getting no more energy – it cools, calms down on its own accord. Meditation is a medicine too – and both words come from the same root.
Once your intelligence and your innocence are available to you, just like two wings, the whole sky is yours. There are no more boundaries for you.
“I have called the psychology that is based on meditation the psychology of the buddhas. Modern psychology is the psychology of people who are asleep.
“If just a simple method of meditation can help a person not only to be normal, because to be normal can never be accepted as the goal. That means you remain a mediocre person for your whole life; you never go beyond the boundaries of the society. In everything you remain half-hearted, there is no intensity, there is no totality.
“The psychology of the buddhas means that we accept man as a three-storied building. There are a few who remain only on the ground floor, only in their bodies; all their interests are centered in the body – this is the lowest life for someone to choose, as if you are living on the porch when the whole building is yours.
“The second level of life is that of a well-understood mind – but who is going to understand the mind? You can see the difficulty of the psychologist: he studies the mind but if you ask who is studying the mind. Mind cannot study itself.
There must be something beyond – a witness, a watcher who studies the mind. The scientist is studying only from the outside.
“Buddha accepts three steps: the body, the mind, the consciousness. Even the consciousness is only a step.
“The psychology of the buddhas is comprehensive of the whole individuality of man – and it does not end there. By studying, by experiencing the body, the mind, the consciousness, and the beyond, Buddha is preparing you to dissolve into the universal.
“Unless psychology can bring human beings to this oceanic experience it is immature, it has just started its ABC’s. And in the West it is going around in a circle – because you do not accept higher realities; where can you go? You are stuck with the mind.
“Psychology is still a game, guesswork, with no foundation in reality.
“The mystics in the East have never bothered too much about the mind; they have only developed methods to bypass the mind. Those methods are the techniques of meditation – they are just to bypass the mind.
“Once you have bypassed the mind, once you can have a bird’s-eye view of your own mind, things start settling.
It is your energy that disturbs the mind, that gives it the power to be violent, to be sad, to be angry, to be hateful, to be jealous. Now you are no longer giving it any energy.
“The moment mind disperses, your meditation has come to maturity. Now your meditation will be the medium, not the mind. The mind will be used as a mechanism by your meditative forces, but mind is put aside; it is no longer the master.
“There is only one way to solve the mind and its problems, and that is to get out of it.
“But modern psychology has no idea of where to go, so they go on around and around but they remain just ordinary beings. You don’t see the transforming presence, which all the mystics in all the countries have always radiated….
“Mind itself is sick. Unless you get out of it, you cannot help the poor mind to become healthy. You are too much identified.
“Not being identified with the mind is the shortest way to your own being.”
END
To continue reading and see all available formats of this talk:
Osho, Sermons In Stones, Talk #14 – The Psychology of the Buddhas
