Mind is a kind of insanity
THE OTHER DAY, YOU SPOKE ABOUT THE MIND AS OUR GREATEST ENEMY, SAYING THAT IT IS THE CREATOR OF SUFFERING. CAN IT ALSO BE THE CREATOR OF JOY?
Arhata, the mind can only create suffering -- to create joy is beyond its capacity, because joy simply means rising above mind. Mind cannot rise above itself. It would be as foolish as if you were pulling yourself up by your shoestrings. The very structure of the mind is not made by you, and it is not made by existence.
You bring a blank check; whatever is written on that blank check is by others. They teach you competitiveness, they teach you guilt, they teach you jealousy, they teach you fear. They prepare the whole ground for suffering and anguish and anxiety. You have to go beyond the writings of others.
Your mind is nothing but a by-product of the society in which you are born, it is the society speaking through you. It is not you -- you are hidden behind the mind.
Unless you enter behind, or go beyond, you will not know what joy is. Joy is your nature, but the mind will not allow you to live according to your nature. The mind will interfere on every step. As mind exists today, there is no possibility for it to be a creator of joy.
But the new man may be courageous enough to leave the children in absolute freedom, help them to be on their own, help them to search whatever they want, give them questions but not give them answers, give them a quest but not give them goals. Then there is a possibility, in the future, that mind may not obstruct you from going beyond it. It cannot create joy even then, but it can allow you to move beyond without any hindrance. That is the best it can do; and beyond it you are joy, you are bliss, you are truth.
Mind is a kind of insanity because it is carrying so many impressions which are conflicting, contradictory. It has got impressions from your mother, and also from your father; and they were both fighting continuously, and they both have given their minds and heritage to you. It has got impressions from the neighbors, it has got impressions from so many teachers in the school, in the college, in the university. It is a crowd of unrelated, irrelevant, inconsistent thoughts -- it does not have any organic unity. It is a miracle that somehow you go on keeping yourself together.
It would have been a great thing if God had also created a small window in your head so anybody could look inside... what is going on? And then you would have found that everybody is mad. People are holding in their madness; sometimes it becomes too much and they lose control.
According to psychologists, the madman and the normal man are not different qualitatively. The difference is only of degree: the normal man is normally mad, and the abnormal man is abnormally mad. They both are mad. One is still in control of his madness. But everybody is almost a borderline case; any moment, just a single step more, and you have stepped into the psychiatric hospital.
Paddy climbs up a flagpole and begins shouting obscenities at the top of his voice. Soon the cops come along, arrest him, and charge him with disturbing the peace. He is sent to the psychiatric hospital for an examination. "How do you explain your behavior?" asks the doctor.
"It is like this, Doc," replies Paddy, "if I did not do something crazy once in a while, I would go nuts."
Just watch yourself. Once in a while you are also doing something crazy; perhaps not in public... in your bathroom, otherwise you would also go nuts. A little release once in a while helps. And we have socially-accepted releases. Have you seen the people at a football match? They may not be seeing the actual football match, they may be seeing it only on the television, and you can see they are going crazy. I know about one man who was jumping up all the time before the TV set, and finally he took up the TV set and crashed it into the wall. I said, "What happened?"
He said, "My team lost the game."
I said, "Why destroy the TV set?"
He said, "I had to do something."
Everybody, if he watches himself, is doing something crazy just to avoid going nuts. You can hold only so much.
One California university has studied, for a year, the results of football matches, boxing matches... what they do to the public minds. Crimes rise fourteen percent; there are more murders, more rapes, more thefts -- in every direction, all crimes start rising immediately. And this fourteen percent increase remains stable for almost one week after the match is finished. What has the match done to the people's minds?
And can you think this society is sane? -- which has boxing matches where two persons are being almost barbarous to each other, hitting on their noses, blood coming out. And thousands and thousands of people are watching so attentively, breathlessly -- as if something great is happening -- shouting madly, starting to fight amongst themselves. If somebody is shouting against your favorite, immediately fights break out amongst the spectators. And why do we have such ugly games?
We know that everybody condemns the Romans who used to throw human beings, the criminals, before the hungry lions. And thousands of civilized Romans, aristocrats, used to watch it. It was in Rome that great stadiums were first created. The reason for creating those stadiums was to watch hungry lions killing poor criminals. Is there any way to call these people civilized, cultured? Is there not some psychological background behind it? Are they not enjoying something which is unworthy of any human being? Are they not identifying themselves with the lion and enjoying a good meal?
And Roman culture was at its pinnacle; even the emperor and his wife, the prince and the whole royal family used to come to see -- to them it was a game. But we are not different either. In Spain they are enjoying bullfights. They raise bulls, and then human beings are fighting those bulls; most of the animals get killed or at least badly hurt. And what are these thousands of people doing?... leaving all work aside, nothing is more important than to see the bullfight.
People who can afford it come from all over the world to Spain to see these bullfights; and boxing is just as barbarous. These are our ways of releasing our craziness in installments so it does not get accumulated to a point where we are no more in control, where it becomes the master and we are in its control. That becomes madness, the difference is only of degree.
Only meditators have been found, down the centuries, not to have become mad. Because the meditator knows how to go beyond mind, he knows how to go beyond madness. He does not collect all kinds of crazy things; on the contrary, he continuously cleans his mind, throws away all rubbish that just goes on collecting in life, naturally.
You clean your house every day, but you have not thought of cleaning your mind every day. Just as your house collects dust -- which is not dangerous unless it is radioactive, which is also a man-made danger -- your mind also collects all kinds of junk, and you go on piling it up. A day comes... suddenly the pile is bigger than you, more powerful than you, starts dictating to you; you have to listen to it, otherwise it will not leave you in peace.
Arhata, mind cannot be a creator of joy. At the most it can be just a passage for the joy from the beyond to descend... and reach even to the very fibers of your body.
In the busy New York traffic, a taxi driver ran into the back of the car of Dr. Kendall, a psychiatrist. Dr. Kendall jumped out of his car, shook his fist at the cabby and screamed, "Why the hell can't you look where you are going, you idiot?"
Then suddenly, he remembered his profession. He looked tenderly at the taxi driver, and said softly, "Let me put it this way -- why do you hate your mother?"
He was a psychoanalyst doctor, and the psychoanalyst is obsessed with the idea of hating your mother, of hating your father. Anything goes wrong, the first thing is, "Why do you hate your mother?"
So now he is speaking his professional, cultured and educated language. But he had forgotten it for a single moment when he jumped out of his car and shouted, "Why the hell can't you look where you are going, you idiot?" That was authentic -- the second statement is stupid, although it is professional.
The psychoanalyst noticed a parrot perched on the farmhouse roof. He ran to fetch a ladder, climbed onto the roof, and was about to clap his cap over the bird, when the parrot fixed him with a beady eye and asked, "What the hell do you think you are doing?"
"Gosh, I didn't mean nothing," said the psychoanalyst. "I thought you was a bird."
Even a man who is well educated... but all education remains part of the mind; it does not make you more alert, more conscious, it simply fills you with information. It treats you like a computer, and it is now well known that computers also can go crazy.
Arhata, the mind can only create suffering -- to create joy is beyond its capacity, because joy simply means rising above mind. Mind cannot rise above itself. It would be as foolish as if you were pulling yourself up by your shoestrings. The very structure of the mind is not made by you, and it is not made by existence.
You bring a blank check; whatever is written on that blank check is by others. They teach you competitiveness, they teach you guilt, they teach you jealousy, they teach you fear. They prepare the whole ground for suffering and anguish and anxiety. You have to go beyond the writings of others.
Your mind is nothing but a by-product of the society in which you are born, it is the society speaking through you. It is not you -- you are hidden behind the mind.
Unless you enter behind, or go beyond, you will not know what joy is. Joy is your nature, but the mind will not allow you to live according to your nature. The mind will interfere on every step. As mind exists today, there is no possibility for it to be a creator of joy.
But the new man may be courageous enough to leave the children in absolute freedom, help them to be on their own, help them to search whatever they want, give them questions but not give them answers, give them a quest but not give them goals. Then there is a possibility, in the future, that mind may not obstruct you from going beyond it. It cannot create joy even then, but it can allow you to move beyond without any hindrance. That is the best it can do; and beyond it you are joy, you are bliss, you are truth.
Mind is a kind of insanity because it is carrying so many impressions which are conflicting, contradictory. It has got impressions from your mother, and also from your father; and they were both fighting continuously, and they both have given their minds and heritage to you. It has got impressions from the neighbors, it has got impressions from so many teachers in the school, in the college, in the university. It is a crowd of unrelated, irrelevant, inconsistent thoughts -- it does not have any organic unity. It is a miracle that somehow you go on keeping yourself together.
It would have been a great thing if God had also created a small window in your head so anybody could look inside... what is going on? And then you would have found that everybody is mad. People are holding in their madness; sometimes it becomes too much and they lose control.
According to psychologists, the madman and the normal man are not different qualitatively. The difference is only of degree: the normal man is normally mad, and the abnormal man is abnormally mad. They both are mad. One is still in control of his madness. But everybody is almost a borderline case; any moment, just a single step more, and you have stepped into the psychiatric hospital.
Paddy climbs up a flagpole and begins shouting obscenities at the top of his voice. Soon the cops come along, arrest him, and charge him with disturbing the peace. He is sent to the psychiatric hospital for an examination. "How do you explain your behavior?" asks the doctor.
"It is like this, Doc," replies Paddy, "if I did not do something crazy once in a while, I would go nuts."
Just watch yourself. Once in a while you are also doing something crazy; perhaps not in public... in your bathroom, otherwise you would also go nuts. A little release once in a while helps. And we have socially-accepted releases. Have you seen the people at a football match? They may not be seeing the actual football match, they may be seeing it only on the television, and you can see they are going crazy. I know about one man who was jumping up all the time before the TV set, and finally he took up the TV set and crashed it into the wall. I said, "What happened?"
He said, "My team lost the game."
I said, "Why destroy the TV set?"
He said, "I had to do something."
Everybody, if he watches himself, is doing something crazy just to avoid going nuts. You can hold only so much.
One California university has studied, for a year, the results of football matches, boxing matches... what they do to the public minds. Crimes rise fourteen percent; there are more murders, more rapes, more thefts -- in every direction, all crimes start rising immediately. And this fourteen percent increase remains stable for almost one week after the match is finished. What has the match done to the people's minds?
And can you think this society is sane? -- which has boxing matches where two persons are being almost barbarous to each other, hitting on their noses, blood coming out. And thousands and thousands of people are watching so attentively, breathlessly -- as if something great is happening -- shouting madly, starting to fight amongst themselves. If somebody is shouting against your favorite, immediately fights break out amongst the spectators. And why do we have such ugly games?
We know that everybody condemns the Romans who used to throw human beings, the criminals, before the hungry lions. And thousands of civilized Romans, aristocrats, used to watch it. It was in Rome that great stadiums were first created. The reason for creating those stadiums was to watch hungry lions killing poor criminals. Is there any way to call these people civilized, cultured? Is there not some psychological background behind it? Are they not enjoying something which is unworthy of any human being? Are they not identifying themselves with the lion and enjoying a good meal?
And Roman culture was at its pinnacle; even the emperor and his wife, the prince and the whole royal family used to come to see -- to them it was a game. But we are not different either. In Spain they are enjoying bullfights. They raise bulls, and then human beings are fighting those bulls; most of the animals get killed or at least badly hurt. And what are these thousands of people doing?... leaving all work aside, nothing is more important than to see the bullfight.
People who can afford it come from all over the world to Spain to see these bullfights; and boxing is just as barbarous. These are our ways of releasing our craziness in installments so it does not get accumulated to a point where we are no more in control, where it becomes the master and we are in its control. That becomes madness, the difference is only of degree.
Only meditators have been found, down the centuries, not to have become mad. Because the meditator knows how to go beyond mind, he knows how to go beyond madness. He does not collect all kinds of crazy things; on the contrary, he continuously cleans his mind, throws away all rubbish that just goes on collecting in life, naturally.
You clean your house every day, but you have not thought of cleaning your mind every day. Just as your house collects dust -- which is not dangerous unless it is radioactive, which is also a man-made danger -- your mind also collects all kinds of junk, and you go on piling it up. A day comes... suddenly the pile is bigger than you, more powerful than you, starts dictating to you; you have to listen to it, otherwise it will not leave you in peace.
Arhata, mind cannot be a creator of joy. At the most it can be just a passage for the joy from the beyond to descend... and reach even to the very fibers of your body.
In the busy New York traffic, a taxi driver ran into the back of the car of Dr. Kendall, a psychiatrist. Dr. Kendall jumped out of his car, shook his fist at the cabby and screamed, "Why the hell can't you look where you are going, you idiot?"
Then suddenly, he remembered his profession. He looked tenderly at the taxi driver, and said softly, "Let me put it this way -- why do you hate your mother?"
He was a psychoanalyst doctor, and the psychoanalyst is obsessed with the idea of hating your mother, of hating your father. Anything goes wrong, the first thing is, "Why do you hate your mother?"
So now he is speaking his professional, cultured and educated language. But he had forgotten it for a single moment when he jumped out of his car and shouted, "Why the hell can't you look where you are going, you idiot?" That was authentic -- the second statement is stupid, although it is professional.
The psychoanalyst noticed a parrot perched on the farmhouse roof. He ran to fetch a ladder, climbed onto the roof, and was about to clap his cap over the bird, when the parrot fixed him with a beady eye and asked, "What the hell do you think you are doing?"
"Gosh, I didn't mean nothing," said the psychoanalyst. "I thought you was a bird."
Even a man who is well educated... but all education remains part of the mind; it does not make you more alert, more conscious, it simply fills you with information. It treats you like a computer, and it is now well known that computers also can go crazy.
OSHO, The Rebel.
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