It is difficult because the whole western training is to analyze. Witnessing is a totally different dimension. It is not analysis. The western training is to analyze, to understand it, to find out the cause of it – but you can never come to any end. You can find a cause for one problem, and then you try to find out another cause for that, and it goes on ad infinitum. Every cause in its own turn is an effect. You can go on and on, just like peeling an onion, layer upon layer. An onion is finished sooner or later but the onion that is the human mind is never finished; it is non-ending. It goes on creating its own layers continuously.
In the East we have never tried analysis, because one of the profoundest insights has been that analysis is not going to end it. At the most it can force it backwards, it can put it away, but it can never end it. It is going to be there somewhere, and just forcing it away cannot help.
In the West you try to force the problem, you reduce it to the cause. In the East we try to put consciousness back to its source, and we don’t touch the problem at all. You try to force the problem away, and we try to bring consciousness home. We don’t touch the problem, but rather remove ourselves from it.
For example, you are there, and you are the problem. In the West, I become interested in you, and I try to force you to go away from my consciousness, and that’s how the unconscious is born. In the East, you are the problem, I am the consciousness. I leave you where you are and simply move myself away; then no unconscious is created, no repressions. I move; I don’t touch the problem. Just by moving myself into my own core, the necessary distance is created.
The West is also trying to create a distance – by forcing the problem away – but then it creates more problems, because they can never be forced away. In the very effort, in the fight with it, you remain close to it. When you analyze, the same mind that is creating the problem is also analyzing it. It is trying to pull you by the shoestrings. You can jump a little, but it is not going to help much. You will be back on the earth again. It is like trying to catch your own tail.
So just watch, and by and by a deep unconcern arises. In that unconcern, everything dissolves. Nothing needs to be done. Simply sit, enjoy, be, and just watch. By and by when the problem understands that this man is not interested in it, it will go.
When a guest is uninvited, unwelcome, and the host does not bother about him, doesn’t even say hello, how long will the guest go on knocking at the door? One day he simply goes. Each thought, each problem, is a guest. Don’t do anything with them, but remain a host – unconcerned, indifferent, and centered.
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Several weeks ago Osho talked to a woman about the beauty of a love that was given time to mature, about the need to nourish love and not allow one’s affections and energies to be distracted by vague attraction to others. He told her to set aside a time each day in which she could fantasize whatsoever she wanted to do in reality.
He asks her tonight how this is going. She says the feelings still persist, off and on.