The first question:

Osho,
In the West, psychoanalysis has grown through Freud, Adler, Jung and Wilhelm Reich, to solve the problems arising from the ego such as frustrations, conflicts, schizophrenia and madness. In comparison to your meditation techniques, please explain the contributions, limitations and incompleteness of the system of psychoanalysis in solving the human problems rooted in the ego.

The first thing to be understood is that any problem rooted in the ego cannot be solved without transcending the ego. You can postpone the problem, you can bring in a little normality, you can create a little normalness about it, you can dilute the problem, but you cannot solve it. You can make a man function more efficiently in the society through psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis never solves a problem. And whenever a problem is postponed, shifted, it creates another problem. It simply changes its place, but it remains there. A new eruption will come sooner or later and when the new eruption of the old problem comes it will become more difficult to postpone and shift it.

Psychoanalysis is a temporary relief because psychoanalysis cannot conceive of anything which transcends ego. A problem can be solved only when you can go beyond it. If you cannot go beyond it, then you are the problem. Then who is going to solve it? Then how is one going to solve it? Then you are the problem; the problem is not something separate from you.

Yoga, tantra and all meditation techniques, they are based upon a different ground. They say that the problems are there, the problems are around you, but you are never the problem. You can transcend them; you can look at them like an observer is looking down from the hill into the valley. This witnessing self can solve the problem. Really, just by witnessing a problem, it is half solved already because when you can witness a problem, when you can observe it impartially, when you are not involved in it, you can stand by the side and look at it. The very clarity that comes out of this witnessing gives you the clue, gives you the secret key. And almost all problems are there because there is no clarity through which to understand them. You do not need solutions: you need clarity.

A problem rightly understood is solved, because a problem arises through a nonunderstanding mind. You create the problem because you are not understanding. So the basic thing is not to solve the problem: the basic thing is to create more understanding. And if more understanding, more clarity is there and the problem can be encountered impartially, observed as if it doesn’t belong to you, as if it belongs to someone else – if you can create a distance between the problem and you – only then can it be solved.