Communism has taken away the whole dignity of man, his pride, his individuality, his freedom…. Christianity has destroyed the very possibility that you have a reality of your own. You are just a puppet in the hands of God. The strings are in his hand. If he wants you to dance, you dance; if he wants you to cry, you cry. You are not a master of your own destiny.

And then finally psychoanalysis comes, and this also has not been able to give man back his dignity. Now patients in millions, around the world are in the hands of the psychoanalysts. And they depend on them as their father-figure and those father-figures themselves suffer from the same sickness, from the same schizophrenia, from the same split personality.

The Eastern method given by the mystics in the first place gives dignity to man, gives him pride and makes him aware: you have a hidden source of awareness – just wake it up and become aware of the mind. You don’t have to do anything: just becoming aware of the mind, you are separate. And the moment you are separate, you are no longer nourishing the roots of the mind. The mind will soon wither away, without any analysis; what is the need of analyzing it?

That’s why Bodhidharma is saying: Awareness, beholding the mind, is the most essential method to have a breakthrough. And once you have gone just a step beyond the mind, you have entered the world of nirvana, you have entered the world of light and eternal life. You have attained to spiritual integrity, freedom, and tremendous ecstasy which the mind cannot even dream about.

Those who understand the mind reach enlightenment with minimal effort. Those who don’t understand the mind practice in vain. And psychoanalysts should be included with those who don’t understand the mind, and are practicing on themselves and on others something absolutely in vain. It is sheer wastage of time and life and energy. Psychoanalysis has to understand the mystical ways of the East, and then it will go through a transformation and it will be of tremendous help to people.

But the trouble is the profession will be gone, and thousands of psychoanalysts who are earning so much money will not be ready for the whole profession to finish. This is a problem. It is such a deep problem that some way has to be found. Otherwise, even if somebody understands the fact intellectually, he will not be ready to do anything, because that will destroy his own vested interest.

It is like the doctors: they help the patient to be cured, but deep down they want the patient to take as long a time to be cured as possible. They don’t want to kill him because that would not help their profession, but they would like him to hang between life and death as long as possible, because the longer he is hanging between life and death, the longer they are earning money. If he is cured, their earning is finished. If he dies, their earning is finished. So they neither want him to live nor do they want him to die. They want…and this is very unconscious, maybe no doctor is clearly aware of it.

I have heard: