Bansho Gyoshu studied meditation first with Master Shomoku. He told Bansho, “Studying this path is like refining gold. When it is impure, the pure gold does not show.”
“As I look between your eyebrows, there is very much something there. If you don’t pierce through cold bones, once, you won’t be able to cast this thing off. Hereafter, see for yourself – it is not a matter of my speaking much.”
Then Bansho was given the saying of Chosha’s to contemplate on: “Turn yourself back into mountains, rivers and earth.”
For six months Bansho met with no success and Shomoku made the comment, “I only hope you will understand later.”
Finally, after a long time, Bansho did suddenly have an insight.

My Friends,

I have been telling my people for almost thirty years, on and off, that psychoanalysis is dead, as dead as Sigmund Freud. But no psychoanalyst ever answered. The reality is that psychoanalysis has never been alive, but it was a great method of exploitation of the sick people.

Nobody has ever been cured by psychoanalysis. There are people who have been under psychoanalysis for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, but there is not a single human being who has gained any insight through psychoanalysis, or any wholeness, any depth, any peak.

People terminate psychoanalysis not because they have succeeded, but because their bank account is finished. Psychoanalysts are the most highly paid people in the world – for nothing. It was going to happen sooner or later, because nobody can be cheated forever.

My standpoint was that unless psychoanalysis has a soul…. It is digging into dreams – which is an absolutely futile, meaningless effort, because dreams are just on the surface of the mind. You close your eyes and they start floating. Analyzing these dreams, you can never come to a conclusion; they go on and on. Psychoanalysis is just concerned with the dreams and the mind. It does not believe that there is something beyond the mind that is going to be its suicide, because your real source of life is beyond the mind.

Mind is just a computer. You can program it, you can reprogram it, deprogram it, you can do anything with it; it is a mechanism. It is not your being. And unless somebody reaches to his being, he is wandering and wasting his life, he is simply vegetating. He has no depth, no peak experiences.

From my university days I have been fighting, first, with my professors of psychology and psychoanalysis. Then, when I became a teacher in the university, I was fighting with my colleagues who were in the same department. But man’s blindness, deafness, dumbness, seems to be infinite….

The materialist believes only in the body. The psychoanalyst believes in the mind as a by-product of the body: when the body dies the mind disappears also. So what are you doing? – torturing people unnecessarily. Neither the mind is going to be your eternal friend, nor the body. Just use them, but don’t forget there is a witness within you.

Hence, I have been fighting for meditation. I have been telling people that unless psychoanalysis is based in meditation, unless it helps people to discover the no-mind, the beyond, it is an absolutely futile exercise of exploiting people. But no psychoanalyst agreed with me.