My effort was to bring the West closer to the East. The East has developed spiritual techniques, but when those techniques were developed, man was not so loaded with knowledge, degrees, and all kinds of meaningless garbage. Those techniques were developed for innocent people.

Now the situation is different: if you give those techniques directly to the people, the people are so loaded that in their garbage your techniques will be lost.

My understanding was, and still is, that therapy can be a good beginning, but it is not the end, it is not the answer. It can clean the mind only for a short period, but in that short period a spiritual technique can be introduced to you before the mind gets loaded again. If the spiritual technique is introduced to you, then that garbage is not going to disturb you; it cannot create confusion, and you do not need any therapy anymore. You are on the way, now this ordinary garbage cannot prevent you.

But if you are loaded already, then to introduce you to a spiritual technique is futile; it is throwing a seed onto stones. The seed is not going to live, to become a plant, to become a tree, to blossom.

So I was using these therapies just for the moment to clean the ground and let me put in the seed. Then we are not worried about the garbage that you will be collecting. The seed has enough force; once it has found its soil, there is no problem. It will bring its branches and foliage, its fruits and its flowers, in spite of all the garbage around – that doesn’t matter.

But I was aware of the danger – that these therapists themselves have no spirituality, and they will start feeling as if they are guides, spiritual guides; as if they are helping so many people on the path. It is so easy to blow your ego up bigger and bigger.

These therapists came from the West to me because in the West therapy was going out of fashion. People were tired, because what is the point? – for a few days you feel great and then come the dumps. You feel worse than before. Then to go again to the therapist becomes a kind of addiction.

There is no end to it. People go on moving from one therapy to another therapy their whole life, always feeling, “This is going to work.” And it seems to work for a while, but it does not change anything basic, just superficial touches, so you are again back to zero.

All these therapists had failed in the West; nobody was coming to them. When they came to me they had no need to search for clients: thousands of sannyasins were coming, and I wanted a certain synthesis between Western methods of therapy and spiritual growth, so I allotted them the work.