Osho,
Please explain the psychology of the buddhas.

Man can be understood as a seven-story building: three storeys are underground, three storeys are above ground. One story, the middle one, is half underground and half above ground. This fourth story is where we are. Sigmund Freud calls it conscious mind.

When Freud started working with sick people, he became aware that there is something underneath the conscious mind. He called it the unconscious mind. He stopped there. He thought he had discovered something new – and in a way he was right, because he was not aware of the Eastern psychology that has existed for thousands of years which has taken note of all the states of the mind. So it was a re-discovery.

Sigmund Freud’s closest colleague, and the most talented psychologist, was Carl Gustav Jung. He worked even harder, went deeper into the psyche of man, and found another story underneath the unconscious. He called it the collective unconscious mind. He stopped there. It is enough for one man to discover even one story, because it is such a vast phenomenon. And, after Jung, nobody has gone deeper than that.

But in the East, below the collective unconscious mind, we have discovered the last story – the cosmic unconscious mind. In the East these minds are simply mentioned, no details are given. The reason is clear…because the search in the East and in the West differed fundamentally. The Western psychologists were concerned with sick people, insane people; naturally, they have to go below the conscious mind to the unconscious. But if there was somebody who was even more insane, they had to go to the collective unconscious. But it is very rare to find a man who is so mad that he has reached the cosmic unconscious mind. If somebody goes that mad, he will be almost a rock. That’s why they have not been able to discover the cosmic unconscious mind.

But, in the East, the search was totally different. They started looking into the minds of meditators, not madmen. As they worked, they found that above the conscious mind there is a super-conscious mind. And many religions have stopped there, thinking they have arrived – it is so beautiful, so peaceful.

But a few seekers continued to fly higher and higher, and found another story on top of the super-conscious mind: the collective super-conscious mind. Most of the seekers stopped there; the joy is too much, uncontainable. It is unbelievable that there can be anything more. But only a few have gone to the very end, to the highest peak – and they have found the cosmic conscious mind. The cosmic conscious mind is what I call the state of enlightenment, the state of buddhahood.