The questioner’s name is Walter Hoffman – that’s what is happening to you, Hoffman. Now you will have to take a very decisive step, a radical step. You will have to learn the ways of inner success. Now the outer will never appeal to you. Yes, I and people like me are to blame. The outer will never appeal to you any more. So don’t go on making efforts in the outer. Direct your energy towards the inner. Now only that can have any meaning.
Right now you are in a limbo. The outer is there but has no meaning; the inner seems to have meaning but is not there. This is the critical stage. But every seeker has to pass through it. I understand this pain, this anguish, and I have all sympathy for you. But although it looks like pain right now. once you have started contacting the inner, you will be surprised – it was not pain, it was a growth pain, it was a birth pain. And you will feel blessed that it happened because you will be reborn out of it.
You say: “as a U. S. Psychiatrist I am well-trained, experienced, and have been successful by outer standards….” Something important is to be understood. Each age creates its own myth to live by. The modern myth is the myth of the completely analyzed person. People are trying to be completely analyzed in the hope that if they are completely analyzed. there will be joy. It does not happen. Even the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was not a joyous man. And if it did not happen to the founder, it is not going to happen to anybody.
You can go on analyzing – it is infinite. The mind is very creative, it goes on creating. It is not a limited phenomenon – that one day you can come to the end of the mind by analyzing it. You can go on analyzing and something will still remain to be analyzed. You can still go on and something will still remain to be analyzed. It is a non-ending process.
The East has worked in a totally different way. The East says that the mind has not to be analyzed, one has to drop out of the mind. The problem has not to be solved, the problem has to be dropped. In solving, you will remain in it; in solving, you will create more and more problems. And this is happening. People who can afford analysis – it is a costly thing, millions cannot afford it – but those who can afford it go into it for years. They go on changing from one analyst to another analyst in the hope that if it has not happened with this one, it will happen with somebody else.
It is not going to happen. Through analysis mind can never come to a state in which you can become something beyond mind. By analyzing, you will remain it. You may become a little more smooth in your life but you will be as neurotic as anybody else. Yes, there will be one difference – you will be more smooth in your neurosis, more adjusted, a little more understanding, but that does not make any radical change. The radical change comes from the understanding that through analysis there is no way. One has to jump out of the mind.