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Part V : Osho’s experiences with Mad people
I used to go to madhouses....
One of my friends was the governor of one of the states, so he
allowed me - I could visit any madhouse in the state, or any
jail, wherever I wanted to go. Otherwise, it is very difficult
to see mad people. empti06
It sometimes happens that a person is brought to me and they
say he is mad. He meditates and he is perfectly okay; nothing
is wrong. Then he goes back home and the family again expects
the madness from him. Then he starts falling into the old trap
again. He has to play the role.
This is one of the most significant things to understand: almost
ninety percent of the people who are in madhouses are not mad.
They are just playing a role because people have forced that role
on them, and they accepted it. They find it comfortable and convenient,
and once they accepted it, it doesn't look good to destroy people's
expectations. This is my understanding: if you say to a hundred
mad people that they are not mad, ninety can come out immediately - if
they are allowed to come out, and if they are made to understand
that they are just playing a game. And it is a foolish game, because
they are the losers. hammer02
In my town one of my friends' uncles was mad. They were rich
people. I used to go in their house often, but even I became aware
only after years that one of his uncles was kept in an underground
basement, chained.
I said, "Why?"
They said, "He is mad. There were only two ways: either we
keep him in our own house, chained.... And of course we cannot
keep him chained in the house; otherwise people will be coming
and everybody will feel worried and concerned. And his children,
his wife, watching their father, their husband.... And it
is against our family's reputation to send him to prison, so we
found this way: we have imprisoned him underground. His food is
being taken to him by a servant; otherwise nobody goes to see
him, nobody goes to meet him."
I persuaded my friend, "I would like to meet your uncle."
He said, "But I cannot come with you - he is a dangerous
man, he is mad! Although he is chained he can do anything."
I said, "He can at the most kill me. You just remain behind
me so if I am killed you escape, but I would like to go."
Because I insisted, he managed to get the key from the servant
who used to take the food. In thirty years I was the first person
from the outside world, other than the servant, who had met him;
and that man may have been mad - I cannot say - but now
he was not mad. But nobody was ready to listen to him because
all mad people say, "We are not mad."
So when he said this to the servant, "Tell my family that
I am not mad," the servant simply laughed. He even told the
family but nobody took any note of it.
When I saw the man, I sat with him, I talked with him. He was
as sane as anybody else in the world - perhaps a little more,
because he said one thing to me: "Being here for thirty years
has been a tremendous experience. In fact I feel fortunate that
I am out of your mad world. They think I am mad - let them
think that, there is no harm - but in fact I am fortunate
that I am out of your mad world. What do you think?" he said
to me.
I said, "You are absolutely right. The world outside is far
madder than when you left it thirty years before. In thirty years
there has been great evolution in everything - in madness
too. You stop saying to people that you are not mad; otherwise
they will take you out. You are living a perfectly beautiful life.
You have enough space to walk...."
He said, "That's the only exercise I can do here - walking."
And I started to teach him vipassana. I said, "You are in
such perfect conditions to become a buddha: no worries, no botherations,
no disturbances. You are really blessed."
And he started practicing vipassana. I told him, "You can
practice it sitting, you can practice it walking" - and
he was my first disciple as far as vipassana is concerned. And
you will be surprised that he died a sannyasin - died in the
basement.
But the last time I had gone to my village, I went to see him.
He said, "I'm ready; now you initiate me. My days are numbered,
and I would like to die as your sannyasin. I'm your disciple;
for twenty years you have been my master and whatever you had
promised is fulfilled."
And you could see from his face, from his eyes, that he was not
the same person - a total transformation, a mutation....
Mad people need methods of meditation so that they can come out
of their madness.
The criminals need psychological help, spiritual support.
They are really deep-down sick, and you are punishing sick people.
It is not their fault. If somebody murders, that means he has
carried a tendency to murder in him for a long time. It is not
that somewhere, out of nowhere, suddenly you murder somebody.
dark04
Once a young boy was brought to me. His parents were very much
disturbed; they had taken him to psychoanalysts, to other doctors,
but nothing had worked. And his problem was not very great, but
it was disturbing his whole life and his whole future. He had
got this idea that while he was sleeping - he used to sleep
with his mouth open - two flies had entered his mouth, and
they were going around inside his body. Now they are here, now
they are there, now they have moved towards the head. The whole
day the boy could not do anything else, there was no way to get
rid of those two flies.
He was examined, there were no flies. And even if you swallowed
two flies, they could not go on moving this way. There are no
superhighways like this, that the flies are going to the head,
and to the feet, and to the heart, and to the stomach, and they
are continuously going around and buzzing...he could hear
their buzz. And how could he remain at ease? Even in the night
he could not sleep well.
When the parents brought him to me they must have taken him to
many people already. Somebody suggested that perhaps I might be
of some help. I listened to the story and I said to the parents,
"You are absolutely wrong, and the boy is absolutely right."
The boy looked at me. I was the first man to whom his parents
had taken him who had given him self-respect, dignity. Others
were all telling him, "You are crazy. There are no flies."
I said, "You are all crazy. I can see his flies."
The father and the mother both became disturbed...where had
they come? Now I was going to strengthen the idea of the boy even
more. But it was too late. I said, "You sit down. You have
been torturing him unnecessarily. First, he's being tortured by
these two flies, and you are taking him all around. You have been
humiliating him."
First, I talked to the boy's parents, and convinced the boy that
I was absolutely with him. He said, "You are the first man
who knows something about these deeper problems."
I said, "I absolutely agree with you. You have been tortured
by these two flies, so we will take them out."
He said, "It will be very difficult because they go on changing
their place."
I said, "You don't be worried."
I took him inside the room, left the parents outside and told
him to lie down. Because I was absolutely favorable to him, he
listened to me. He lay down, and I told him to close his eyes
and watch those flies - where they were going - so that
he would have an exact idea where they were. "When they are
very close to your mouth, I will pull them out."
He said, "That seems to be logical. They have entered from
the mouth."
So I put him on the bed with his eyes closed, and I rushed all
over the house to find two flies. It was a difficult job and it
was just by chance...Hindu women use coconut oil for their
hair - which is a dirty habit. You can smell from far away
that a Hindu woman is coming close. And I had seen dead flies
many times in their bottles of coconut oil, so I rushed around
looking for a coconut oil bottle. And by chance, I found not only
two, but three flies.
Strangely, it seems almost every coconut oil bottle catches these
flies - they go in and they get caught, they cannot fly. When
they are in the bottle, taking a holy dip in the coconut oil,
then they cannot fly - their wings get sticky. And particularly
if it is winter time, then the coconut oil becomes solid. It was
winter time, so it was very easy for me to take those three flies.
I cleaned them, washed them, brought them in, and I told the boy,
"Keep your eyes on the flies - where are they?"
And he said, "They are very close. They are just near my
throat."
I said, "This is the moment. Open your mouth." And as
he opened his mouth, I took the flies out of his mouth which I
already had in my hands. I told him, "You were wrong, there
were not two, there were three."
He said, "My God! You are the right person." I showed
him three flies. He said, "It feels so peaceful inside - no
buzzing, no flies."
He rushed out with the flies to show his parents, and the parents
were shocked. They said, "We have been to the doctors, you
have been x-rayed. We have been to the psychoanalyst, you have
been psychoanalyzed, and nobody has detected any flies. But now
we cannot say anything. This man has even caught them."
The boy said, "Can I take these flies with me to show to
all those doctors? They are idiots because they were condemning
me that I'm crazy. Now I want to show all of them that they are
crazy. My only fault was that I was counting two, and there were
three."
I said, "You can take these without fear, and if at any time
any fly enters again, I'm available. You can come to me. You need
not go anywhere else."
He said, "Now it won't happen because now I sleep with a
bandage on my mouth. I have suffered enough - it has been
almost two years I have been suffering."
And he went to the doctors, he went to the psychoanalyst; and
one of the doctors was very friendly with me. He was a Rotarian,
and I had gone the next day to speak in the Rotary Club. We met
there...he said, "You are something. Where did you get
those three flies from? Now that boy is making a fool of us. And
he was saying, `All your X-rays, and all your education is just
nonsense. You don't know anything about flies when they enter
into somebody's body. And these are the flies, as a proof.'
"I inquired of him, `Who has caught them?'
"He mentioned your name, very respectfully, and he said,
`He is the only man in the whole city who treated me as a human
being, not as a madman - who realized my difficulty. And once
he accepted my difficulty, it was not much trouble because they
were roaming all over my body. He simply said, `When they come
close to your mouth, just tell me. Keep your eyes closed, so I
can catch hold.' And I was thinking there were only two...there
were three!'"
Imagination can create a kind of insanity if it starts believing
in its own daydreams - it can create hallucinations. As far
as I'm concerned, your so-called saints, great religious leaders
who have seen God, who have met God, who have talked with God,
are in the same category with this crazy boy who had two flies
moving inside him. Their God is just their imagination. rebel35
In Poona, some twenty years ago, a young man who was a professor
in the university came to see me. He wanted a private interview;
he did not want to say anything about his problem before others.
And later on, naturally I understood that it must have been embarrassing
for him to say it before others. He had from his very childhood
learned the habit - which is very strange, because a man's
physiology does not allow it - of walking like a woman.
A man cannot walk like a woman for the simple reason that he does
not have a womb. It is the womb in the woman's body that makes
her walk differently; without the womb, nobody can manage it.
But something must have happened in his childhood of which he
was not aware. Perhaps he was born in a house where there were
only girls - his sisters - and he was the only boy. And
naturally, children learn from imitation: if he was surrounded
only by girls, he may have started moving the way they were moving
and become almost fixated on it.
Everybody was laughing at him, and particularly that he is a professor
in the university, and walking like a woman, and all the students
laughing.... He had been to doctors, but they said, "What
can we do? - there is no disease, no medicine can help. There
is nothing wrong in your body. No operation can help."
He had been to psychoanalysts in Bombay and New Delhi and they
were also unbelieving, because such a case had never come to them.
So none of the advice they could give was the advice of psychoanalysis - because
psychoanalysis has no precedent for such a case. In all the discoveries
of psychoanalysis, I have never come across a single case like
this that has been treated by psychoanalysts.
So naturally...the man was a psychoanalyst, but the advice
he was giving was just commonplace advice. He said, "You
have to try hard to walk like a man. Be alert." This is commonsense
advice. "What can be done? You have to change your habit
and create a new habit. So particularly when you go for a morning
walk, or an evening walk, try hard to walk like a man."
And that created the trouble: the more he tried to walk like a
man, the more his mind was getting hypnotized to walk like a woman.
That was why he was trying...otherwise nobody tries. Have
you ever tried not to walk like a woman?
But if you are so consciously trying hard to walk like a man,
you don't understand the mechanism of hypnosis: you are hypnotizing
yourself more to walk like a woman. You are trying hard and you
are failing, and every failure is making your autohypnotic situation
deeper. So all the advice of great psychoanalysts turned him into
even more of a mess. He started walking more like a woman than
he had before.
When he came to see me, a few friends were there and he said,
"I cannot tell you my problem. I want absolute privacy."
So I said, "Okay, you can come into my room." I took
him into my room, and he locked the door. I said, "What kind
of problem do you have that you are so much afraid?"
He said "It is so embarrassing...I walk like a woman."
I said, "You should not be embarrassed about it. In fact,
you have done a miracle. Physiologists cannot believe that it
is possible: walking like a woman needs a womb, otherwise you
cannot. And you don't have a womb..."
He said, "Whatever may be the case..."
I said, "You are somebody to be appreciated. Who says that
this is embarrassing? You would win a competition, you would come
first in the whole world - a man walking like a woman...no
man can compete with you!"
He said, "What are you saying? You are trying to console
me."
I said, "No. I am simply trying to make it clear to you...you
have listened to psychoanalysts and other advisers who have told
you to make hard and conscious efforts to walk like a man - and
what has been the result?"
He said, "The result has been this, that I am walking more
like a woman than before."
I said, "Now, listen to my advice. You try hard to walk like
a woman..."
He said, "You will make me look absolutely stupid."
I said, "You try it just here in this room, before me. Make
a conscious effort to walk like a woman. I want to see how you
can walk...because it is physiologically impossible. It is
just a psychological conditioning, and it can be broken - but
not by the opposite extreme." He was afraid, but I said,
"You try, just around the room - but be conscious and
make it as woman-like as possible."
And he failed, he could not manage it. He said "My God, this
is strange!"
I said, "Now go out, go to the university, and walk consciously
as a woman. Watch women, how they are walking...find the best
woman and just walk like her."
And after seven days, when I was leaving, he came back and he
said, "You have done a miracle. The harder I tried to walk
like a woman...I could not do it. People have even started
looking at me strangely, because they expect me to walk like a
woman and I am walking like a man. I am trying my hardest, my
best, to walk like a woman, and nothing succeeds!"
I said to him, "This is the way to break through your autohypnosis.
Autohypnosis is unconscious. If you consciously do the same thing,
then the autohypnosis will be broken. It cannot stand the light
of consciousness." tahui17
Traveling all over the country, while I was preparing for my
people, I was studying all kinds of people - neurotic, psychotic,
all kinds of people spiritual, material. secret10
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....
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. poetry01
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