Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living)

by Osho

The Western approach is to think about a problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning. To uncondition the mind, or to recondition the mind, to recondition the body, to take out all those imprints that have been left on the brain—this is the Western approach. Psychoanalysis goes into the memory; it works there. It goes into your childhood, into your past; it moves backward. It finds out from where a problem has arisen—maybe fifty years before, when you were a child the problem arose in your relationship with your mother, then psychoanalysis will go back. Fifty years of history! It is a long, dragging affair. And even then it doesn’t help much because there are millions of problems; it is not only a question of one problem. You can go into one problem’s history; you can look into your autobiography and find out the causes. Maybe you can eliminate one problem, but there are millions of problems. If you start going into each problem to solve one life’s problems, you will need millions of lives! Let me repeat it: to solve one life’s problems you will have to be born again and again, millions of times. This is almost impractical. This cannot be done. And all those millions of lives when you will be solving the problems of this life, those lives will create their own problems … and so on and so forth. You will be dragged more and more into the problems. This is absurd!