The psychotherapist’s work is to clean your mind. It is a kind of lubricating your mechanism — it functions a little better and you start becoming a little more understanding about the functionings of the mind, although that does not make any revolutionary change. And it is possible you may solve one problem, but you have not removed the cause. Mind itself is the problem. So you can remove one problem, mind will create another problem…. It is just like pruning the trees: you prune one leaf and just out of self-respect and dignity the tree will grow three leaves in the place where there used to be one. That’s why gardeners go on pruning; that gives trees more foliage, more leaves.

The same is the situation with the mind: you can remove one problem by understanding it — and it is costly — but the mind is still there which has created the problem, and psychoanalysis does not go beyond the boundaries of the mind. The mind will create a new problem, more complicated than the one that you have solved.  Naturally, because the mind understands you can solve that kind of problem, it creates something new, more complicated, more foliage.

Meditation is a totally different thing than psychoanalysis or any therapies which are confined to the mind. It is simply a jumping out of the mind: “You have your problems — I’m going home.” Because mind is a parasite it does not have its own existence. It needs you inside in it, so it can go on eating you, your head. Once you jump out of it, the mind is just a graveyard. All those problems that were too big drop, they simply drop dead.

Meditation is a totally different dimension: you simply watch the mind and in watching you come out of it.   And slowly, mind with all its problems disappears; otherwise the mind is going to create strange problems….  Mind is your only problem — all other problems are just offshoots of the mind.  Meditation cuts the mind from the very roots. And all these therapies — Gestalt and Voice Dialogue and Fritz Penis — we can use them for those who have not yet entered into meditation just to have a little understanding of the mind so they can find the door from where to get out.   All kinds of therapies which are helpful, can be used but not for the meditators.  They are only helpful in the beginning when you have not yet become accustomed to meditation. Once you are meditative you don’t need any therapy, no therapy is helpful then. But in the beginning, it can be helpful.

Sigmund Freud is right only about the Western mind and its tradition. When he says that every girl hates her mother because she loves the father, the whole thing is based on their understanding of sex, that one loves the opposite sex. So girls love the fathers, the boys love the mother. But the girls cannot express their love, particularly they cannot be sexually related with the father, and the mother is related sexually. So they become jealous of the mother — the mother is their enemy. The boys become enemies of the father and because of that the boy cannot make love to the mother. The Japanese cannot even think of this; even Indians cannot think of this — just a totally different upbringing. Sigmund Freud or Jung or Adler or Assagioli or Fritz Perls have no idea. Not even in their dreams have they thought that people can be different from the Western people….

In the East, psychoanalysis is not of much help. For the Westerners, they can go to psycho therapy just to clean the mind. With a clean mind, to enter into meditation is easier. But if you don’t enter meditation and you simply depend on cleaning the mind, then you will be cleaning the mind for your whole life and you will not go anywhere else.

Because of its different orientation the East should find seats in the universities for meditation, not for psychoanalysis….

In the East for centuries the problem has been how to get beyond the mind —the only problem, the single problem. But for the Western mind, because it has developed in a different way it has never thought about transcending mind.

In the East that has been the only, single search. The whole genius of the East has been working for one thing, no other problems: how to go beyond the mind, because if you can solve your problems wholesale just by going beyond, then why go for retail solving of problems? The mind will go on creating; it is a very creative force. You solve one problem, another problem arises. You solve that problem, another problem arises. It is a good business for the psychoanalyst, because he knows you are never going to be cured. You are not going to be cured of the mind; he cures your specific problems. Your mind is there, the source. He never cuts the roots, he only cuts leaves, branches at the most, but they go on growing again — the roots are there.

Meditation is cutting the very roots of problems. The mind is the only problem, and unless you go beyond the mind, you will never go beyond problems. It is strange that even today, the Western psychologists have not even pondered over the fact that the East has created so many enlightened people. None of them has bothered about the analysis of the mind…. Hundreds of methods have been found which can help you to transcend the mind, and once you are beyond the mind all its problems look as if they are somebody else’s problems. You attain to a state of a watcher on the hills, and all the problems are in the valleys. And they don’t have any impact on you; you have gone beyond them.

The West has remained utterly mind-centered. In the West the only thing they have thought about is matter and mind. And matter is the reality and mind is only a by-product; beyond mind there is nothing. In the East matter is illusory, mind is a byproduct of all your illusions, projections, dreams. Your reality is beyond matter and mind, both. So we divide reality in the East into three parts: matter, the outermost; the soul, the innermost; the mind is in between the two. Matter has a relative reality; it is not absolutely real, just relatively real. The mind is absolutely unreal, and the soul is absolutely real.

This is a totally different categorization of humanity. In the West the categories are simple: matter is real, mind is just a by-product, and there is nothing beyond mind. So remember, if you are meditating then nothing else is needed. If you are not meditating, then these psychotherapies may be helpful as a stepping stone for meditation…. The West is being exploited by all kinds of frauds for the simple reason that the West has not looked into the matter of meditation itself.

Meditation has only one meaning, and that is going beyond the mind and becoming a witness. In your witnessing is the miracle — the whole mystery of life.