According to Osho, 'yes'—a total, affirmative openness to life—cannot come from exhaustive primal therapy, which is impossible and only offers brief relief. Because tensions span many lives and the mind keeps accumulating, catharsis remains a toy. 'Yes' arises through a qualitative shift: meditation, watchfulness, relaxing into universal life forces—discovering your being beyond the past. Awareness, not analysis or endless screams, delivers freedom and a fresh, discontinuous newness.
You don’t need years of screaming; become aware and rest in your inner silence now to say a real yes to life.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, janov says that negativity is electrochemically driven by endomorphins, the chemical effect of pain. How is "yes" possible without exhaustive primal therapy?
Primal therapy has contributed something very essential and significant to human growth. But just as other therapies in the West are amateurish, primal therapy also belongs to the same category. Sigmund Freud used to say that exhaustive psychoanalysis would free man from all tensions, all worries; would give him for the first time freedom from the past, and a tremendous energy to create the future -- not as a continuity of the past but totally new, fresh, discontinuous with the past. But the whole problem is that exhaustive psychoanalysis is impossible. There is not a single person in the whole world who has gone through exhaustive psychoanalysis, which means that now he does not need any psychoanalysis. People have been in psychoanalysis for fifteen years, twenty years, and yet they are exactly the same as they had begun. Only one thing has changed: they have now become full of psychological…
Beloved master, what is yes? I find that I have no real understanding of it. I have seen that whenever I say yes, there is a hint of surprise, as if I am amazed that there is no reason to say no. My yes is always instead of no. Where is the seat of this experience, yes...?
Just the other day Buddha was talking about trust: Trust, meditate, and see. Yes means trust, and trust is the beginning of meditation. Meditation means relaxing with existence. Unless you trust, unless you can say yes to existence, how can you relax? People cannot relax because they are afraid. People cannot relax because they fear that if they relax they may be cheated. People can relax only with others whom they trust. With a stranger in your room you may not be able to sleep in the night. Who knows, he may cut your throat. Who knows, he may steal your money and escape. But with your wife or husband you go into deep sleep, you can trust. The child can go with his father or mother anywhere. Even if the father is going into fire, the child can go singing a song, dancing, inquiring, questioning, unafraid, because he knows…
If love becomes your style of life it will change the quality, not the quantity. Logic works in the world of quantity, and love transforms the quality of your being. That is the only phenomenon which changes the quality of your being, nothing else can do it. Love is a magic, love is the ultimate alchemy. And it is only through love that man has attained to the ultimate heights and the ultimate depths together. Fulfillment is possible only when nothing in you remains potential, everything becomes actual, when you are not exhausted. One can be exhausted also, and nothing is left inside. That is a negative state. That's what is happening through gaining more and more things: people become exhausted, tired. But tiredness and exhaustion and being spent in futile exercises can leave you only in a state of darkness.
Once you can remain in your body, but unconnected with it, meditation has happened. This is the first satori. Many hours may pass but you will not feel the passage of time. But this happens only when fear has disappeared and your mind has become acclimatised to the new experience and it is not too terrified by it but becomes curious. Your mind will become so interested that it wants to know more about it and the fear will become transformed into a witnessing of what has happened. Go into it more and more, little by little, and if you start feeling that you will go mad, absorb that madness also by and by. Many people have gone mad. If they are working without a master and not knowing what to do, they land themselves in something which they cannot manage, and they can go mad.
Osho, yesterday you said that when anger is watched consciously, it dissolves. But why is it that when sexual desire arises, even in awareness its intensity persists? Why is it so?
There is no entanglement in the breath. If you try to practice on anger… Anger is not happening every moment; it happens sometimes. And when it happens, it happens with such intensity that you are already going deep into it; so much is at stake in those moments that you may think, “We will look into awareness later; first let’s settle this now.” Lust is very deep, because existence has made it so deep; life depends on it. If lust were so easy that you decided and were freed, perhaps you would not even have been born—because many before you would have become free, and the possibility of your being would have been almost nil. But your parents, and their parents, did not become free; therefore you are. You too will not get free so easily, because your children are also to be—they are waiting: “Do not run away midway.”…