According to Osho, psychology concerns social adjustment and symptom management, not inner revolution. It pacifies guilt and restores conformity, keeping you a cog in the crowd. Transformation means becoming an individual—free of herd mind, centered in your own being—and that, he says, is the domain of religion: the lived science of awakening transmitted by the transformed, not by the still-sick therapist.
Psychology helps you fit in and feel okay about problems; religion helps you wake up inside and be truly yourself.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, is psychology not sufficient for the transformation of man? After the birth of psychology, what need remains for religion?
Naresh! Psychology is not even interested in transformation. Psychology is interested in adjustment. It wants you to be adjusted to the crowd—so that you don’t slip out of it, don’t fall apart, don’t become isolated, but remain a part of the herd. Its entire strategy ensures you never become an individual, only an organ of society. The moment someone starts drifting from the social stream, shows signs of privacy, of individuality, we rush him to a psychologist: “Adjust him. Bring him back. He’s beginning to stray; he’s started to make his own footpath—put him back on the highway!” Psychology is not at all interested in transformation. Transformation means revolution. And the first revolution is freedom from society—becoming an individual. The first revolution is to be centered in the self. The first revolution is to drop the herd mentality. Ordinarily man is like sheep: wherever the flock goes, he goes. Ask…
Can't psychoanalysis help people to know themselves? Is religion really necessary?
Sugeet, psychoanalysis can help a little bit, it can prepare the ground, but it cannot be a substitute for religion. In the West it is becoming a substitute for religion, and that is going to destroy something immensely beautiful. Religion is a totally different phenomenon from psychoanalysis. Religion is not analysis at all, religion is meditation. It is not thinking, it is not analysis. Psychoanalysis is concerned with the mind and helping the mind to become adjusted to society, to whatsoever is thought to be normal. It may be, it may not be. Usually the average is thought to be the normal, but the average is not necessarily the normal. The word normal comes from 'norm'; norm means the law. Normal is one who lives according to the law, the ultimate law, the ultimate norm. A Buddha is normal, a Jesus is normal, a Zarathustra is normal, a Bodhidharma is…
Osho, what is the relationship between meditation and patience?
If you sit to meditate to remove mental restlessness, you will keep looking back again and again: “Has it gone yet?” And the irony is that when you begin to meditate, restlessness will increase. Because what has been repressed will start surfacing; catharsis will begin. The rubbish you have kept hidden within and never allowed to express—meditation will break open those doors too. It will clean the house. Dust piled up for years, for births, will rise again; there will be gusts and storms. For a while even the little peace you had will be lost. Then you will panic: “I came for peace, and even what I had is gone.” Without patience, you could even become unhinged, because meditation brings such a great storm. The disease is not from a day or two; it’s from lifetimes. Meditation will break through all the layers to reach your innermost core. In…
Question: Osho, to me the present state of world affairs appears illusory. Eminent scholars from different walks of life offer various themes for the transformation of life. For instance, religious leaders affirm that God or religion alone is omnipotent and can transform life and provide heaven. Sociologists, politicians, educationists and moralists believe that only better forms can create a better society. Naturalists say that understanding nature will bring transformation. Whereas psychologists and psychopathologists believe that psychoanalysis, tranquilizers, sedatives or brainwashing agents can transform life, etc., etc. But to me, sir, all this appears to be merely a partial transformation. Would you suggest what total and spontaneous transformation is? Religion, yoga, are the search to awaken and raise that inner seed. But I do not agree with those religionists who believe that religion is sufficient, who think that something happening within is enough and who stand in denial of the outer.
Beloved master, I am a psychologist. I was hoping that studying psychology would help to change my life, but nothing like that has happened. What should I do now?
After three years, one day when he came, the psychoanalyst received him with great joy and said, "I am glad to declare, after three years' research on you, that you don't suffer from an inferiority complex. I have come to this conclusion after such a long effort that it can't be wrong. You don't suffer from an inferiority complex -- simply forget all about it." The politician was very happy and he said, "I am grateful to you, but can you tell me how you arrived at this conclusion?" The psychoanalyst said, "Because you ARE simply inferior -- how can you suffer from an inferiority complex?" Nagesh, you need not be worried. If sitting silently you start feeling madness arising, don't be worried -- you can't be more mad than you already are. Man cannot fall more. He has fallen to the rock bottom. Now there is no further to…