According to Osho, therapy groups are not to deliver you to your natural self, which no method can produce. Their purpose is to mirror your conditioned, self-created patterns—your ‘prison’—so you recognize your own signature on your wounds. In the very seeing, support for the unnatural drops, the grip loosens, and the natural—already there—emerges indirectly without effort.
Groups don’t give you your true self; they help you notice the fake stuff you maintain so it falls away on its own.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Is the purpose of the therapy groups to bring the participants to their natural self? If so, isn't the effort to be natural unnatural? If not, what is the essential difference between natural and unnatural?
I have heard about one man who married eight times, and again and again he managed to find the same type of woman. Just see the point: the point is that he has a certain kind of mind, a certain conditioning. In that conditioning, only a certain type of woman appeals to him. A blonde or a brunette -- a certain kind of woman appeals to him. The long nose, the black eyes, or something. Always he is attracted by a certain kind of woman. And then that woman starts doing the same things. And then he is puzzled -- and he was thinking he was changing the woman. You ARE changing the woman, but you have not changed your mind! So your choice remains the old, because the chooser is the old. It is not going to help; you will be in the same trap. The colour of the…
It is good that you don't feel it is therapy; it isn't. In fact the very word therapy is condemnatory. The moment you say therapy, you have taken the other as a patient, ill -- that s the condemnation. Nobody is really ill. In fact the society is ill, individuals are victims. Society needs therapy, individuals simply need love. The society is the patient and needs hospitalization. Individuals suffer because you cannot catch hold of the society; it remains invisible. When you try to catch hold of it, an individual is found and then he becomes responsible -- and he is simply suffering, he is a victim. He needs understanding, not therapy; love, not therapy. Society has not given him understanding, has not given him love. Society has given him strait-jackets, prisons.
It is a tremendous chaos but very beautiful. And all that is beautiful comes out of chaos. All the stars are born out of chaos. These groups are really to create a chaos in you... to bring to your focus whatsoever is the real situation. They don't lie -- they make you aware of the truth. These groups are really like a diagnosis -- and that is half the therapy, more than half. So passing through these group experiences, you have come to feel your inner conflict, the division. Sometimes you are one person and sometimes you are another. Whenever energy moves into one direction, you are one. When energy moves into another direction, you are another. Now a synthesis is needed, a unification, a yoga. Union is needed... and the inner union becomes easily possible if you are moving in some outer union also.
Whenever we are pushing, trying to prove something, trying to get something, trying to fight for something, trying to struggle, whenever there is some kind of will, we are against tao. Tao is will-lessness: just going with the current wherever it is going, moving with the river.... [Osho suggests some groups to the new sannyasin who assisted therapy groups in the west. She says: I have this idea about therapy -- I don't want therapy... but I'll do them.] Mm mm, it is not therapy, because you are not a patient and it is not therapy. The word is ugly... but this is a necessary evil with language: whatsoever word we use it is never true to the fact. Now, therapy is ugly. It presupposes that somebody is abnormal, ill, diseased, that somebody is not in the right shape, that somebody is a case, somebody is mental or something.
With the old orthodox psychoanalysis, whatsoever can be done in years can be done in weeks in these groups. Of course psychoanalysts are not in favour of them because their whole trade, their whole business will be destroyed. Psychoanalysis has become a big concern, one of the richest professions in the world now, so too much investment is there. They go on guarding but the citadel is almost on the volcano and any moment it will explode. So those who are a little avant-garde, those who can see a little ahead, should start absorbing all that is happening all over the world. These groups are basically different from psychoanalysis and yet complementary. They are more active; psychoanalysis is a passive thing. The psychoanalyst remains almost an outsider, watching, observing. He is a voyeur.