People aren’t machines; how they feel, believe, and want to live changes whether a treatment works.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved Osho, in recent years, science has been discovering more and more the element of subjectivity in experiments in physics. Also, in medicine today, we talk about the subjectivity of therapy; the same medicine has different results with different doctors. Please can you comment about the subjectivity of a science that claims to be an objective one?
Anything that has to do with human beings can never be totally objective; it will have to allow a certain space for subjectivity. It is not only true that the same medicine from different doctors has different effects; it is also true that the same medicine has different effects on different patients from the same doctor. Man is not an object. First you have to understand the word `subject'. A piece of stone is just an object. There is no interiority, there is no innerness to it. You can cut it in two; then there are two objects. You can cut it in four, and there are four objects. But you will not find any interiority. Subjectivity means that from the outside a man is just as objective as any other object -- a statue, a dead body, a living body, what is the difference? The statue is simply an…
Osho, how would you like your bold experiment to be under scientific scrutiny? Also, is there any particular method of meditation useful for treatment of a particular type of mental illness?
Science HAS ITS OWN LIMITATIONS. I am ready, I can invite scientists to come here to watch what is happening. They are welcome. But they will not be able to know the real thing that is happening here. They will only be able to know the body of it, they will miss the soul -- their very methodology prevents it. Just like if you ask the scientist, "Please watch this roseflower, it is so beautiful" -- he can analyse the roseflower, he can reduce it to its constituents. He can tell you how much water is in it, and how much colour and how much perfume, and how much earth and how much air. He can tell you everything that comes within HIS vision, that which he can catch hold of by his methodology. But his methodology is limited. He will not be able to catch hold of the beauty…
Is something essentially missing in western psychotherapies?
IT IS NOT ONLY THAT SOMETHING ESSENTIALLY IS missing in Western psychotherapies -- THE ESSENTIAL is missing! The Western psychotherapies are still objective, from the outside. They have not yet come to the point where meditation becomes the MOST important thing in psychotherapy. They are still looking from the outside -- they are looking at the behaviour. Behaviour is the outermost expression of your psychology, but it is not the source. It is the outcome, the by-product. The Western psychotherapies are still pruning the leaves of a tree. By pruning the leaves of a tree you cannot destroy the tree. They have not yet reached to the roots; those roots are hidden underground. They are looking aboveground. When you look at the tree you rend to forget the roots -- they are not visible, they are not obvious. Roots are not so foolish as to be obvious; roots are not…
You have said that science experiments with the objective, and religion with the subjective. But now there is a new growing science, psychology, or more accurately, depth psychology, which is both subjective and objective. So science and religion meet in depth psychology.
They cannot meet. Depth psychology, or the study of psychic phenomena, is again objective. And the method of depth psychology is the method of objective science. Try to see the distinction. For example, you can study meditation in a scientific way. You can observe someone who is meditating, but then this has become objective for you. You meditate and I observe. I can bring all the scientific instruments to observe what is happening to you, what is happening there in you, but the study remains objective. I am outside. I am not meditating. You are meditating; you are an object to me. Then I can try to understand what is happening to you. Even through instruments much can be known about you, but that will remain objective and scientific. So really, whatsoever I am studying is not the real thing that is happening to you, but the effects that your…
The appreciation of objects and subjects is the same for an enlightened as for an unenlightened person. The former has one greatness: he remains in the subjective mood, not lost in things.
BELIEVE OMNISCIENT, OMNIPOTENT, PERVADING. So nothing is attracting you -- YOU get attracted. Be alert and the bridge will be broken and you will regain balance inside. Go on doing it more and more. The more you do, the better. And a moment will come when you will not need to do it because the inner power will give you such a strength that the attraction of things will be lost. It is your weakness which is attracted. Be more powerful and nothing will attract you. Only then for the first time are you master of your own being. That will give you real freedom. No political freedom, no economic freedom, no social freedom, can be of much help. Not that they are not desirable, they are good, good in themselves, but they will not give you the things which the innermost core of your being is longing for --…