What is the unconscious mind?

Beloved Osho, what exactly is this unconscious mind which is also called the dark night of the soul? Is it something belonging to the physical monkey brain? Or is it something of the universal mind, which I am assuming is my own higher mind? Also, if it is not of the physical brain, then is this why it is a waste of time to attempt to end your suffering by putting a bullet through your brain?

"I said `by mistake' because the doors were open and everybody knows that there is nothing in that hut but me and my blanket. And I offered my blanket to him. He was a guest. He tried not to take it, I had almost to force him. And he is so mannerly that he said to me, `Thank you, sir' and he closed the door. This man is a very nice man, you should not harass him." Because that monk said, "You should not harass him," the thief was released. He could not believe it! Neither did he understand that night, nor could he understand the saint's statements in court in his favor. He followed the saint. The monk said, "Are you coming now?" He said, "Yes, I am coming now." He said, "You unnecessarily wasted two years. I was telling you to get into a partnership from the very…

Beloved Osho, can you talk more about the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious mind? It seems that the brain has the capacity to store an experience, say, in a memory bank. Now if that memory ends up in the unconscious, what happens? Is it that the conscious mind represses it and tabs it "censored" or does the unconscious do the censoring? But does the unconscious have any investment in repression? And if not, is it the conscious that is continuously providing the energy to keep this material censored? And if so, is there a key to the unconscious within the conscious? Is this

Mahavira and Buddha continually repeat, "Don't go on in a vicious circle. Just look into your past lives and see whether you have been doing this kind of thing always, for eternity. Do you have any mind or not? any intelligence or not?" Just being reminded that you have been after money for thousands of years and you have attained money in many lives and there was only frustration and nothing else; that you have been after power and you became powerful many times, but after reaching the last rung of the ladder you saw that there is nothing -- that you have been befooled by the society, that ambition is nonsense. You are not to be somebody. You are what you are. There is no question of climbing a ladder and you will be better. Because these experiences of past lives will change the whole character, it is better…

Beloved Osho, I hear you often saying that the unconscious is the basement of our mind where we throw all unpleasant and repressed parts of the experiences which we have gone through in many lives because our conditioning didn't allow it to be part of the conscious sphere. What happens with the beautiful spiritual experiences we have had in some lives? Through self-hypnosis I have been able to remember a lot of such experiences. Is there a tremendously helpful treasure of positive experiences that we can retrieve?

But in the change from one life to another life, just so that you don't remember your past life, the mechanism is such that you remember nothing -- not the unconscious or the superconscious, or beyond. You come with a clean conscious mind, so a new upbringing, a new teaching, a new conditioning starts. If all these seven layers were remembered, the child would be in much difficulty -- as if you are teaching the child seven languages simultaneously. He would be confused, utterly confused. So it is a natural protection against being confused and mad, to keep only a small part moving each time into new life, fresh, so the new life can bring you its own ideology, religion. I remember one girl who lived just a hundred miles away from Jabalpur in Katni. Her parents were puzzled because she remembered that in her past life she had been…

How to differentiate between the dictates of the unconscious mind and that of the inner guide? How can one recognize that the inner guide has come into function?

The first thing: because of Freud, much misunderstanding has arisen around the word "unconscious". Freud completely misunderstood it, misinterpreted it. And he has become the very basis of modern knowledge about mind. To Freud, unconscious meant simply the repressed conscious, the suppressed part of the conscious. So all that is evil and bad, immoral, has been suppressed. Because the society cannot allow it, it has to be suppressed within. For Freud, that repressed part is the unconscious -- but not for mystics. Freud is not a mystic; he has not entered his own unconscious. He has been simply observing cases of patients: ill people, abnormal people, mad, insane, pathological. He has been studying the pathological mind, and through the study of the pathological mind -- and that, too, from without -- he concluded that just underneath the conscious there is an unconscious mind. That unconscious mind carries all that has…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS THE FUNCTION OF MIND IN RELIGION? I said, "What does that signify to you?" I had no idea that his childhood name was Munna. In India it is a popular name, Munna. Before children get a full name, they are called Munna, Pappu, just like that -- any meaningless word. It was his childhood name. He said, "Only my father uses it, nobody else," because he was now himself nearabout sixty, principal of a college and a well known poet. Who would call him Munna? Only his father, and his father lived in Allahabad. I said, "Then it is better we stop somewhere and you immediately make a phone call to Allahabad." He said, "Nonsense! Why?" I said, "Don't say nonsense...