Neurosis

What is neurosis and what is the cure for it?

This was my experience. When I was a student I was surprised at my professors' knowledge because it was thirty years old. It was when they were young that they had gathered it from their teachers. Since then they had not looked at what had happened That knowledge was absolutely useless. I was constantly in conflict with my professors, I was thrown out of many colleges, expelled, because the professors said that they could not cope with me. And I was not creating any trouble, I was simply making them aware that what they were saying was out of date. But that hurts the ego. They had learned it in their own university days and they were thinking that the world had stopped then and there. Now students cannot depend on teachers and children cannot depend on their parents, hence a great rebellion is on the way all over the…

Beloved Osho, is the small family the main cause of neurosis in this society? Is the total dependence of the child on the parents, and vice versa, the cause of hypocrisy, fixations and all kinds of neurosis, fear and anxiety?

The family is certainly the cause of all kinds of neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia. The whole sickness of man's mind is created by the family. The family is the basic unit of the old society; unless the family disappears the old society will continue, because its basic unit is intact. In my own way, without my saying anything, my communes are helping make the family disappear. A commune means the disappearance of family ties. You may be here, your wife may be here, your child may be here, but you are no longer a separate unit competing against every other separate unit. In a commune you are not competing, but on the contrary, you are pooling all your energies together. The child will not get fixated -- which is one of the most significant things to be understood. Scientists have discovered in animals a certain fact -- the first impression... and…

Why is modern man so neurotic?

Adolf Hitler shouted from the housetops. He was not whispering. He gave slogans -- clear-cut, well-defined. All that he gave is nonsense, but that is not the point. People are not worried about sense or nonsense, their whole thing is they want somebody who can shout so confidently that they can follow easily without any turmoil in their being. They followed Adolf Hider. It happens again and again in the history of man, intelligent people follow very unintelligent leaders. And this has been a problem for psychoanalysts: why does it happen? Now, just look at India -- a country which has cultivated intelligence for at least ten thousand years, and now following a man like Morarji Desai. This seems just unbelievable. Why should it happen? There is a reason for it. People who think, the MORE they think, the more they become hesitant. They start talking in ifs and buts;…

How would patanjali work with the incredible neurosis of the modern mind?

Just like me! What I am doing here? fighting with your neurosis. The ego is the source of all neurosis, because the ego is the center of all falsity, of all perversions. The whole problem is with the ego. If you live with the ego, sooner or later you will become neurotic. You will have to become, because ego is the basic neurosis. Ego says, "I am the center of the world," which is false, mad. Only if there is a God, he can say "I". We are only parts, we cannot say "I". The very assertion "I", is neurotic. Drop the I and all neurosis disappears. In between you and the mad people in the madhouses there is not vast difference -- only a difference of degrees, not of any quality, quantity. You may be ninety-eight degrees, and they have gone beyond hundred. You can go any time; the…