Sufism, Vol. 2 Sufis: The People Of The Path Chapter 10: Out of the Mud and the Mire, Question 1

The first question:

Question 1

AS A U. S. PSYCHIATRIST I AM WELL-TRAINED. EXPERIENCED AND HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL BY OUTER STANDARDS -- BUT NOW, WHAT TO DO? I NO LONGER FEEL THAT I AM A DOCTOR OR THERAPIST OR ANALYST, ONLY A PERSON, AND PERHAPS A TEACHER. YOU AND OTHERS LIKE YOU ARE TO BLAME FOR THIS. NOW I AM ONLY LISTENING TO THE INNER VOICE FOR DIRECTION. IS THERE ANY MORE I CAN DO?

First, there is no success as far as the outer is concerned. All success is just an effort to cover failure. There is only one success, there are not many successes -- and that one success is to know oneself, to be oneself.

I understand what you mean by being successful by outer standards. Man has created outer standards of success to deceive himself. You can have money, you can have a name, you can have prestige, but if you are not, what does it matter? You can have the whole world but if you are not, what does it matter?

In fact, man tries to possess things because he does not possess himself. This is a strategy to hide the fact that he does not possess himself. This is a strategy to hide the fact that he does not possess himself; this is a way of explaining away the inner emptiness; this is a way to feel, 'Look, I have so many things, what else does one need?' When you are surrounded by too many things -- what you call 'success by outer standards' -- what exactly are you doing? You are trying to create a substitute of 'having' for an emptiness which you are feeling inside. Being is missing, and you are trying to replace it by having. And it cannot be replaced by any having.

This is the whole struggle of human mind. These are the two directions: having and being. In the West you have worked very hard to have more; in the East we have worked hard to be more. Yes, sometimes it happens that even a beggar may have more being than a rich man, than a king. Somebody who has nothing, may have himself; and in that very having there is peace, there is bliss, there is benediction.

So the first thing I would like to tell you is that there are no outer standards of success. They are efforts to cover up your inner emptiness, efforts to deceive yourself and to make you feel that you have not failed. There is only one success, absolutely only one -- that is to be. Through that, one attains to ecstasy; through that, one attains to the ultimate.

So it is good that I and people like me have destroyed your illusion. Once that illusion goes you will be in a deep crisis. That is what is happening to you.

The questioner's name is Walter Hoffman -- that's what is happening to you, Hoffman. Now you will have to take a very decisive step, a radical step. You will have to learn the ways of inner success. Now the outer will never appeal to you. Yes, I and people like me are to blame. The outer will never appeal to you any more. So don't go on making efforts in the outer. Direct your energy towards the inner. Now only that can have any meaning.

Right now you are in a limbo. The outer is there but has no meaning; the inner seems to have meaning but is not there. This is the critical stage. But every seeker has to pass through it. I understand this pain, this anguish, and I have all sympathy for you. But although it looks like pain right now. once you have started contacting the inner, you will be surprised -- it was not pain, it was a growth pain, it was a birth pain. And you will feel blessed that it happened because you will be reborn out of it.

You say: As A U. S. PSYCHIATRIST I AM WELL-TRAINED, EXPERIENCED, AND HAVE BEEN SUCCESSFUL BY OUTER STANDARDS.... Something important is to be understood. Each age creates its own myth to live by. The modern myth is the myth of the completely analysed person. People are trying to be completely analysed in the hope that if they are completely analysed. there will be joy. It does not happen. Even the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, was not a joyous man. And if it did not happen to the founder, it is not going to happen to anybody.

You can go on analysing -- it is infinite. The mind is very creative, it goes on creating. It is not a limited phenomenon -- that one day you can come to the end of the mind by analysing it. You can go on analysing and something will still remain to be analysed. You can still go on and something will still remain to be analysed. It is a non-ending process.

The East has worked in a totally different way. The East says that the mind has not to be analysed, one has to drop out of the mind. The problem has not to be solved, the problem has to be dropped. In solving, you will remain in it; in solving, you will create more and more problems. And this is happening. People who can afford analysis -- it is a costly thing, millions cannot afford it -- but those who can afford it go into it for years. They go on changing from one analyst to another analyst in the hope that if it has not happened with this one, it will happen with somebody else.

It is not going to happen. Through analysis mind can never come to a state in which you can become something beyond mind. By analysing, you will remain it. You may become a little more smooth in your life but you will be as neurotic as anybody else. Yes, there will be one difference -- you will be more smooth in your neurosis, more adjusted, a little more understanding, but that does not make any radical change. The radical change comes from the understanding that through analysis there is no way. One has to jump out of the mind.

That's what meditation is. Meditation is just the contrary to analysis. Meditation means that, seeing that the mind is infinite, there is no need to bother about it -- you can get out of it. You are not the mind -- why go into it? You can slip out of it. The mind remains in its same place but you are out of it. And once you are out of it, you are the master of your mind. Then you can use it; then you will not be used by it.

This myth of the completely analysed person is a new dream. Man likes to dream, man likes to invent new ideas to hope for. Sometimes it is moksha, nirvana; sometimes it is money, power, prestige; sometimes it can become the completely analysed person.

I have many psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and other kinds of therapists here. The greatest number of any profession that has come to me is from therapy. There is a reason for it. Those who have been working in therapy have by and by become aware of one fact -- that it keeps you moving in a circle. It does not lead you anywhere, it only pretends. It promises but it never delivers the goods. It is just an infinite circle -- one can go on and on and on. It keeps you hoping, waiting, but that's all. Once you have become aware of it then forget about analysis and try something totally different -- that is meditation. Meditation does not mean that you have to think about the mind -- you have to drop out of it. Meditation is an escape from the mind. meditation is creating a distance from the mind, meditation is a transcendence.

And once you are standing above the mind, away, aloof, a watcher on the hills, things are totally different. Then those problems are no longer relevant. When you are in them, they are relevant. It is just like having a dream, a nightmare, at night, and being really troubled by it. A lion is following you and you are running and running and the lion is coming closer and closer every moment. You can feel his breath on your back. It is terrible! And you start climbing a tree and the lion starts climbing it with you -- because in a dream everything is possible. Your heart is in a turmoil, your whole body is perspiring. And when you reach the top of the tree the lion is also there with you. A scream comes out of you, and because of the scream you become awake. And suddenly you start laughing, although the body is still trembling and your breath is not rhythmic. and your body is perspiring; you can see the beads on your forehead. But now you start laughing. You laugh at the whole thing, the ridiculousness of it -- it was just a dream.

What has happened? Just a moment ago you were in it. It was not a dream because you were in it, you were identified with it, you thought it was a reality. The idea that it was real was driving you crazy. Now that you are out of it, aloof, alert, you can see that it was just a dream. Mind is a dream -- sometimes very sweet and sometimes very nightmarish. But it is a dream.

The effort that we have been making in the East down through the centuries, is not to solve the problems. For example, in your nightmare you try to solve the problem of what to do with this lion who is following you. That's what psychoanalysis is. Or you start trying to find out where it comes from, how it happened in the first place -- 'Why is this lion following me? And from where is this fear coming? And why am I climbing the tree?' And you meet somebody who is very expert in analysing things, in explaining, in creating theories, in telling you how it happened in the first place. Maybe it is a birth trauma or maybe your parents have not treated you well. Or maybe this lion is nobody. Just look directly into its eyes -- it is your wife or your husband and you are afraid of your wife or your husband.

But all these explanations take one thing for granted -- that it is real. And that is the basic problem, not where the lion has come from or what the symbolic meaning of the lion is. That is not the real problem. The real problem is that the lion is real. Psychoanalysis does not help you to become aware that mind is an unreal thing -- illusion, maya. In fact, it takes you more into the mud and the mire. It takes you deeper, to the roots. But an illusion cannot have any roots. You will always be getting to the roots but you will not arrive. An illusion cannot have any cause.

Now let me repeat it, because this will make the difference very clear. An illusion cannot have any cause, so you cannot search for the cause. You can go on and on, you can go into the unconscious of man.... Freud did that, and did it perfectly, but that didn't solve anything. Jung had to go deeper. He had to find something like the collective unconscious. And you can go on. Then you can find the universal unconscious, and so on, so forth, layer upon layer. You can go on analysing -- that maybe it is a birth trauma, that you became very much afraid when you came out of the birth canal from your mother's womb. But things don't end there because you were in your mother's womb for nine months. Those nine months cannot be simply dropped. In those nine months much happened to you. You have to go into analysing that.

And if you go deep enough you will have to enter into your previous life -- that's what Hindu analysts have done. They say 'previous life', and then 'previous to previous', and go on and on backwards. And you reach nowhere. Either way you come to a point where you see the whole futility of it.

To see the futility of the mind and to see that an illusion cannot have any cause and cannot be analysed, the only thing that can be done is to make yourself a little bit alert, aware. In that very awareness the dream disappears. It has no grip over you. And once the mind is not there gripping you, you are a totally new man. A new consciousness is born in you.

And Hoffman must be aware of the futility. He has been helping people, analysing -- but it has not even helped himself. That analysing has not even helped himself. Maybe it makes things a little more clear, maybe it helps things to be a little more categorised, pigeon-holed -- it is a kind of labelling -- but nothing essential happens. And if something happens sometimes, it is not because of analysis. If something happens sometimes, it may have some other causes; it has to have some other causes.

A man may become very much fed-up with the whole thing called analysis. That very fed-upness with analysis, may create a new awareness in him. He may get bored. One day he may understand that enough is enough. Rushing from one psychotherapist to another psychotherapist, from one school to another school, a time comes when one thinks that now it is enough, one need not bother about it. It doesn't matter. In that indifference something is possible.

Or, something is possible through the magnetic personality of the therapist. My own understanding is that the therapist helps more than the therapy. If the therapist has a charisma -- as Freud had, Jung had, Adler had -- if the analyst has a charisma, a magnetic personality, a certain kind of presence, that helps, that is therapeutic. That is why it happens again and again that when the therapist is alive, it works; but when the therapist is gone, by and by it disappears. The therapy works no more.

Psychoanalysis died with Sigmund Freud. It was his charisma not analysis itself. Freud had a certain magnetism of personality, something that is very mysterious. One has it or one does not have it. Whatsoever he was doing would look meaningful, because he put the meaning into it. When a man of charisma, magnetic energy, does anything, that thing seems to be very important. In another's hand it may become very ordinary, mediocre. that's what it became.

Jung helped people not by what he was saying, not by what he was analysing, but just by what he was.

But therapists are as yet unaware of the fact that it is the personal factor that helps -- not the theories and the dogmas and the principles. It is something mysterious, the personal factor, that helps.

Have you watched it sometimes? You are ill and your doctor comes. And the moment he enters the room you start feeling good. He has not given you any medicine yet, he has not even diagnosed what kind of illness you have, he has not even touched you. He just enters. The moment you know your doctor has come, your physician is there, something that was a worry disappears. You need not worry. The tension is there no more. Now the doctor will take care. If the doctor has some personal aura in him, even while he is testing you, taking your blood pressure and your pulse, you have already started to be healed. Before he prescribes any medicine you are fifty per cent healed. The medicine may not do much but the doctor has done much. It is your confidence in him, your trust in him, his personal aura, his certainty -- 'Don't be afraid. Now I am here.'

Psychotherapy has not yet become fully alert of the phenomenon that it is not the therapy that helps but the personal factor. The person may not be aware himself that he is functioning as a healing force. If you understand me rightly, it is always God who heals. God is the only healer. If somebody is alive, flowing, then God flows through him. Psychotherapy has yet to understand this magic, this MANA, this energy.

In the East a person will simply go to his Master, touch the feet of the Master, and be healed. The Master is not doing any analysis, any therapy, nothing, the Master has no expertise about it -- it is just the personal energy, the aroma that surrounds the Master, and the trust that the patient brings. What psychoanalysis is doing in the East is nil because there are so few psychoanalysts in the East. But people are more psychologically healthy, far more psychologically healthy, than the Western counterpart.

And much is going on to help people in the West, great energy is being put into helping people psychologically, but still they remain psychologically ill. Psychoanalysis has not yet come home; it has yet far to go. And when it really comes home it will be found that it is not the theory but the person that helps.

Now, Hoffman says: BUT NOW WHAT TO DO? I NO LONGER FEEL THAT I AM A DOCTOR OR THERAPIST OR ANALYST, ONLY A PERSON, AND PERHAPS A TEACHER. YOU AND OTHERS LIKE YOU ARE TO BLAME FOR THIS. If you are not feeling like a doctor, not feeling like a therapist, not feeling like an analyst, you are coming close to the point which I am talking about. You are becoming a person. A person means a presence. If you are feeling like a person you will be able to help many more people than you have ever helped before, but now be conscious of the phenomenon that everything else is secondary.

The most primary thing is the presence that the therapist brings to the patient. The patient has lost hope, the patient has fallen into a negative space, the patient is in despair, the patient cannot trust any more, the patient has become shrunken into himself, he has collapsed. The real therapist will bring his presence, his positivity, his aliveness, his streaming energy to the patient. He will come there like a fresh breeze, new sunrays. He will bring something of the divine to the patient, something of prayer and meditation. He will overwhelm the patient, he will surround him from everywhere, he will become a womb, a warm womb for the patient, and things will start happening. Miracles start happening.

And I am not saying that you should drop your expertise. Use it -- but it is secondary. First have a person-to-person contact with the patient, first let him share something of your presence so that he starts hoping again, so that his negative space starts turning into a positive space. Let him feel your joy, let him feel your trust in life, let him feel you -- that you are there. Let him see that life is not meaningless. Sing a song or dance around him but let this message be very loud and clear to him -- that life has meaning. Let him see that it has meaning for you, why can't it have meaning for him? And he will start coming out of his despair. You have reached him, you have taken his hand in your hand; you can pull him out of his confusion, you can pull him out of his anguish.

Once he is pulled out of his despair, healing forces start working. Healing forces are always around, God is always around. When you fall into a negative space you cannot connect with god and then you need a link -- one who can connect with God.

So, Hoffman, perfectly good! Become a person. Forget therapy, forget analysis. Become a person. And when I say 'forget therapy, forget analysis' I don't mean don't use them -- but don't be identified with them. They will be there, your whole knowledge, your experience, will be there; but now let this experience and knowledge become secondary to your presence. It will help to a certain extent, it will be good.

In Zen they say that if you really want to become a painter then learn painting for years. Then for a few years forget all about painting. Throw away the brush and the canvas and the colour and do something else and become completely oblivious to the fact that you know anything about painting. First learn, then unlearn -- and then one day, suddenly, you will be painting. And your painting wi!l have innocence -- the inno-cence of a child -- and the expertise of one who knows. Both will be there. And when both are there, there is great art.

Remember, you may be very, very feelingful, you may be very poetic, but you may not know how to put it into colour, you may not know the technique. then your painting will be just worthless, amateur. Or you can become a great technician, you can know everything about colour and the brush and form, you can have studied in an academy, you can be a great technician, but you don't have any feeling, you don't have any love, you don't have any poetry. Your heart has no song. Then you can paint -- and your painting will be perfect technically -- but it will be dead. The real artist has both qualities -- the innocence of a child and technical expertise. But when he paints he forgets all technicalities. They are there, from the deep unconscious they are working, but he forgets all expertise. He becomes inno-cent. He paints like an amateur. He does not know anything he paints from the mind of not-knowing -- so there is freshness, there is vision. And the expertise goes on functioning from the unconscious. It is there, it is in his blood, in his bones. There is no need to remember it, there is no need to be self-conscious about it. Then something of the unknown descends into the known.

And the same should be the principle for every kind of life you are going to live. Know it well technically and then forget the techniques. Then go into it very innocently. If you are feeling like a person, that is the best thing that can happen to a person.

... AND PERHAPS A TEACHER. Good. That word 'perhaps' is beautiful. If you were very certain about being a teacher I would have told you to drop that idea; it is dangerous. 'Perhaps' is good, hesitation is good. A good teacher is always 'perhaps'. He is not dogmatic, he is not rigid; he is liquid, he is flowing, he is spontaneous. He cannot destroy; he can only create. When you become very dogmatic and certain, you become destructive. You become a pedagogue, not a teacher.

So both things are good, Hoffman. Go inwards, become a person and perhaps a teacher.

You say: NOW I AM ONLY LISTENING TO THE INNER VOICE FOR DIRECTION. IS THERE ANY MORE I CAN DO? No, if you do anything you will disturb the whole thing. You simply wait. Simply wait, prayerfully, meditatively. Things are happening. The inner voice will start leading you. And when the inner voice starts leading you, don't be cunning, don't choose. Don't say, 'This I will choose and this I will not choose.' Then it will not be of any meaning. Then even if it does come from the inner voice, if you remain the chooser you decide from the ego. Now relax into the inner voice. Let it take possession of you.

It will be difficult for you because you say you are 'experienced, well-trained and successful'. It will be difficult for you because one never knows where the inner voice is leading. The inner voice may say to you 'become a sannyasin' -- that's what my feeling is. But then don't bring your experienced mind and successful past and your well-trained state into it. Don't interfere. If the inner voice says 'become a sannyasin', then become a sannyasin -- there is nothing to do on your part. Just be possessed. The more you trust the inner voice, the more clear and loud it will become. And the more you trust and act accordingly, by and by you will see there is no need to think about anything.

God goes on giving you hints, but you don't listen. God goes on saying what has to be done, but he whispers -- that's true. He does not shout. And we are so full of noise that that whisper is lost. Listen to the inner voice, that is God's voice. And don't only listen, act on it. Move into commitment, into involvement.

When you start acting on the inner voice.... Sometimes it will be very risky, but take the risk -- because only when there is risk is there life, only when there is risk is there growth. Live dangerously. If the voice says 'do this' then do it and don't bother too much about consequences. Nothing else matters.

And sometimes your mind will tell you that this is too much -- think about it. If you think, the inner voice will be lost. It is lost in thinking. Don't think. Act. And you will see that each act brings you closer and closer to the voice. And when you have acted many times and have seen that the voice always takes you to the right place, then there will be no doubt. And then thinking can be dropped. It is a substitute. Because we have forgotten how to listen to God, we have to think.

The real man of awareness need not think. God goes on supplying him with all that is needed, whenever it is needed.

Sufism

VOL. 2, SUFIS: THE PEOPLE OF THE PATH

Chapter-10

Out of the Mud and the Mire