Osho on Catharsis

BELOVED OSHO,

THIS MORNING YOU TALKED ABOUT THE INNER INTERCOURSE AND ORGASM WHICH HAPPENS BETWEEN THE OUTER MALE BODY AND THE INNER FEMALE UNCONSCIOUS, AND VICE VERSA. PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THIS HAPPENS IN THE ACTIVE MEDITATION WE ARE PRACTICING HERE.

It happens in the active meditation you are doing here because all that is hidden and suppressed is brought out by it. It is a catharsis, an expression. It is just the reverse process of suppression. So you will have to understand the process of suppression. Someone has died: you feel very sad, but you think in your mind that it is not manly to weep or to cry. It will look like a weakness, and you have always maintained a strong image of yourself. Everyone knows that you are a very strong-willed man, so how can you weep? This is womanish, so you suppress the tears. They want to come out, they want to be released and relieved, but you suppress them. Those tears will become poison, because the system was trying to throw them out and you have suppressed them. You go on smiling. Your heart is weeping and crying, but you go on smiling. You are trying to maintain an image. You cannot be natural; you cannot allow your heart, your body, your mind, to function naturally. You go on manipulating them. You choose: something has to be expressed and something has to be repressed. That repressed part becomes the unconscious.

Really, there exists no unconscious. You repress something and you repress it very deeply because you yourself do not want to be aware of it, you do not want to be conscious of it. It will be a heavy burden on the mind, so you go on forgetting it. You go on being unconscious about the fact that it exists there. You forget its existence, and you yourself create an unconsciousness within. This is the way you become divided, you become two. The rejected part becomes the unconscious and the accepted part becomes the conscious. If you are a man, then you are rejecting the woman, because no culture has yet existed on earth which accepts the bisexuality. All the cultures that have existed up to now were not really aware of the fact that to be a man or to be a woman is not something absolute. It is relative, it is a question of degrees. If you are a man, it doesn’t mean that you are a hundred percent man. No one can be, because to be a hundred percent man you will have to be born out of your father with the mother not contributing anything. That is impossible! Or to be a hundred percent woman, the father would have not to be there at all; only the mother would be involved. If the father contributes something, the male element has entered; if the mother contributes something, then the female element has entered. This is a new fact brought out by depth psychology — a new fact for the West, but tantra in the East has always been aware of it.

Man is only in relative terms a man: he may be sixty percent man and forty percent woman; or a woman may be sixty percent woman and forty percent man. That is why many things happen. Sometimes the degrees are so near that someone may be fifty-one percent man and forty-nine percent woman, so you cannot decide really whether he is a man or a woman. He will walk, he will talk, he will move, in a feminine way, forty-nine percent. And this difference is of hormones. New hormones can be injected. This is a borderline case — forty-nine percent woman and fifty-one percent man. You can inject a few more female hormones, and the balance will change and the man will become a woman. There have been many accidents when suddenly a boy becomes a girl or a girl becomes a boy. Then scientists became aware about this phenomenon. Then they came to understand that there are borderline cases. Now there are hormones available, and I think that the time is not very far off, it will happen even before this century ends, that the alternatives will be available to everyone: you will be able to change your sex.

And it is a good idea — because if a man has remained for thirty years a man, it will be a good change. Really, to become a woman is to move into another world, and this is a greater change than going to the moon. There is nothing much there; it is just like the earth. But a man moving to be a woman or a woman becoming a man is moving to a completely opposite pole. Really, whenever the alternative becomes possible, only foolish people will not use it. Those who are wise will use it, because then you can become aware and you can live in two totally different worlds. That will give a new light to the human mind, because man has never really understood what woman is, neither are women capable of understanding men, because their psychologies differ so absolutely, they exist on such extreme poles.

Freud has said, “I have been working for forty years with human psychology, but still I cannot say what a woman desires, what a woman wants, what her mind is.” It is difficult, because a man cannot understand a woman. Whatsoever he understands will be a point of view, as he is standing at the other pole. He will be looking at a woman as a man, and that changes everything. A woman cannot understand man because she is always looking from the standpoint of being a woman. And we cannot change places. If biology helps us, then the old controversy between man and woman will disappear. I am saying that you are a man only relatively or a woman only relatively. And if you are a man, then the other part which is a woman, which your mother contributes, you will have to suppress. Why? What is the need to suppress it? We suppress it because we have been trying to live according to logic. That is the greatest fallacy man has committed. We have been trying to live according to logic, and life is illogical.

Life is both man and woman together, and logic is always either feminine or masculine. Your logic says you are a man, so cut all those qualities which do not belong to a man. And that suppressed part becomes your unconscious. You are a woman, so everyone says you must be kind, loving, sympathetic. You must not be cruel, you must not hate, you must not be aggressive, because that is not how a woman is conceived to be. This is nonsense! Really, if a woman becomes aggressive, she is incomparable. No man can compete with her, because your aggression is exhausted already — you have used it too much. But she has not used her man, so that man is still fresh and young. If she becomes aggressive, there is no man who can compete with her. If she is angry and violent, you will look just pale before her. And similar is the case with man. They say that a man must be aggressive, violent, powerful. He must have willpower, must not be weak, must not show sympathy or love: these things are womanish. But if a man can love, no woman can compete with him — no woman, because his ‘woman’ remains always virgin and fresh, unexhausted, unused. What I am saying is this: that your other is illogical, so you deny it in order to have a clear-cut image, a logical image…

Be real to life, not to logic, and then whatsoever you have suppressed will come up, will explode. This is what the active meditation is doing: bringing the suppressed up to be expressed; bringing your tears back to life, bringing your anger, your laughter, your sadness, back to life; throwing everything out of your system so that your system becomes purified, so that your system becomes innocent again. With that innocent system you can contact the divine. This poisoned system cannot have any contact. Active meditation is catharsis. It is to purify you. And when you are purified and the unconscious has been acted out, the barrier between the unconscious and the conscious falls — because the barrier is created by suppression. When you are not suppressing the barrier disappears and then there is no boundary between the conscious and the unconscious. Then you are both: you are bisexual — man and woman both.

And when you are both, you will have a new feeling of being, a new unity within you. You will not feel disrupted, divided. You will become organic, one. This oneness can lead you to the ultimate oneness; this oneness is the first step.

Source:

Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link.

Discourse name: The Supreme Doctrine Chapter title: Surrender and I Will Transform You Chapter #3

9 July 1973 pm in  Mt Abu Meditation Camp

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘active meditation, catharsis, innocence, conscious’ in many of His discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. The Divine Melody
2. The Empty Boat
3. The Great Zen Master Ta Hui
4. Hsin Hsin Ming: The Book of Nothing
5. From Misery to Enlightenment
6. God is Dead, Now Zen is the Only Living Truth
7. The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 5
8. The Grass Grows By Itself
9. The Great Secret