24^th march is the date when an Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich was born. The author of several influential books, most notably Character Analysis (1933), The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), and The Sexual Revolution (1936), Reich became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.

He was one of his kind as he use to visit his patients in their homes to see how they lived, and had also promoted adolescent sexuality and the availability of contraceptives, abortion and divorce, a provocative message in Catholic Austria. He said he wanted to “attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment”.

From the 1930s he became an increasingly controversial figure, and from 1932 until his death in 1957 all his work was self-published. His message of sexual liberation disturbed the psychoanalytic community and his political associates, and his vegetotherapy, in which he massaged his disrobed patients to dissolve their “Muscular Armour”, violated the key taboos of psychoanalysis.

Osho says Wilhelm Reich and my ideas have a certain superficial similarity, but remember, it is superficial. Wilhelm Reich is a thinker, not a meditator, and sometimes thinkers groping in the dark can find a few things, they can stumble upon a few things. But to have eyes is a totally different phenomenon. Osho also says Wilhelm Reich is certainly appreciated by me, appreciated for the simple phenomenon that he is not a meditator yet he has stumbled upon something which only meditators can come across. And that is his limitation too: he is only a thinker. So what he says he cannot preach. What he preaches he cannot practice. In fact he does just the opposite of it. His blindness has to be searched for in his life, not in his words. Wilhelm Reich’s wife writes about him that he was a most jealous man. Now that is impossible. If a man has transcended sex, then jealousy is impossible. And he was continuously talking about getting rid of possessiveness, jealousy, but about his wife he was very suspicious. Finally they had to separate, and the cause of separation was Wilhelm Reich. He was meddling with all kinds of women. He was having many love affairs in the name of freedom, in the name of love, in the name of non-possessiveness, in the name of friendship and sharing, but the same was not allowed to his wife

You carry the whole past, every moment of it, and you have been many things! From the womb up to now you have been millions of persons, and they are all carried within you, layer by layer. You have grown, but the past has not disappeared; it may be hidden, but it is there — and it is not only in the mind, it is even in the body. If, when you were a small child and you were angry and someone said, ‘Stop! Don’t be angry,’ and you stopped, that anger is still being carried by your hand. It has to be so because energy is indestructible, and unless you relax that hand it will persist, unless you do something consciously to complete the circle of that energy which became anger in a certain moment fifty years back or sixty years back, you will carry it within you, and it will color all your actions.

You can touch somebody, but the touch won’t be pure: the whole past is carried by the hand; all repressed anger, all repressed hatred is there. Even if in love you touch a person your touch is not pure, love cannot be — because where will that anger go which is carried by the hand?

Wilhelm Reich worked very much on this somatic repression. The body carries the past, the mind carries the past; because of this loaded state you cannot be here and now. You have to come to terms with your past. So meditation is not only a question of doing something here and now; before that is possible you have to come to terms with your past — you have to dissolve all hangovers, and there are millions of them.

Even when one becomes old he is also a child, a young man, and all that he has ever been is there, because you don’t know how to die every moment.

That is the whole art of life — to die moment to moment so that there is no hangover. A relationship has finished — you don’t carry it, you simply die to it! What can you do? Something was happening and now it is not happening. You accept it and you die to it — you simply DROP IT with full awareness, and then you are renewed in a new moment. Now you are not carrying the past.

You are a child no more, but watch yourself and you will feel the child is there — and that child creates trouble! If you were really a child there would be no trouble, but you are young or old…

The child continues somewhere in you: when you weep you can find him, when you laugh you can find him, when somebody gives you a present you can find him, when somebody forgets to, you can find him, when somebody appreciates you, you can find him; when somebody condemns you, you can find him — it is very difficult to be really mature. One can never be mature unless the child simply dies within you, is no longer a part of you — otherwise it will go on influencing your actions, your relationships.

And this is not only true for the child,

every moment of the past is there and influencing your present — your present is so loaded. And millions of voices from the body and the mind go on manipulating you; how can you reach the path? You are a mountain. This mountain has to be dissolved. What to do? It can be dissolved consciously — one thing is to live your past again, consciously. This is the mechanism of consciousness: whenever you live something consciously it never becomes a loaded thing on you;

try to understand this. It never becomes a burden on you if you live it consciously. If you go to the market to purchase something and you move consciously, walk consciously, purchase the thing consciously, with full remembrance, mindfully come back home, this will never be a part of your memory. I don’t mean that you will forget it — it will not be a load. If you want to remember it, you can remember it, but it will not be constantly forcing your attention towards it, it will not be a loaded thing.

Whatsoever you do consciously is lived through and is no longer a hangover. Whatever you live unconsciously becomes a hangover, because you never live it totally — something remains incomplete. When something is incomplete it has to be carried — it waits to be completed…

Remember one basic law: anything that is complete drops, because then there is no meaning in carrying it; anything that is incomplete clings, it waits for its completion. And this existence is really always after completion. The whole existence has a basic tendency to complete everything. It does not like incomplete things — they hang, they wait; and there is no hurry for existence — they can wait for millions of years.

Move backwards.

Every night for one hour before you go to sleep, move into the past, relive. Many memories by and by will be unearthed. With many you will be surprised that you were not aware that these things are there — and with such vitality and freshness, as if they had just happened! You will be again a child, again a young man, a lover, many things will come. Move slowly, so everything is completed. Your mountain will become smaller and smaller — the LOAD is the mountain. And the smaller it becomes, the freer you will feel. A certain quality of freedom will come to you, and a freshness, and inside you will feel you have touched a source of life.

You will be always vital — even others will feel that when you walk your step has changed, it has a quality of dance; when you touch, your touch has changed — it is not a dead hand, it has become alive again. Now life is flowing because the blocks have disappeared; now there is no anger in the hand, love can flow easily, unpoisoned, in its purity. You will become more sensitive, vulnerable, open. If you have come to terms with the past suddenly you will be here and now in the present, because then there is no need to move again and again. Go on moving every night. By and by memories will come up before your eyes and they will be completed. Relive them; completed, suddenly you will feel they drop. Now there is no more to be done, the thing is finished. Less and less memories will come as the time moves. There will be gaps — you would like to live, nothing is coming — and those gaps are beautiful. Then a day will come when you will not be able to move backwards because everything is complete. When you cannot move backwards, only then do you move forwards.

There is no other way. And to move forwards is to reach the path: the whole consciousness moving ahead every moment into the unknown. But your legs are being pulled back continuously by the past, the past is heavy on you; how can you move into the future, and how can you be in the present? The mountain is really big, it is a Himalaya, uncharted, unmapped; nobody knows how to pass through it — and everybody is such a different Himalaya that you can never make a map, because it differs with everybody. You have your Himalayas to carry, others have their Himalayas to carry, and with these mountains, when you meet with people there is only clash and conflict. The whole life becomes just a struggle, a violent struggle, and everywhere you can see and feel and hear the clash. Whenever somebody comes near, you are tense and the other is also tense — both are carrying their Himalayas of tension and sooner or later they will clash. You may call it love but those who know, they say it is a clash. Now there is going to be misery.

Be finished with the past. As you become more free from the past, the mountain starts disappearing. And then you will attain a unison: you will become, by and by, one.

Source:

This is an excerpt from the transcript of a public discourse by Osho in Buddha Hall, Shree Rajneesh Ashram, Pune.

Discourse name:

And The Flowers Showered

Chapter title: What is the way?
Chapter #4
3 November 1974 am in Buddha Hall

References:

Osho has spoken on notable Psychologists and philosophers like Adler, Jung, Sigmund Freud, Assagioli, Wilhelm Reich, Aristotle, Berkeley, Confucius, Descartes, Feuerbach, Hegel, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Huxley, Jaspers, Kant, Kierkegaard, Laing, Marx, Moore, Nietzsche, Plato, Pythagoras, Russell, Sartre, Socrates, Wittgenstein and many others in His discourses. Some of these can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

The Hidden Splendor
The Wild Geese and the Water
This, This, A Thousand Times This: The Very Essence of Zen
Nirvana: The Last Nightmare
Beyond Enlightenment
Beyond Psychology
Dang Dang Doko Dang
The Discipline of Transcendence
The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha
From Bondage to Freedom
From Darkness to Light
From Ignorance to Innocence
The Secret of Secrets, Vol 1
From Personality to Individuality
I Celebrate Myself: God Is No Where, Life Is Now Here
Yoga: The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 4
Zen: The Path of Paradox, Vol 1