Osho Quotes on Schizophrenia or Split Personality

Osho Quotes on Schizophrenia or Split Personality

1. A person is schizophrenic, split, divided. Psychoanalysis will deal with this split — with how to make this split workable, with how to adjust this man so that he can function, so that he can live in the society peacefully. Psychoanalysis will tackle the problem, the schizophrenia. If this man comes to Buddha, Buddha will not talk about the schizophrenic state. He will say, “Meditate so that the inner being becomes one. When the inner being becomes one, the split will disappear on the periphery.” The split is there — but it is not the cause, it is just the effect. Somewhere deep in the being there is a duality and that duality has made this crack on the periphery. You go on cementing the crack but the inner split remains. Then the crack will appear somewhere else. Then you cement that crack; then somewhere else the crack will go on appearing. So if you treat one psychological problem, another problem arises immediately; then you treat another and a third arises. This is good as far as the professionals are concerned because they live off it. But this is not a help. The West will have to go beyond psychoanalysis and unless the West comes to the methods of growing consciousness, of inner growth of being, of expansion of consciousness, psychoanalysis cannot be of much help.
2. Oneness is divine; twoness is undivine, manyness is madness! Ordinarily we are a crowd, we are not one. The worst situation that a man can fall into is to become a crowd or to become a schizophrenic, two. But if you are two, sooner or later you will become many because once the fragmentation has started it goes on, ad infinitum. So the whole spiritual effort is how to drop schizophrenia, how to become one, how not to be two, how to turn this whole energy — lower, higher, left, right  – into one; that is the whole science. In that oneness one is neither a man nor a woman… in that oneness one is indefinable. And we will work for it. Meditation is a way to oneness.
3. This is the basic schizophrenia of humanity — never total this way or that. My whole teaching is to be total whatsoever you do.
4. To live blissfully is the only true prayer, the only true religion. Religion has nothing to do with god and all the mythologies that have been created around the concept of god. It has nothing to do with after-life, with hell or heaven. It is simply the art of living here and now totally. And to live totally is to be blissful, to live partially is to be miserable. Anything that you do half-heartedly will bring misery to you because it will divide you. It will create a split, it will create a subtle schizophrenia.
5. My whole emphasis is for acceptance and becoming a witness. But the religions all over the world have corrupted the mind of people, and they have corrupted tremendously. They have created a bifurcation, a split. The have made the whole of humanity schizophrenic. Drop this schizophrenia. Don’t make any split within yourself; you are one — and take yourself as one. And whatsoever is within you, you have to love it, you have to move into its mystery, you have to know it to the very end. If desire is there, then the desire has to be penetrated to the very core af its existence; it has to be known. And only through that knowing, the energy involved in knowing is released; it becomes desirelessness — but it is the same energy.
6. What you want to do, and what you say, and what you really do, are totally different things. You may be doing something which you never wanted to do, you may not be doing something which you always wanted to do. You live a schizophrenic life, divided into the unconscious and the conscious. And out of this schizophrenia whatsoever happens is wrong.
7. Mind is divided in two parts. You don’t have one mind, you have two, and there is a very small bridge connecting both. Sometimes in deep meditation the bridge is broken and you suddenly feel two. But this is not like schizophrenia, because in schizophrenia you not only feel two, you become two. In deep meditation you remain a witness far away; you see yourself as two minds and a third point of awareness is there. li you lose that third point of awareness it is schizophrenia, you have gone mad. If that third point of awareness remains alert, it is tremendously beautiful… you have seen a reality within the mind. Sometimes it can happen that a person falls from a train in an accident and the bridge that connects the two brains is broken; it is very delicate. Then the person becomes two: sometimes he is one person. sometimes the other. It also happens in deep meditation, but with a difference. There is a transcendental consciousness looking at these two brains functioning absolutely separately and in deep harmony, with no conflict. It is as if two parallel lines are in deep synchronicity, in harmony, and you are a watcher — it is very beautiful. It has been an experience of witnessing.
8. The conflict is in man. Unless it is resolved there, it cannot be resolved anywhere else. The politics is within you; it is between the two parts of the mind. A very small bridge exists. If that bridge is broken through some accident, through some physiological defect or something else, the person becomes split, the person becomes two persons — and the phenomenon of schizophrenia or split personality happens. If the bridge is broken — and the bridge is very fragile — then you become two, you behave like two persons. In the morning you are very loving, very beautiful; in the evening you are very angry, absolutely different. You don’t remember your morning… how can you remember? Another mind was functioning — and the person becomes two persons. If this bridge is strengthened so much that the two minds disappear as two and become one, then integration, then crystallization, arises. What George Gurdjieff used to call the crystallization of being is nothing but these two minds becoming one, the meeting of the male and the female within, the meeting of yin and yang, the meeting of the left and right, the meeting of logic and illogic, the meeting of Plato and Aristotle. If you can understand this basic bifurcation in your tree of then you can understand all the conflict that goes on around and inside you.
9. That’s the difference between morality and religion: morality tries to change your character without bothering about your consciousness; hence morality creates hypocrites. It only gives you a beautiful painted facade, but behind the facade you are the same ugly person. Morality creates a kind of split in you. You remain unconscious within but on the surface you start acting as if you are conscious; that creates schizophrenia. Hence in a certain sense the whole humanity is schizophrenic. That’s what morality has done to humanity. Religion is totally different. Religion tries to transform your consciousness first. It makes you more and more alert, more and more aware, more and more silent, more and more watchful. And out of that watchfulness a new character starts emerging. Then there is a unity between the inner and outer, a great symphony. You are one, one piece. And that harmony between the within and the without is felt as bliss, as joy, as peace, and ultimately it is through that harmony that one experiences god.
10. When the watcher is totally into it, all wanderings simply disappear; and that is real control. Without controlling it is controlling, without repression you are the master. And then you need not be on guard; you can be absolutely relaxed because you have nothing to be afraid of. My approach is: through witnessing absorb the energy rather than through control, fight. Fight is not right, never right: it dissipates energy; it creates division, it makes you split. So insist on being aware, that’s all. Don’t judge what is wrong and what is right; don’t judge whether the psychic wandering is good or bad. Let it be as it is. Simply remain in deep acceptance that whatsoever is, is good, and through that acceptance a transformation happens and a real mastery arises. Nobody is defeated and yet you are victorious. That is the real art. Controlling, repressing, fighting is simply stupid. It leads nowhere. It only leads into neurosis, into schizophrenia — beware of it. The very idea has to be dropped.
11. As you grow, as you learn, as you become conscious, as you become more and more alert, a certain inner discipline arises without any imposition, because you can see what is right and what is wrong. And when you see it, there is no split; then you are not of a double mind, then it does not create a kind of schizophrenia. Otherwise the whole humanity has lived a schizophrenic life up to now, because of the moralistic past.
12. Why do some people suffer from schizophrenia? Because from two different directions two conditions meet in them, but they cannot mix and become one, they remain two. Sometimes one is up and the person starts speaking in a different way, behaving in a different way; another time the other is up and the person behaves so diametrically opposite to his normal behavior that all you can do is take him to the psychiatrist. You start thinking he is sick. He is not sick, he is simply suffering because two long traditions have met in him. All that he needs is to be a witness of both the conditionings and separate himself, disidentify himself from both the conditionings, and the whole schizophrenia will disappear. In fact, the moment he disidentifies himself from both the conditions, he will have a richness that you cannot have, because he can use from both the conditions, both the heritages, things which he wants. He is now the master.
13. (Jiddu) Krishnamurti’s insistence on choicelessness is particularly for this reason. That is the most potential method to destroy schizophrenia. Don’t choose — let things be.
14. Sometimes it happens that you become one, in some rare moment. Watch the ocean, the tremendous wildness of it — and suddenly you forget your split, your schizophrenia; you relax. Or, moving in the Himalayas, seeing the virgin snow on the Himalaya peaks, suddenly a coolness surrounds you and you need not be false because there is no other human being to be false to. You fall together. Or, listening to beautiful music, you fall together. Whenever, in whatsoever situation, you become one, a peace, a happiness, a bliss, surrounds you, arises in you. You feel fulfilled.
15. All kinds of foolish things have existed in the name of religion and have been thought very holy and spiritual. They are simply different kinds of diseases — neuroses, psychoses, schizophrenia. My effort here is to create a whole human being, an integrated human being, life-affirmative. Creativity is my approach. If you can create something in life, think that you are doing god’s work. That is the only service required and the only prayer worth doing. Other prayers are for people who cannot be creative.
16. The basic schizophrenia is created because the body goes in one direction, the mind goes in another direction. And you are the third element — you are neither the body nor the mind, so you are pulled apart by these two. Half of your being is pulled by the body and half of your being is pulled by your mind. So there is great anguish — one feels torn apart.
17. Sometimes you can do a thing which only the mind feels like doing and the body is not ready for. For example, you can eat: the body is not hungry but you can go on eating because the mind is enjoying the taste. It will not know how the body is feeling because the feeling is cut; there is no bridge. Sometimes it can happen that you are so much engaged in playing cards or seeing the movie that the body is hungry and you may not know about it. Then one remains like two parallel lines, never meeting. That’s what schizophrenia is, and it is very rare to find a person who is not, in some way, schizophrenic.
18. The mind is always indecisive. That is one of the basic characteristics of the mind, indecisiveness. The moment a resolution arises in you the mind disappears. To be decisive is to go beyond the mind; to remain indecisive, hesitant, divided, is to live in the mind. Resolution means totality, commitment, involvement, a quantum leap into something, into something which is not yet clearly known. Taking a risk is resolution. But the mind is a coward. It avoids risks; it seeks security, safety. Resolution is one of the ways to go beyond misery, schizophrenia. Ordinarily man is a crowd, a thousand and one desires dividing him. When all these desires become a single pool of energy, that is resolution. Sannyas is resolution; it is a total effort to get out of the mind. And if one really strives to get out of the mind — difficult thought it is, but not impossible… And life gains significance only when you know something which is beyond the mind. Hence I will call you divine resolution. The beyond is divine; the mind is mundane.
19. To be in the present is to be in God, is to be in bliss, is to be in silence. Being in the middle, the exact middle, one transcends all duality and the turmoils implied in dualities, and the conflicts, and the divisions. One goes beyond schizophrenia, beyond all split.
20. Schizophrenia is not a disease that happens to a few people — it is the normal state of humanity. Everybody is divided, split. You can watch it in your own life. When you are not with a woman, with a man, not in love, you think, you fantasize about love. Love seems to be the goal. That seems to be the very meaning of life. When you are with a woman or with a man and in love, suddenly you start thinking in terms of spiritualism: “This is attachment, this is possessiveness, this is lust.” A condemnation arises. You cannot be alone and you cannot be with somebody. If you are alone you hanker for the crowd, for the other. If you are with somebody you start hankering to be alone. This is something to be understood, because everybody has to face this problem. You are born in a schizophrenic world. You have been given double standards. You have been taught materialism, and you have been taught spiritualism, together. The whole society goes on teaching you contradictory things.
21. I am life-affirmative; your so-called godmen are life-negative. And because basically life can not be negated — you are life, how can you negate it? — they create hypocrisy. It is bound to happen. Your so-called godmen down the ages have been creating hypocrisy. They don’t allow you to be authentic. They don’t allow you to be natural — how can they allow you to be authentic? They create a division in you. They are the root cause of all schizophrenia, and the whole of humanity suffers from schizophrenia. The differences between one person’s schizophrenia and another’s are only of degrees. You are split! Who has done this wrong to you? Your so-called godmen, the so-called saints, the so-called mahatmas. They are at the very root of all your misery because their very teaching is “Deny nature! Fight nature! Go against the stream; push the river!” And you are part of nature, just a wave in the river — how can you fight with nature? Fighting, you will be defeated. If you are a sincere person, you will go mad; if you are not yet mad, that will simply show that you are not a sincere person. You say one thing and you do another.
22. Guilt creates a dual personality in you: on the surface you are one person and deep down you are another — because you can see the futility of it, the nonsense of it. You become split — guilt creates schizophrenia. And the whole of humanity suffers from schizophrenia for the simple reason that we have created guilt, so much and so deeply that we have divided every man in two.
23. To be free of guilt is to be free of all priesthood. To be free of guilt is to be free of all past. And to be free of guilt is to become one, because then the split disappears. To be free of guilt is to drop schizophrenia. And then there is great joy, because you are no longer fighting with yourself. You start living!
24. Buddha believes in no ideals either — because all ideals create tension and conflict in man. They divide, they create anguish. You are one thing and they want you to be something else. Between these two you are stretched, torn apart. Ideals create misery. Ideals create schizophrenia. The more ideals there are, the more people will be schizophrenic, they will be split. Only a non-ideological consciousness can avoid being split. And if you are split how can you be happy? how can you be silent? how can you know anything of peace, of stillness?
25. Because of this cultivated morality, we have put the whole of humanity in a state of schizophrenia. Everybody is more or less made into a hypocrite. The society forces you to do it. If you don’t do it, you cannot live, you cannot survive. It has become almost a necessity that you don’t show your reality. You show only that which people want you to show, and you keep everything else hidden inside. But then your inner being goes on accumulating poisons and poisons and poisons, and you live a hell within, decorated with beautiful flowers. And those flowers are also plastic, because they cannot be true flowers. True flowers need roots in your being. A really religious person has no morality imposed upon himself. His morality arises out of his consciousness. He is not trying to do the right, he is not trying to avoid the wrong — -he simply remains conscious and acts out of his consciousness, and whatsoever he does is right. In fact, it is impossible to do anything wrong consciously.
26. The moment you give a name to something, you have created the world as dual; you have brought a dualism, you have brought a subtle schizophrenia into the world. Whenever you say, `This is beautiful,’ you have brought ugliness into the world. Don’t you see it? Whenever you say, `I love,’ you have brought hatred into the world. Whenever you say, `You are my friend,’ you have brought enmity into the world. Whenever you say, `This is good, right moral,’ you have brought immorality into the world, you have brought the devil into the world. In deep silence, when you don’t know what is good and what is bad, and you don’t utter any labels and names, in that silence the duality disappears, the schizophrenia disappears, the split disappears. The world becomes one. That oneness is God. And to live in that oneness is to be a sadhu, is to be a sannyasin
27. Morality creates schizophrenia, split personalities, divisions. A moral person is not an individual because he is divided. Only a religious person is an individual. The moral person has a personality but no individuality. Personality means PERSONA, mask. And he has many personalities, not just one, because he has to have many personalities around him. In different situations, different personalities are needed. With different people, different personalities are needed. To one he shows one face, to another he shows another face. One goes on changing faces. Watch, and you will see how you go on changing faces every moment. Alone you have one face. In your bathroom you have one face, in the office you have another.
28. Our minds are really troubled. A thousand and one troubles are there. First, everybody is in a state of schizophrenia, more or less; the differences are only of degrees. Everybody is split because the exploiters, both religious and political, have depended on this strategy: divide the man, don’t allow man integrity, and he will remain a slave. A house divided against itself is bound to be weak. So you have been taught to fight with the body; that is the root strategy of division, of dividing you. “Fight the body, the body is your enemy. It is the body that is dragging you towards hell. Fight, dagger in hand! Fight day and night! Fight for lives together! Only then, one day, will you be able to win over it. And unless you are victorious over your body, you are not going to enter into the world of God.”
29. This is my message to you: drop these hemispheres — East and West — and drop these hemispheres of inner and outer. Become fluid. Let movement, flow, be your very life. Remain available to the outer and to the inner both. That’s why I teach love and meditation. Love is the passage to go out, meditation is the passage to go in. And a man who is in love AND meditative is beyond schizophrenia, is beyond all kinds of split. He has become one, he is integrated. In fact, he has soul.
30. The whole humanity has been reduced to a state of neurosis; it is schizophrenia. Everybody is split. And your so-called religious people are responsible for this great calamity. Man is not functioning as a whole, not as an integrated whole; he functions as a divided, split personality. That’s why it is so difficult to trust man: one moment he says one thing, another moment just the opposite — because one moment he may be talking from one side of his being — his soul side — another moment he may be talking from the other side — the body side. Howsoever you divide yourself, in reality you remain indivisible. You are not body and soul; you are bodysoul, you are psychosomatic, you are one individual, indivisible entity. Hence Buddha reminds you: don’t start fighting with yourself in order to become a master. That’s what so many stupid people down the ages have been doing: fasting; torturing themselves; lying down on a bed of thorns; wounding their bodies; destroying their eyes; cutting off their sexual organs. Millions of people have done such stupid things. Studying them, they seem to be unbelievable.
31. I am not interested in making your mind clear. My whole effort is to make you aware of your confused mind, to make you aware of your ill mind, to make you aware of your insanities, to make you aware of your schizophrenia, to make you aware of your whole pathology, so that you are bound to drop it, you cannot cling to it anymore. And the moment mind is dropped, the moment you know you are not the mind, a mutation has taken place. You are transported into another world; you have entered into the world of consciousness.
32. Nothing is separate. With the disappearance of thinking, schizophrenia disappears, this existential schizophrenia of dividing everything: this is man, this is woman, this is good, this is bad, this is beautiful, this is ugly, this is mine, this is thine. All distinctions create neuroses. Man is mad because he thinks too much, and he goes on missing the obvious. God is very obvious.
33. Forcing anything simply means you are forcing against yourself. This creates the schizophrenia, the split personality which is fighting with itself. This is the most ugly and destructive device which has been used by the vested interests for thousands of years. They found a simple clue for how to destroy the individual. The individual is a danger — a danger against exploitation, a danger against slavery, a danger against any kind of enforcement. An individual would die rather than submit. Individuality has a dignity…. But man has been taken away from his individuality by a simple device. Put the individual in conflict — and you know the ancient proverb: a house divided cannot stand for long.
34. This question of guilt has to be understood; otherwise, you will listen to me and you will not be able to follow. Then you will feel guilty. And I am here to make you happy, not to make you guilty. A guilty person is an ill person. A guilty person is a poisoned person. A guilty person is not in harmony; he is in an inner conflict. He wants to do something and is always doing something else, just the opposite. The rift grows bigger and bigger, and the bridge becomes more and more impossible. Guilt creates schizophrenia: you become two persons, or even many. You become a crowd; you become polypsychic — you lose unity.
35. Peace cannot be cultivated from the outside, it has to grow within you. It has to be your fragrance; not your character, but your conscience. One can become a man of peace by cultivating a certain character, by imposing a certain discipline, but deep down there will be turmoil, and all that is repressed will wait to take revenge. If something is cultivated from the outside it always divides you into two. Then the outer and the inner are always in conflict; that is the root cause of all schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is not a disease that happens to a few unfortunate people, it is almost the normal state of humankind. And the reason is that we have been told to cultivate good qualities: virtue, peace, love — but all these things are impossible to cultivate, you can only pretend. You will be phony, and to be phony is to be in hell, to be phony is to be as far away from God as possible. Hence I give you the name, Dhyan Manfred. The peace has to arise out of deep meditation. You are not to bring it, it has to happen to you. And if you can be meditative, if you can learn how to be silent, without thoughts, then peace is a natural atmosphere around you. It is a climate that follows you wherever you go. It becomes your shadow.
36. The religions have created a division. They say when you go to the church it is religious and when you go to the shop or the office or the factory, that is worldly. When you are praying it is holy and when you are taking a shower it is nothing holy. I don’t believe in this division. This division creates a split humanity, it is the root cause of schizophrenia. One can take a shower as prayerfully as one can pray; one just has to be understanding. The water is divine, the shower is divine, the coolness is divine, you are divine. The divine is showering on the divine — it is multiplied! It is just a question of seeing, understanding; and only then a person is religious —  when all his acts, gestures, movements become divine. Then the twenty-four hours of your day are prayerful. That’s the meaning of sannyas, to transform your whole life into a prayer, an unending prayer.
37. On the surface you are one person, in the depths you are just the opposite of it. The logical conclusion of this process is schizophrenia; and the whole humanity is living in a mild form of schizophrenia. Once in a while the schizophrenia reaches to such a height and the insanity becomes so much that the humanity has to commit a mad act, a suicidal act — that’s what war is. After every ten or twelve years we need a world war; it is a kind of necessity. We are living in such a wrong way, we are living with such insanity hidden in us that sooner or later so much is accumulated that it explodes and then man goes on destroying himself.
38. Life needs expression, life is expression. If you do not allow life, then you are creating, accumulating, explosive forces. They will explode and you will go to bits. This division in you is schizophrenia. So every man is schizophrenic, divided – divided against himself. He cannot be at ease; he cannot be silent; he cannot be blissful. Hell is always there, and unless you become whole, you cannot be freed from this hell. So if you understand me, man as such is schizophrenic, neurotic. So something has to be done which releases this neurosis, brings your divided parts nearer. The unexpressed has to be expressed, and this constant repression of your mind, of the conscious upon the unconscious, has to be withdrawn.