The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here
In this great book of questions and answers Osho reminds us that there is in reality nowhere to go! He also talks especially to the baby boomers as they confront the onset of middle age. Osho responds to questions ranging from swordsmanship to music, from enlightenment to conditioning, from sex to age, from women?s rights to psychology. But no matter what the subject, woven through his jokes and stories, through the wisdom and shattering clarity of all these talks, is meditation - as the miracle ingredient to bring into your life for transformation.
Chapter Titles
Chapter 1: The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here
Chapter 2: Be a Joke unto Yourself
Chapter 3: Into the Open Sky
Chapter 4: Suddenly You Have Blossomed
Chapter 5: You Have Never Looked Inside
Chapter 6: Expectation Breeds Frustration
Chapter 7: First Have Your Cup of Tea
Chapter 8: Forget Trying to Get It!
Chapter 9: Enlightenment Is None of Your Business
Chapter 10: Drunk with Awareness
Chapter 11: Meditation - Now or Never!
Chapter 12: I Am the First World Citizen
Chapter 13: Human Mind Is a Miracle
Chapter 14: A Very Delicate and Complex Affair
Chapter 15: Man Is Born to Celebrate
Chapter 16: Innocence Regained
Chapter 17: On the Master?s Operating Table
Chapter 18: The Alphabet of Rejoicing
Chapter 19: Cowards Cannot Enter Here
Chapter 20: A Graceful Old Age Is Your Birthright
Chapter 21: Philosia?The Path of the Mystic
Chapter 22: The Sweetness of Silence on Your Tongue
Chapter 23: Knowledge Is the Corpse of Knowing
Chapter 24: The Only Way to Be Is Not to Be
Chapter 25: Don?t Renounce the World, Renounce the Rubbish!
Chapter 26: A Glimpse of Your Own Future
Chapter 27: Become the Mystery
Chapter 28: Education for Life - And for Death
Excerpt from The Great Pilgrimage: From Here to Here
Chapter 14
Osho,
Is taking the role of a therapist dangerous to my own spiritual growth? Is it possible to help people and still let my own ego dissolve at the same time? I feel that a subtle fight goes on inside me between one part that is clear and another part that wants nothing to do with clarity. Under your guidance I have learned not to dominate others when I use my capacity to see, but am I still dominating myself?
"The role of a therapist is a very delicate and complex affair.
First, the therapist himself suffers from the same problems that he is trying to help others with. The therapist is only a technician. He can manage to pretend and to deceive himself that he is a master - that is the greatest danger in being a therapist. But just a little understanding, and things won?t be the same.
First, don?t think in terms of helping others. That gives you the idea of being a savior, of being a master - and from the back door the ego enters again. You become important, you are the center of the group, everybody is looking up to you.
Drop the idea of help. Instead of help use the word sharing. You share your insight, whatsoever you have. The participant is not someone who is inferior to you. The therapist and the therapee are both in the same boat; the therapist is just a little more knowledgeable. Be conscious of the fact that your knowledge is borrowed. Never for a moment forget that whatever you know is still not your experience, and this will help the people who are participating in your group.
Man is a very subtle mechanism. It works on both sides: the therapist starts becoming the master, and rather than helping he is destroying something in the participant, because the participant will also learn only the technique. There will not be a loving, sharing friendliness, an atmosphere of trust, but "You know more, I know less?. By participating in a few therapy groups I will also know as much as you know."
The participants slowly, slowly start becoming therapists themselves, because there is no degree required - at least in many countries. In a few countries they have started to outlaw all kinds of unaccepted therapies; only a man who has a university qualification in therapeutics, in psychoanalysis, in psychotherapy will be able to help people in therapy groups.
This is going to happen in almost every country of the world, because therapy has become a business, and people who are unqualified are dominating it. They know the technique, because technique they can learn; by participating in a few groups they know all the techniques, then they can make a concoction of their own. But there is no way of controlling?.
But remember: the moment you play the role of a helper, the helped is never going to forgive you. You have hurt his pride, you have hurt his ego. That was not your intention?your intention was just to inflate your own ego, but this can happen only if you hurt other people?s ego. You cannot inflate your ego without hurting others. Your bigger ego will need more space, and the others have to shrink their space and their personality to exist with you.
From the very beginning an authentic loving person?and I make it an absolutely necessary point that there is nothing more therapeutic than love. Technique can help, but the real miracle happens through love. Love the people who participate in therapy and be one amongst them, with no pretensions of being higher or holier."
