Pavlov has done a great deal of research on this subject. He is perhaps the only person who has cured patients with addictions. If you were addicted to smoking and wanted to give it up, Pavlov would use this method of repetition. He would give you a cigarette. No sooner would you have it in your hand than you receive an electric shock. Your whole body feels the tremor and the cigarette falls out of your hands. For seven days you remain in his clinic. Ever time you smoke you feel the electric shock. In seven days the mantra would be stronger than the urge, so much so that the very mention of a cigarette makes you tremble. You develop an aversion to smoking. Pavlov cured thousands of patients in this matter. His argument was that unless a person be given an opposite habit, which is stronger than his addiction, he cannot be made to overcome his habit. The pattern of your life, whatever it is, is a result of your mind. You go on repeating. Every day you want to get rid of your anger, and every day you get angry. The more you repeat the anger, the stronger it becomes. How often you vow not to get angry, but your vows are always broken. Now the confusion deepens. It was better not to take any oaths, for now the mantra is reinforced; it has become doubly effective. Now you keep repeating, ”I shall not be angry. I shall not be angry...” knowing full well that your anger is much stronger than your vows. Vows have no value; they are not worth a penny no matter how many times you take them. Now this also becomes hypnosis. Now you will swear you will not be angry, knowing full well that it is not going to be effective. Never take any vows that you cannot fulfill. It is better to live with a habit than take a vow and break it. If it becomes a habit with you to take vows and break them, this will make you incapable of following any resolution in life. The so-called religious teachers have made you very irreligious. They give you vows so cheaply. you go to the temple, to a holy man or sage, and he tells you, ”Take a vow.” Now you are in a fix. Sitting in the holy surroundings of a temple you cannot say to the sage, ”I am incapable of taking any vows.” That would hurt your ego. Instead, you say, ”From today on I will never smoke again.” I have a friend who is slightly eccentric – but he is much better than you! He went to a monk – he is a Jaina – and the monk said, ”Take a vow!” ”Very well, I shall,” he said. The monk asked, ”What have you vowed?” He said, ”I have vowed to smoke from today on.” He never smoked before. He was slightly eccentric but he kept the vow faithfully! And I tell you, this man has gained a lot more than the man who takes vows of not smoking and fails to keep them. He broke his vow, he was filled with self-condemnation. This man at least kept his word. He may be eccentric but he is better than you. He could, at least, stick to his resolution. Whenever you break a vow your self-esteem drops and you are filled with guilt. Each time you fail, your guilt increases ad you become more and more miserable. You will lose your soul in this state of wretchedness. To gain your soul you need the self-respect of a king; self-condemnation simply takes you further and further away from yourself. Understand the nature of your mind and you will understand this sutra. The whole art of the mind, its structure, is built on repetition. The mind is a mantra. Whatever you repeated has become your habit. All that you keep repeating becomes a part of your life. For lives on end you repeat the same things over and over again and you attain it in each life – and you are addicted to the repetition of all that is wrong and false! So what is to be done? One: do not be in a hurry to destroy the false. The best way to go about it is to start doing the right thing instead of fighting the wrong. Learn a new mantra! If you smoke, it is perfectly all right! Begin to meditate, and intensify the mantra of meditation every day. The day meditation pervades your being, you will be filled with self-respect. When this happens it will be child’s play to give up smoking, for you have now begun a positive mantra. Don’t be negative in your approach or you will find yourself in difficulty. You will be caught up in remorse and guilt; you will be lost in pain and sorrow and despair. All your holy men sitting in the temples – how sad they look! There is no joy, no flowering in their lives; they use only negative mantras. Their quest is centered around negation – to get rid of whatever is wrong, bit by bit. I tell you not to be in any hurry to get rid of your bad habits. Be quick to develop good ones. The day that the good habits become powerful, the bad ones are easy to give up. Don’t fight with your illness; strive to attain health. That was what Coue used to tell his patients. He told them to practice auto-suggestion: ”I am getting better! I am getting better... You can also do the opposite. You have a headache. You can repeat to yourself, ”I have no headache.” Now, as many times as you repeat this, you will be repeating the word ’headache’. If you have a headache, there is no sense in telling yourself there is no headache. The headache is! No matter how many times you repeat the contrary, you know that your repetition is a lie. Superficially you may go on saying that there is no headache but inwardly you know that your head is aching. You are repeating just for the sake of Coue. And the headache will be cured by an inner process – not by following the suggestions of Coue. Don’t use a negative word ’no’. Therefore, I say, don’t be in a hurry to renounce the world; instead, strive to attain God! Therefore, I say, don’t walk the path of renunciation; seek ultimate enjoyment! Don’t concentrate on that which is wrong because in order to give up the wrong you have to look at it again and again. And the more youlookatit, themorethemantraisbeingrepeated. Andyouarehypnotizedbythethingyouwatch constantly. A great deal of research is going on about car accidents. Nowadays the number of people dying in car accidents is more than the number died in the world war. The number of people who die every year in car accidents is twice as high as the number of people who died in World War Two. It is not a small number. Something has to be done. In examining this phenomenon, it was discovered that fiftypercentofaccidentstakeplacebetweenmidnightandthreea.m. Thatistheperiodofsleep,and the mind is the most drowsy. When the mind is drowsy it gets hypnotized. The driver is hypnotized by the monotonous purring of the engine and the straight road without any curves for miles on end. And the psychologists say that thousands of people are dying because of the white line drawn in the middle of the road. The driver keeps on watching it and gets hypnotized. Then he is not in his senses, he is in a druggish state. The situation is: it is between midnight and three am; there is the monotonous sound of the engine; the long, empty road, everything enveloped in darkness; even the trees and shrubs are invisible; the driver sees only the road and the white centre-strip. the great path chap 4 pp 65-67 osho
Posted on: Sat, 27 Dec 2014 14:17:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015