Osho,
What exactly is this unconscious mind which is also called the dark night of the soul? Is it something belonging to the physical monkey brain? Or is it something of the universal mind, which I am assuming is my own higher mind?
Also, if it is not of the physical brain, then is this why it is a waste of time to attempt to end your suffering by putting a bullet through your brain?
The question that you have asked implies almost the whole psychology of man. In one way, man is divided into the body, the physiology, and the mind, the psychology. The brain is part of the body; mind is the psychology – another name of psychology. They both belong to something else – a deeper and higher consciousness, a universal consciousness. But the state of the mind is very complex; it is almost like a bridge between the soul, the universal, and the body, the individual.
When the body dies the mind continues, as a wavelength of memories, with the conscious soul. It will enter into new bodies; it will gather more experiences, sufferings, joys. And through many lives, mind goes on collecting. Each body allows it to have sufferings or blessings – but slowly slowly, if it goes again and again into pain, misery, agony, it becomes habitual for the mind that whichever body it may have, it will fall into painful experiences.
The mind also dies one day
Body dies many times; mind dies only once.
The day mind dies, you enter into the world of immortality, the universal. That’s what we call enlightenment.
Until the mind dies, it remains the master; it does not accept being a slave. The moment your innermost being asserts, that very assertion becomes the death of the mind. Hence, meditation is defined as no-mind.
It does not mean that the mind is not there; it simply means the mastery of the mind is no longer there. It can still be used as a vehicle, just like a flute, but the song is not of the flute. And the flute cannot sing on its own – the flute is only a passage; it gives way.
A man of no-mind also uses the mind when he speaks, but just like the song of the flute.
One of the most cherished books of Hindus, Shrimad Bhagavadgita, is very strange in the sense that it is called “the song of the divine.” Just its title is so significant; from the very title it means that the words are used not by the mind but by someone who has no mind.
In the East we never developed any psychology. This is one of the most important differences that has grown between East and West. In the East we have developed techniques and methods to go beyond mind; in the West the philosopher, the thinker, has become too much involved in the mechanics of the mind: what is mind?
It is so surprising that for ten thousand years in the East, which has been continuously concerned with the inner search, nobody has bothered about what mind is. If you can drop it, drop it, because all that is real and authentic and true is beyond it. Why waste time with something which is ephemeral?