“Sitting Silently, Doing Nothing, The Spring Comes and The Grass Grows by Itself.”

IN ZEN, IN JAPAN, THEY DON’T DO PSYCHOANALYSIS. They don’t go into very very long analytical processes. A madman is brought to a Zen monastery, he is given a very very far away cottage, provided with food, taken care of, but nobody says anything to him — just left alone. Nobody talks to him. Even the person who brings food is not allowed to talk to him. He’s simply left alone. He can move around the cottage, he can do something in the garden if he wants. Otherwise, he is supposed to lie down in the bed and rest and just be there. And what does not happen in three years’ psychoanalysis happens in three weeks.

JUST THE MAN SITTING THERE DOING NOTHING, lying down on the bed or sitting on the lawn or looking at the stars, COOLS DOWN, SLOWS DOWN. The tension disappears. The tension need not be analyzed; analysis may make it acceptable but can’t make it go.
It seems simple. If you tell it to a FREUDIAN, he will think you are talking nonsense — “Such a simple thing. How can it help? Problems are very complicated. Dreams have to be analyzed first, and you have to go deep down into the unconscious.”

And if you go to a JUNGIAN, then he says you have to go even to the collective unconscious.
And if you go to a PRIMAL THERAPIST he says, “This won’t help. First, you have to go backward to the primal scream. It will take years!” And all that happens out of all this psychoanalysis, and thinking about it, and dreams and the past is that the man by and by becomes fed-up with the whole thing and starts accepting it. He says, “Okay, this is the way I am.” Nothing much happens out of it.

PSYCHOANALYSIS HAS BEEN A FAILURE. It will take time for people to understand that it has failed.
But in the East, we have been trying a totally different approach, a simple one. JUST LEAVE THE MAN ALONE. Let him relax, let him swim, sit, walk, let him be in his body. Let him be in a situation where he’s not expected to do anything. Let him be irresponsibly there; then those three, four weeks become like a womb. He relaxes, he eats, sleeps, takes the bath, and nothing to worry about. And the zen people say, “Sitting silently, doing nothing, the spring comes and the grass grows by itself.” Life takes care of itself.