Mystic Mantra: Beyond the law of the reversed effect'

All of you must have experienced this if you work with a short-tempered boss, and you try to avoid his yelling at you, you end up getting a stronger, more intense dose of it. All your efforts of dodging, trying to sort things without telling him, or hiding the facts fail. All these struggles make you so worked up that this bottled up energy invites even a bigger outburst from the other. Why do we collide with the very thing from which we are excessively trying to save ourselves? Because our consciousness becomes focused only on it. But no need to curse yourself, there is a physical law working behind it: The law of the reversed effect. Émile Coué, the French psychologist, had discovered this law in 1920. He had observed, “The greater the conscious effort, the less the subconscious response. When the imagination and will power conflict, are antagonistic, it is always the imagination which wins, without any exception.”

It will be easier to understand if you comprehend the two layers of mind, namely the conscious and the unconscious. They grow side by side but are like two neighbours who never meet each other. The unconscious is the vast and powerful space and the conscious mind is narrow and weak. All our decisions are made by this narrow little conscious mind, which is rational and logical, and these decisions are disposed of by the powerful unconscious. Because life is much more than logic — it is a dance of energies that are equal and opposite to each other. The famous writer Aldous Huxley’s explanation might help: “The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and the results of proficiency come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing or combining relaxation with activity. The solution for this fear is to relax, to let go and to think about relaxing things that can provide us with a confident feeling. From this confident feeling, when we feel fresh and secure, we can easily deal with anything that will appear less threatening.”

But just by thinking about relaxing things, we are not going to feel relaxed. The tensions and blocks in the unconscious are too many. Unless the unconscious is thoroughly cleansed of these, relaxation cannot come our way. This is why Osho has created meditative therapies in which you can unburden the unconscious mind by throwing out the tensions and repressions of ages so that it is empty of the garbage. Then as when the doors of a dam are open and they blast the barrier between itself and the conscious mind, you can do it by strong emotional catharsis: crying, laughing, screaming, using gibberish or expressing your repressed childhood. This cleansing is utterly and deeply relaxing as if the inner walls of the prison are washed clean. For the first time, there is a harmony between the conscious and the unconscious. After this shower, they don’t work against each other but in sync with each other thus precipitating the desired result. If there is synchronicity in your inner energies, there will not any reversed effect on your action. Because your unconscious will support the conscious mind. Anything you do will be with total love and acceptance.