“For the baby, nothing is bad and nothing is good – yet. He has not even thought about such things, we implant such thinking in him. And we are powerful. We reward him for doing what we call right, and punish him for what we call wrong.
And it is not only we who are labeling things as bad, but the whole of society is also calling it wrong. The child is alone. He is very natural, but he is alone, weak, and helpless; and he is dependent on those who are labeling these impulses as wrong. It is they who feed him and clothe him; they can beat him and punish him. What is the child to do?
If ‘wrong’ could be finished with just by saying so, the child could be finished with his wrong impulses. But no, it is not finished, so the child begins to repress it. Repression begins, and whatever the parents and society call wrong the child pushes into the basement of his mind. And it is all this hidden away stuff that becomes the unconscious. This is how the unconscious is born.
Whatever is kept in the back cellar the child has no wish to see, because if it is seen the child will become restless and troubled. So the child begins to create an inner blindness so that he cannot see the bad things in himself….
What is the child to do? We have no idea of the child’s dilemma. The things that he has been told are bad are now hidden within himself; he stops looking at them and turns his back on them. It is this turning of the back that gives birth to the unconscious.”
osho.com, Nowhere to Go but In, Talk #3 – The One, Undivided
