What is the difference between philosophy, psychology, and religion?

      “Consciousness can go either out or in. These are the two ways available for consciousness. When consciousness goes out, it thinks about the object, the other, the thou. When consciousness goes in, thinking disappears because there is no other, no object. It falls into subjectivity.

      “When consciousness goes out, philosophy is created. Philosophy is thinking about objects. Philosophy is extraversion. When consciousness goes in, it forgets all about objects, it starts enjoying the being of subjectivity, of interiority. You are simply there enjoying the very fact of being alive, the very fact of being conscious. No object is there, you are pure subjectivity. No thought is there, you are pure consciousness. Extraversion is philosophy, introversion is psychology, and the transcendence of both is religion.

      “Buddha uses two words. For the outside he uses dhatu, the object. Philosophy is concerned with the object. It forgets the observer, it remembers the observed. The arrow is pointed toward the without, dhatu, the object. For the inner journey Buddha uses the word chitta, subjectivity. When you are moving inward, psychology is created; when you are moving outward, philosophy is created. Science is a growth of philosophy.

      “But the modern psychology, so-called psychology, is not psychology in the sense that Buddha uses the word psychology because the modern psychology again goes on thinking in an objective way about the mind. It uses the philosophical method. Hence it misses the point. That is the difference between modern psychology and the real psychology.

      “Gurdjieff used to say that the real psychology has yet to be born. What does he mean by real psychology? Is Sigmund Freud not a real psychologist? Is Carl Gustav Jung not a real psychologist? Is Adler not a real psychologist? No, they all think in the objective way. Their psychologies are nothing but philosophies. They think about the mind; the mind is taken as an object. They think about the mind from the outside. They watch, they observe, they analyze, they dissect, but the observer remains outside; the observer thinks.

      “Gurdjieff says that the real psychology has yet to be born. In a sense he is right, in a sense he is not. If we think about Freud, Jung, Adler and company, then he is right, but if we think about Patanjali, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Hui Neng, then he is wrong. The real psychology has existed for millennia. The real psychology has existed for so long that we have forgotten about it. The new so-called psychology is very immature. It is a very late arrival, just one hundred years old. It is very childish.

      “The real psychology is the psychology of the buddhas. The real psychology is to go inside your being – not to watch how rats behave, not to watch how others behave, not to go on looking outside – to go inside with closed eyes, deep, meditatively, alert, fully alert, watching what happens inside. Go on dropping from the outside into your inside, into your interiority. Go on forgetting the world of objects, then the world of thoughts, then the world of feelings. Go on dropping out, go on dropping out, and a moment comes when your consciousness is there without any content. To know this consciousness is to know what real psychology is – the psychology of the buddhas.” Osho