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is true is not to be decided by votes; otherwise, we could never come to any truth ever. People would vote for what is comfortable -- and lies are very comfortable because you don't have to do anything about them, you just have to believe.... Truth needs great effort, discovery, risk, and to walk alone on a path which nobody has traveled before.
Just today, Anando was giving me some information. One piece was very significant: all schizophrenic people, neurotic people, psychotic people, or any other kind of mentally disturbed people, always want to be in the crowd -- they don't want to be alone. This was discovered by psychoanalysts who have been working with these mental cases for years -- that these people have a great fear of being alone and that they are very comfortable in the crowd.
The reverse is also true -- if you feel comfortable in the crowd, that means unconsciously you have a tendency to fall mentally sick if you go out of the crowd, if you are left alone.
In jails, the greatest punishment is the isolation cell. When a person is put into a dark isolation cell, just a piece of bread is slipped underneath the door; that is the only communication between himself and humanity. Nobody speaks to him, nobody comes to see him. And within three weeks he starts losing his sanity, he starts seeing things he has never seen -- hallucinations, all kinds of illusions... the crowd was a protection.
Those psychoanalysts have not said what the basic reasons behind it are. The crowd is a protection because it supplies you with a common hallucination in which everyone believes. So you need not be worried about it, you need not think that this is something sick: "It is healthy to be a Christian, to be a Mohammedan, to be a Hindu, to go to the temple and to bow down before a stone statue and pray to a god who lives in heaven. Everybody is doing it, it must be true; so many people cannot be wrong...." It is a common hallucination.
Now, by putting a person into an isolation cell you have taken him out of the crowd, out of the comfort and the coziness of the crowd. He has never been on his own. Now, for the first time, in darkness, with nobody
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