What is the difference between discipline and control?

[Guest guest]

Discipline comes out of awareness; control comes out of fear.

 

People who are around you are more powerful than you, they can punish you, they

can destroy you. They have all the power to control, to corrupt, to repress. And

the child has to become diplomatic.

 

When sex energy arises, the child is in difficulty. The society is against it;

the society says it has to be channeled. And it is flowing all over the child.

It has to be cut.

 

In the schools what are we doing? In fact, the schools are not so much

instruments for imparting knowledge as instruments of control. For six, seven

hours a child is sitting there. This is to curb his dancing, to curb his

singing, to curb his joy; this is to control him. Sitting for six, seven hours

every day in an almost prison-like atmosphere, by and by the energy deadens, the

child becomes repressed, frozen. Now there is no streaming, the energy does not

come, he lives at the minimum -- that's what we call control. He never goes to

the maximum.

 

Psychologists have been searching and they have come to recognize a great factor

in human misfortune -- that is, that ordinarily persons live only ten per cent.

They live ten per cent, they breathe ten per cent, they love ten per cent, they

enjoy ten per cent -- ninety per cent of their life is simply not allowed. This

is sheer wastage. One should live at a hundred per cent capacity, only then is

flowering possible.

 

So meditation is not control, it is not repression. If somehow you have got the

wrong idea -- you are repressing yourself -- then you will become very

controlled, but then you will be cold. Then you will become more and more

indifferent, not detached. Indifferent, non-caring, unloving -- you will almost

commit suicide. You will be alive at the minimum. You can be called "just so-so"

alive. You will not be burning from both sides, your flame will be very dim.

Much smoke will be there but almost no light.

 

It happens to people who are on the path of meditation -- Catholics, Buddhists,

Jains -- that they become cold, because to control comes easily. Awareness is

very arduous. Control is very easy because control needs only a cultivation of

habits. You cultivate habits, then those habits possess you and you need not

worry. Then you go on with your habits, they become mechanical and you live a

robot life. You may look like a Buddha but you will not be. You will be just a

dead stone statue.

 

If compassion has not arisen in you, then apathy will arise.

 

Osho: Dang Dang Doko Dang