The first question:

Osho,
Could you say something about discipline and repression?

They are as distinct as the earth and the sky. The distance is so great between the two, that it is unbridgeable. Repression is just the opposite of discipline, but for thousands of years repression has been misunderstood and thought of as if it were discipline. It gives a pseudo appearance of it.

And remember one very fundamental thing: that the real is never in danger from the unreal; the real is always in danger from the pseudo. The unreal cannot harm it, but the pseudo can harm it because the pseudo looks like it. It is not it and yet it has the mask of it, the appearance of it.

Repression is cheap. Any stupid person can do it – it needs no intelligence to repress. Discipline needs great intelligence. Discipline means awareness. Discipline comes from your innermost core; it is not an imposition from the outside. Nobody can discipline you.

The very word discipline is beautiful: it means the art of learning. Hence the word disciple: one who is ready to learn, one who is capable of learning. Learning is an inner process. One has to be always alert, only then can one learn. One has to be awake, only then can one learn. One has to watch all that goes on happening around you and one has to deepen this watchfulness so that you can see even the inner processes of your body, mind and heart. You have to become a mirror. You have to witness everything within yourself, then only do you learn from it, and that learning brings discipline. Then a deep harmony arises in you, because whatsoever is wrong starts falling away from you of its own accord. You are not to drop it. If you have to drop it through effort, then it is repression; if it falls like dry leaves falling from the tree, then it is discipline.

Discipline has to be effortless; it has to be out of sheer understanding. Repression has nothing to do with understanding, with learning. Others tell you what to do and what not to do; others give you the Ten Commandments. You have simply to follow, you have to be obedient. And who are these others? They are the powerful people – politically powerful, religiously powerful. They may be the rich people, the people who own the state or the church, the dominant people. They have their vested interests; to safeguard their vested interests they create a certain kind of slavery, a mental slavery. They want people to be obedient, they don’t want people to be rebellious; hence they cannot allow intelligence.