Osho – There is a subtle difference between Repression and Control

[Osho tells a sannyasin there are some things about his energy that it will be helpful for him to know. You haven’t allowed yourself to ever be wild, you’ve always had a subtle control inside you – and that can be a hindrance to spiritual growth… ]

Osho – There is a subtle difference between repression and control. Repression is not having understanding of what you are doing; you simply repress something. Control is a little more intellectual; you feel convinced that this is the right thing to do, so you control.

You are not repressed but you are controlled. Intellectually you understand what is the right thing to do and what is not, and you try to do the right thing. By and by that has become a habit, the very style of your life. That’s why you are not streaming, not flowing, not dancing.

And unless you dance, unless you go wholeheartedly with your energy – even if it takes a wild form, even if it becomes almost maddening – you will not grow. One has to go with it totally, and one day a different kind of discipline arises. There are three different things: one is repression without even intellectual understanding; another is control with intellectual understanding; the third is discipline with spiritual awareness… and that is what is needed. We substitute it by control or many more people substitute it by simply repressing.

You are in the second category, the controlled category. It is better than people who live with repression but one step more is needed: you have to drop control and you have to come to an inner discipline – which is not a kind of control at all. It is simply your awareness: you know and your act follows your knowing. The act is spontaneous like your shadow follows you; it follows your knowing.

So while you are here, relax control; that is the first thing. The second thing: whenever you feel that you can go a little more, try. For example, you are dancing and you feel that if you try a little more you can go a little wilder. Then try it – because we never know how much we can go unless we try.

Slowly, slowly, you take one step, two steps, three steps, and you become more confident and a great trust arises in energy – that wherever it leads it is good. The day that trust arises the transformation starts.

We have been taught not to trust the energy, not to trust life. We have been taught just to trust reason which is a very small fragment and which is in the service of the society. All that is vital, alive, has been denied, and dead reason has been given full rein.

So when you are doing the dynamic meditation or the kundalini or some other meditation and you feel that you can go a step more, then go. That one step will make it possible to go one step more, then go. That one step will make it possible to go one step more and so on and so forth: one step leads to another. Soon you will be going far away from your self-drawn boundaries.

Once you start going beyond the boundaries you start expanding. That’s what expansion of consciousness is, and that’s what man is always hankering for. There is no need to be small; you can be the whole! Even the sky is not the limit: you can be as big as the whole existence, but for that great courage is needed.

We live in a very very shrunken state with small boundaries which we hide behind. Come out! Those caves will not give you light; in those caves light never reaches. Come out in the open! So first, relax control; second, whenever you feel a boundary try to go at least one step beyond it; and third, don’t be afraid of the wild and the mad.

If a person remains afraid of the wild and the mad he cannot expand. And the fear is unnecessary… in fact the fear is very dangerous. If a person remains afraid of the wild and the animal and the mad, then all madness goes on accumulating. Layer upon layer you are piling it up: one day it will be too much.

One day it will be so much that you will not be able to control it. It will explode and then you will be nowhere. That’s how madness happens. Madness happens because of the control. These people in the madhouses are very very controlled people: their madness is the conclusion of their whole life’s effort.

A man who allows madness, allows wildness, never accumulates any madness and is out of danger. Rather than having it wholesale it is better to have it retail. It is very good to be angry sometimes rather than not being angry for ten years and then one day murdering a man.

In those small homeopathic doses anger is good; nothing is wrong. If you don’t use it in small doses, one day it will be so much that your system will not be able to bear it. These three things, remember.

Source: from Osho Book “The Further Shore”