The second question:

Question 2

BELOVED OSHO,

YOU SAID THAT THROUGH CHAOTIC BREATHING YOU WANT TO DESTROY OUR OLD WRONG PATTERNS -- TO REBUILD US IN A NEW DIMENSION. PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THIS REBUILDING IN A NEW DIMENSION HAPPENS AFTER THE OLD HAS BEEN DESTROYED.

You have misunderstood me. The chaotic method is to destroy the old patterns, not to create a new one. It is NOT to create a pattern at all. Just the old pattern has to be destroyed. The method, all meditative methods, just destroy your conditioning without conditioning you in any way; otherwise there will simply be a change of fetters, a change of prisons. The new prison may look a little better but it is still a prison.

The unconditioned mind is the end -- a mind which has no pattern around it. The old pattern has to be destroyed, and the new is not to be created because the new will become the old again. Nothing has to be created in its place; you are to be left alone without a pattern. But you have lived so long in patterns that you cannot conceive of how you can live without a pattern. How can you live without conditioning? How can you live without a discipline? How can you live without fetters? You have lived so long in slavery, in conditioning, that you cannot conceive of what freedom is. But you can live; really, only then will you live.

A conditioned mind is not alive. For instance, people come to me and they say, "You do not give us any discipline: what to eat, what not to eat, what to do, what not to do. You simply give us meditation and let us go into chaos. You do not give us something to live by. You just push us into chaos without any discipline."

I do not give you any discipline because only those who are enemies to you can give you disciplines. I give you awareness, not discipline. And your awareness will give you spontaneous light about what to do and what not to do. And who can decide beforehand? And what is the need to decide it beforehand? When the moment arises, when the situation is there, you will be alert enough to do whatsoever happens to you -- what is felt by your awareness itself to be done.

If you are aware you do not need any discipline. Only people who are fast asleep need discipline because they do not know what to do. They need a pattern to follow. Their whole life becomes a misery because no pattern can be helpful in a changing life. Every pattern will become a prison because life is constantly changing. This moment one act may be good but the next moment it may become bad because the situation has changed. And you go on following a dead pattern; you never fit anywhere.

Look at your own lives: everyone is a misfit. Everyone is unfit; no one fits anywhere. And the reason? -- the pattern, the discipline, the conditioning. You carry it everywhere. Whatsoever the situation, you have a constant pattern around you. You will never fit. Life is changing, life is a flux; it is riverlike, it is never the same again. Not for a single moment is life the same. It goes on changing and you have a fixed pattern which doesn't change. You will be a misfit.

Everywhere in the world, human beings have become misfits. And when you feel that you are a misfit, you feel discarded, rejected -- as if life is against you. Quite the reverse is the case: your conditioning is against life. Only an unconditioned mind can respond to the changing life -- because he has no pattern. Life creates a situation: he is alert; he behaves in a way which happens in that moment. That type of man will never regret; you will always regret. That type of man will never repent; you will always repent -- whatsoever you do.

You love a girl: now the alternatives are whether to marry her or not. Whatsoever you do, you will repent. If you marry her, then for the whole of your life you will think the other alternative would have been better. If you do not marry, the same thing will happen: you will think that the other alternative was better. You have not been alert. Only an alert person can respond totally.

You can respond only in parts, fragments, and while you are responding it is a fragmentary response. And there are other parts within you which are against it. Sooner or later they will take revenge. They will say, "We were saying not to do this." What does repentance mean? Repentance means you are divided. You do a thing and at that very moment something in you is against it. That part is watching you and that part is saying, "Do not do it! This is wrong." And another part goes on saying, "This is right. Do it!" And you do it.

You will not fit because you can fit only when you are fluxlike, changing. A fixed entity cannot fit in a riverlike existence. You must be fluid. Only when you are liquid, fluid, flowing, changing, alert, aware, will you not repent. You will never feel guilty; you will never feel that something was better than what you did. Nothing can be better because you responded totally. That was all that could have been. Nothing else was possible.

My meditation technique is not to give you a new pattern; it is simply to drop the old pattern, to destroy it and leave you completely free without any imprisonment around you -- without any prison. Of course, you will feel difficulty because the prison was also a shelter. Now there will be rains and there will be no shelter, and the wind will come and there will be no shelter, and the sun will be there, hot and burning, and there will be no shelter, and you would like to hide somewhere. Your eyes have become so accustomed to darkness that in the light you will feel uneasy. But this is what will make you free. You will have to get the feel of the new life under the open skies. Once you know the freedom and the beauty of it, once you have become aware, once you have come out of the prison, the old habit, you will not ask for any pattern or any discipline.

And this doesn't mean that your life will become a chaos -- no! Your life will be the only ordered life possible. The life that you are leading is a chaos. It only seems to be ordered on the surface. Behind it, underneath, there is disorder and turmoil. Only on the surface have you created the appearance of order. Look within yourself: there is disorder. Ordered life will be disordered; disciplined life will be chaotic within. This looks paradoxical but this is so, this is the truth. Only an alert life will have an order -- not forced but spontaneous, alive. The order will go on changing with life. It must.

A spontaneous life is just like your eyes. Do you know that your eyes go on changing continuously? And when they stop changing, then you need some technical help. When I am looking at you and you are ten feet away from me, my eyes have one kind of focus. When I start looking at the hills which are far away, my eyes immediately change. The lenses of the eyes change immediately. Then only can I see the hills. When I look at the moon, my eyes change immediately.

You come into the house, it is dark; your eyes change. You come out of the house, it is light; your eyes change. And when your eyes become fixed, they are ill. They must be fluxlike; only then are you capable of seeing. The more fluxlike the eyes, the more liquid they are, without any pattern, the more they are just changing with the situation, then the more alert your consciousness will be.

Meditation will give you an inner eye which will be constantly changing, constantly aware of the new situation, constantly responding. But the response will come from your total being, not from a pattern. The response will come from YOU, not from a conditioning.

Now, whatsoever you do, howsoever you react, it comes from your conditioning. If you have been born in a Jaina family, then just looking at nonvegetarian food you feel revolted, you feel a nausea. That nausea is not coming from you; that nausea is coming from the conditioning. It never comes to a Mohammedan; it never comes to a Christian. It is not that you are more nonviolent and they are violent: it is just a conditioning from the childhood. And that conditioning starts functioning the moment you see meat.

Even the word meat and you will feel a subtle nausea. Just a word and the nausea will be felt. Is it coming from you? If it is coming from you, then your whole life will be a life of love. But it is not. You are as cruel as anybody else. The Jaina is as cruel as the Mohammedan and sometimes even more. He has to be more cruel because he cannot express his violence through food. It has to be expressed from somewhere else.

When you eat, you express your violence. If you eat meat, your violence moves through food -- it is released. This is a common observation: people who are nonvegetarians are more loving than the vegetarians -- more loving, more kind than the vegetarians. Why? This should not be so. Their violence is released through food.

In your body, your teeth are the most violent part. Violent people eat more food than nonviolent people. Just crushing the food with the teeth gives release to violence, anger and hate. Persons who are eating meat and other such things have a natural outlet for their violence. I am not saying go and eat meat but if you do not eat meat, if you do not eat nonvegetarian foods simply by conditioning, do not think that you have become loving and nonviolent. Your violence will find other ways, more subtle ways. Your relationships will become more cruel, poisoned.

But if you are really not behaving according to a pattern; if this is because love has arisen in your heart; if you have become alert to the cruelty of eating animal food; if you have become alert by yourself; if not by any tradition, not by birth, not by any teaching, not by any scriptures, but by your own meditative experience you have become alert, if you have become alert that it is stupid, that to kill an animal for food is stupid, idiotic; if you have become alert of this fact by your own meditation -- then it is totally different. Then your whole life will be nonviolent and loving. Then you will not just be obsessed with food but you will know it is an alive phenomenon and you will not be mad after any fixed rules. There will be no fixed rules, really; there will be only a constantly alive awareness.

So I am not going to create a new pattern for you. I am a destroyer. I am not going to create anything, really. I am just going to destroy, because there is no need to create. You are already there behind the structure. If the structure is destroyed, you will be freed. If the structure which binds you is no more there, you will be there. You are not to be created; you are already there. Only the walls of the prison have to be destroyed and you will be under the open sky.

You have misunderstood me. I told you this chaotic meditation is to destroy your conditioning, your slavery, your mind, your ego -- in a deep sense, YOU. It has to destroy and then the new will be born. I am not saying I will create it. No one can create it. And there is no need: it is already the case. It is there. Only the shell has to be broken and it will come out.

All religion is destructive in this sense. The society is constructive, religion is destructive. Society constructs the conditioning. Society makes you a Hindu or a Christian or a Jaina. Society never allows you to be yourself. It gives you a pattern, because society is an organization. The society wants you to fit into that organization according to its own rules. The society doesn't want YOU; the society only wants your efficiency. You are not the point, you are not the target. You must behave like a mechanical thing. The more mechanical you are, the more society will appreciate you because you will be less dangerous.

No machine can be dangerous. It never goes out of the way: it never disobeys, it never rebels, it is not revolutionary. No machine is revolutionary; it cannot be. All machines are orthodox: they obey, they follow. Society tries to change you into a mechanical thing. Then you are more efficient, less dangerous, reliable, responsible. And there is no fear, no danger; you can be relied upon.

The society creates a mechanical device around you: that is the conditioning. And it allows you only certain outlets and closes certain things completely. It chooses some fragments from you and approves them, then rejects all else. It says that only a part of you is good and the other parts are bad, so deny those parts. Society doesn't accept you as a whole, as a unity; it accepts only certain parts. Hence, the conditioning.

Religion is always destructive; in a way, religion is always antisocial. But society is very cunning. It tries to convert religion also into its managerial system. It wants to make religion also a part of it.

Jesus is rebellious, the church is not. Jesus is against society -- he has to be, because he is trying to destroy the mechanical part and he is trying to free your spontaneity. He is bound to be against the society; the society will crucify him. But just by crucifying him you cannot destroy Jesus. Really, if you want to destroy Jesus, crucifixion will be of no help. You will have to organize a church around Jesus; only then will he be destroyed.

It is said that once it happened that the devil was very much disturbed because one man had achieved enlightenment on earth. He called his advisers and he asked them, "What to do now? One man has again achieved truth, he has become enlightened, and our whole profession is now in danger. What to do? How to prevent people from going to this man?"

The oldest follower of the devil said, "Do not be disturbed. We should go and we should organize a church around him. Do not worry. Then the church will become the prevention, then people will not be able to come to him directly. The church will be in between, and whatsoever he says will not be heard by the people directly. The church will first interpret it, and through interpretation you can destroy anything."

Truth can be destroyed most easily if you order it, organize it. When religion becomes a sect, it becomes a part of society. Whenever religion is alive and not a sect, it is against society. Jesus is against society, Mahavira is against society, Buddha is against society. But Buddhism, Jainism, Christianity, they are all parts of society. They are religions no more. Religion has to be rebellious. And this is the rebellion: religion tries to destroy the mechanicalness because the mechanicalness is your hell. Spontaneity is your heaven; mechanicalness is your hell.