The second question:

Osho,
After working with the cathartic techniques for a few years, I feel that a deep inner harmony, balance, and centering is happening to me. But you said that before entering into the final stage of samadhi, one passes through a great chaos. How do I know if I am finished with the chaotic stage?

First: you have lived in a chaos for hundreds of lives. It is nothing new. It is very old. Secondly, the dynamic methods of meditation which have catharsis as their foundation allow all the chaos within you to be thrown out. That’s the beauty of these techniques. You cannot sit silently, but you can do the dynamic or the chaotic meditations very easily. Once the chaos is thrown out a silence starts happening to you; then you can sit silently. If rightly done, continuously done, then the cathartic techniques of meditation will simply dissolve all your chaos into the outside world. You will not need to pass through a mad stage. That’s the beauty of these techniques. The madness is being thrown out already. It is in-built in the technique.

But if you sit silently as Patanjali will suggest… Patanjali has no cathartic methods; it seems they were not needed in his time. People were naturally very silent, peaceful, primitive. The mind was not yet functioning too much. People slept well, lived like animals. They were not thinking very much, logical, rational – more centered in the heart, as primitive people are even now. And life was such that it allowed many catharses automatically.

For example, a woodcutter: he need not have any catharsis because just by cutting the wood, all his murderous instincts are thrown out. Cutting wood is like murdering a tree. A stone-breaker need not do cathartic meditation. The whole day he is doing it. But for the modern man things have changed. Now you live in such comfort that there is no possibility of any catharsis in your life – except you can drive in a mad way.

That’s why, in the West, more people die every year through car accidents than by anything else. That is the greatest disease. Neither by cancer nor by tuberculosis; no other disease takes such a toll of lives as car driving. During the Second World War, in one year millions of people died. More people die every year around the earth just by mad car drivers.

You may have observed, if you are a driver, that whenever you are angry you go fast. You go on pushing the accelerator, you simply forget about the brake. When you are very hateful, irritated, the car becomes a medium of expression. Otherwise, you live in such a comfort, doing less and less anything with the body, living more and more in the mind.