The first question:

Osho,
Where does educating the subconsciousness conflict or harmonise with Tao, as it implies discipline with self-effort from an external expression?

Tao knows nothing of discipline. Tao is anarchic, spontaneous, effortless. All disciplines are unnatural – they have to be. Nature needs no discipline, it is sufficient unto itself. Trees and rivers and animals and stars – they don’t know anything of discipline. Discipline is man-created, man-made, and because of discipline man becomes split. One part starts manipulating the other part, then a rift is created. The mind tries to manipulate the body, and the body tries to manipulate the mind in subtle ways, or at least tries to sabotage it. This conflict creates confusion: all conflict is confusion. Because of conflict the fusion cannot happen: you cannot be one, you cannot be fused in one, hence confusion. And the ultimate result can only be schizophrenia. You go on fighting and fighting, and by and by you are no longer one individual, you become many – at least two, and if worse happens, then many – then you become a crowd. And when you are not one, you cannot be happy.

Happiness is a function of unity. Happiness is the music that happens when you are in unison, when everything fits together, when everything harmonizes, when there is no conflict not even a trace of it, when you are an orchestra not a crowd…. Nobody is trying to manipulate, nobody is trying to become the master, nobody is trying to exploit, oppress…the whole being is overflowing with joy.

Tao is spontaneity, it is not discipline, hence Tao is the ultimate in religion – no religion touches that peak. The moment a religion starts becoming a discipline, it has already fallen very low.

There are three stages of a religion. Just like there is childhood, youth and old age in the life of a man or a woman, so there are three stages in the life of a religion. When religion is born – the childhood of religion, when a master is alive, fresh, and the energy is flowing from the source and the fragrance is coming, when Buddha is alive or Lao Tzu is alive or Jesus is alive – then religion has its first, virgin, innocent state: the childhood. It is as fresh as the dewdrops in the morning, fresh as the roseflower, fresh as the stars, innocent; it knows no discipline, it knows only spontaneity.