Life: A song, a dance -Osho

This book is a collection of transcribed versions of 5 discourses during which he says that it takes courage to find the truth. People are not ready to give up their dreams and their dreaming.

They are not ready to drop the mind and move into the immediate.Only a few people have ever dared to discover truth.

It is risky, Osho warns us. It may shatter all that you have known before and you will have to re-arrange your whole life.

It is dangerous: it may destroy all your illusions, it may shatter all your dreams.

CONTENTS: 1. At the Center We are One2. Love and Centering: One Phenomenon3. In Love, Drop the Object4. Mind as a Master is a Disaster5. God is Because You are Full of Fear

About the Author

OSHO was born on 11 December 1931, and attained 'enlightenment' at the twenty-one, and went on to complete his academic studies. He spent several years teaching philosophy at the University of Jabalpur. By the late 1960, Osho had begun to develop his unique dynamic meditation techniques. He felt that modern man is so burdened with the archaic traditions of the past as well as the anxieties of modern-day living, that he must go through a deep cleansing process before he can hope to discover the thought-less relaxed state of meditation. In early 1970s, the West first began to hear of Osho. By 1974, a commune had been established around him in Pune, and the trickle of visitors from the West soon became a flood. Osho left his body on 19 January 1990. His talks have been published in more than six hundred volumes, and translated into over thirty languages.

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... some excerpts

In fact, they are all interested in knowledgeability;ignorance they want to destroy. They want to gain knowledge because knowledge will give them power, knowledge is power. Knowledge will give you prestige, money, respectability. Knowledge will fulfill many of your ambitions and desires.

Ignorance cannot do anything for you, but it can allow something which is far more precious than knowledge can ever give to you. But its whole secret is in allowing,. in patiently waiting - with a question mark in the heart, with a quest all over your being, a quest which is not partial, a total enquiry.

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Ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. Rightly understood, it is not something negative. It is simply a tabula rasa, a clean slate.

Nothing is written on it. You have to· write your own holy Bible, holy Koran, holy Gita; you'have to give birth.

Ignorance is a womb.

It contains the quest for truth - and if you don't fall victim to knowledgeability, ignorance is the right beginnmg.To know absolutelv that "I do not know," is the first step of wisdom.

You have known something of tremendous value: you have known your innocence, and in this innocence, the ego dies.

The ego can live only with the false

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it is the accumulation of the false. The ego is interested in knowledge - borrowed, third-hand, rotten ... but knowledge is cheap. _ To know by. experience is a risk. You may burn your fingers in the experiment.In the experiment, you are dropping out of the crowd and moving alone in this vast universe and you don't have any guide, any maps, any instructions. All that you have is a thirst
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The law of reverse effect is: there are things which 'ou can have but because you are .trying to get them, you will not be able to get them. It is like when you want to fall asleep in the night. You try all kinds of tricks but you· find that you cannot befool yourself - sleep is n. And they have a hierarchy - the feet cannot become the head. So whatever you are, you cannot change, you cannot transform yourself. You have to accept your fate - this has been the teaching for thousands of years.And the result is this miserable humanity.This is the conclusion of all your. religions and all your prophets and all your saviors. This is what they have done, this is how they have saved you. They don't seem around too much nowadays - perhaps they have saved you completely! They may have gone to save somebody else on some other planet, some other star.
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These saviors existed because we wanted somebody else to do this work of spiritual growth for us:. "Somebody else should do it." Nobody else can do it. It is your freedom to be miseI:able 'or to be blissful, to remain in darkness or to live a iif~ of light. This is the prerogative of human beings.The saviors are cheating you. To say to somebody, "I :ll'll1 goin~);t~ save you," means that the person stops his 'sear~h and' becomes only a shadow. He follows you.And remember, existence does not accept carbon copies; it needs the original. You have to take the whole responsibility for your life.And it is not a burden.

In fact, freedom can never be a burden.The moment you accept total responsibility, you become free to be whatever your nature demands, to be whatever your nature deserves.And only when you fulfill. your destiny - ah finding your path, risking everything for the search, then life is no more just vegetating.Then life is a song, a dance, a deep ecstasy._ But you have to drop the idea that anybody else can do it for you. You have to drop the idea that knowledge gathered from scriptures can do it. You have to be mature, you have to accept that "This is my life and only I can do something for it." In this way you become an individual.In this way you become free from organizational religions, in this way you become free from any political, philosophical ideologies.In this way you become innocent again.Y'our eyes are clean, have depth; your heart is ready to dance.And if you can forget yourself and start the dancing, start the singing....
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And when I say forget yourself, don'~ misunderstand me. Don't start emphasizing the fact of forgetting yourself - that will spoil the whole thing

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When I say forget yourself, I simply mean that when you are dancing, let the dance be there and the dancer dissolved into it.When you are singing then what is the need of the singer? Let the singer melt into the song, and each moment of life starts taking on the qualities of truth, of beauty, of blissfulness. You don't have to go anywhere. And you don't have to be anybody else, either.Wherever you are, whatever you are, exactly there - in silence, in peace - you can discover the very center of the universe.That center exists in everyone

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We are different only on the periphery; at ,the center we are one.That's why a person who has reached to his innermost core becomes a magnetic force - because he is now at the center and you are at the periphery; He has all the gravitation. If you just relax a little bit... because you are clinging with the periphery. A little relaxation and you will be pulled in.And while you are slipping into the presence of the master, you will find that a dark shadow of your own, which we call the ego, is leaving you. As you are coming closer to the master, the ego is leaving you. The moment you have come and there is no barrier between you and the master, you will be surprised: for the first time you don't have any weight. It is as if that ego was a mountain on you, and suddenly everything looks bright, fragrant, rosi~r.

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Life is simple.We make it complex by doing things against nature.There is only one religion, and that is nature. Allow nature to take you completely; allow yourself to be one with nature

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Anything that goes against nature.is against religion, is against spirituality, is against your ultimate welfare. So just listen to your nature - and your nature goes on telling you, but we are deaf. -I have heard.... In Tibet, two Buddhist monks were passing through the marketplace. One monk was very greedy. In fact, because of his greed it was suggested he renounce the world and become a monk; otherwise, Your future is going to be nothing but hell." He listened to many saints, tried many times, but again and again he thought about all the possessions he had collected, and he ~nt on postponing. One day the master called .him and said, "It is enough. Now I cannot wait; I am going to die tomorrow. Now you decide." Under such compulsion - it was almost blackmailhe got initiated, renounced the world. But that does not make any difference.The greed is inside you, not in the things. , So now it became attached to new things. He started collecting other things, with new names. He started collecting ancienf scriptures. .. .Both monks were passing through the market where there was so much crowd and so much bargaining and o much noise... and somebody's coin fell and he heard the sound. He said to the other monk, "Did you hear it?I just heard the sound of a coin falling on the road." The other monk said, "You are a miracle! In such a maddening crowd ... just the sound of a coin? You managed to hear it? You have to forgive me, I don't have that much sensitivity." They both went to the master and told him about the incident. The master said, "It is not insensitivity on your part - he is too sensitive towards coins! Even in a IllaJh~t, the sound of a coin... he knows no other music." Don't go against nature.
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All that you know is this small life, and in tIlls small life you know two things: the misery and the pain oflife, and ways and methods of forgetting that misery and pain. That you call your amusement, entertainmentgoing to a movie, to a circus. These are your ways to forget your life. There you became engaged for two or three hours in. a different world.

The enlightened person is certainly difficult for you to conceive of.It is just like if you smoke, you cannot conceive how millions of people go on without smoking. They must be missing! And the person who does not smoke is not missing anything except some nicotine, some poison that will kill you earlier than him. Otherwise, he is not missing anything.

The person who is an alcoholic carn'lot believe that the whole world goes on without the bottle. He cannot live even a single day without the bottle. He feels pity for you: "Poor fellows, they don't know that there is a way, through alcohol, to forget all the burdens oflife."

But he cannot conceive of a life which has no burdens at all to forget.And that is your position

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When you think about enlightenment, the problem is that you don't understand that the man who is enlightened is no more an ego

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You can insult· him but you cannot hurt him; you can abuse him, you can condemn him, and there will be no change in his being

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Even if you kill him he will remain the same.It is difficult for you to understand how an enlightened man can remain without going to circuses, movies ... and all kinds of stupidities are there

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But so few enlightened people have existed that not much is known about them. And much is such that unless you experience it, you cannot understand it

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For the enlightened person, everything that is going on around him is a circus. There is no need for him to purchase a ticket - his problem is how to get out of the circus! He does not want to go to the movie, he wants to get out!But wherever he go~s.. . .Just think of Gautam Buddha i~ Bombay.,...It is not difficult to infer why these people have declined to happen. Why no more Gautam Buddhas, .\1ahaviras, Bodhidharmas, Zarathustras? Where have all these tremendously beautiful people disappeared to?Why are they not more available to us?Because humanity has grown so much - just in the proportion. . . .In India there were only two million people in the time of Buddha. Now there are nine hundred million people in India. Just looking at the proportion, at least a dozen Buddhas are absolutely needed!But that,kind of person has disappeared - and he has . appeared because what you call life he has found to be nothing but slow death. And he has found the real life.Once a person finds the real life, why he should come nack into a ~iserable world?But your question is relevant. You feel afraid that :itting silently for thousands of years is going to be difficult.But yon don't know tha~ if you are silent, time stops.There are no more ten thousand years, ten million years, . othing. Just a simple now.When mind is s¥ent, time disappears because mind . time.ow you are worried that in life there is so much -rama, and the enlightened man ... what is he going to -0 for eternity?What drama you are talking about?
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One idiot slipping on a banana peel? And everybody starts laughing.,. this is not compassionate. Even if that man is a banana, he has every right to slip on a banana peel. He is not harming anybody, just doing some special kind of yoga. But why are you laughing?Your life is full of sadness and you are in search ...wherever there is a possibility to laugh, some sadness is thrown away, some burden is thrown away. Certainly, ~n enlightened person will not be laughing. There is no need. The laughter is needed because of your sadness, it is an antidote to sadness. The enlightened man is so blissful... and remember, blissfulness is not happiness.That's where things always become confused.Happiness is momentary: on both sides of happiness there is unhappiness.Blissfulness has no opposite to it, there is no such thing as "unblissfulness." There is only blissfulness, and that blissfulness is not dependent on anybody else or anything outside the enlightened being himself.His source of bliss is within his own being.He is shining, radiating vvhat he has experienced.And the more he shares it, the more it goes on growing.Time has no existence for him any more. .He lives in the moment. And he lives so totally and so intensely that there is no space for any sadness or any misery to enter.But don't ·decide anything before experiencing at least a little sample. Experience a little meditation and it will be the answer to your question. Because one day you will find that you are sitting silently and so joyful, for no reason at all.The moment one becomes enlightened, one becomes blissfulness, one becomes benediction. Time and space both disappear.He becomes one with the whole.
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Then stars are within him, flowers are within him, skies upon skies are within him. Then birds on the wing are within him.Right now everything is outside you.Enlightenment brings everything inside you.It spreads you far and wide, to infinities. Many such questions will arise, but don't just intellectually think about them. Otherwise, you will be missing the real juice of life.Experiment.Your questions should come out of your experiments; then they will be existential and they will be of immense help for your growth.
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