Yes—but unless your mind and body are already separate, use your body in kirtan so your mind can follow inside.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
A friend has asked: Osho, regarding the pyramids of Egypt you have said that their civilization and culture were at a peak. But those people placed human corpses inside the pyramids—kept mummies—and put food and drink, clothes, jewelry, and such things, so that these might be useful on the journey after death. Please explain: if those people were so highly evolved, did they not know that none of this is of any use after death?
When Ramakrishna died, by custom his wife, Sarada, should have broken her bangles. Neighbors gathered and told her to break them. As she started to do so, she suddenly burst out laughing. People thought she had gone mad. And she refused to break the bangles. She said, “As I reached for my bangles, Ramakrishna’s words came to me—‘I shall never die.’ So his body may have been shed, but he has not died; therefore I cannot be a widow.” This is the first such moment in the entire history of India when a widow refused to be a widow upon her husband’s death. “If his soul is, then I am not a widow; I will wear these bangles.” And Sarada continued to wear the clothes of a married woman. Every day, at the time she used to go to Ramakrishna’s room, she would say to him, “Come, the meal is…
Question: Third question: Osho, please explain a little about kirtan-meditation. Kirtan is a very long journey—it is to dance with the Divine. If you have ever danced with a woman you loved, a certain grace descends into the dance, a certain quality appears. Dance with someone merely for form’s sake and the steps will happen, the motion will be there, but no juice will flow in the inner prana. Dance with one you love and the juice of passion flows. Kirtan is to dance with the Divine—the most Beloved. As ordinary erotic dance circles around the sex center, kirtan circles around the sahasrar, the crown. At the ultimate height of your being, flowers of dance bloom—thousands of lotuses open. O afflicted by life! Wait—do not commit suicide; your cure is not poison, but wine. Kirtan! The devotee says: Do not head toward suicide out of fear of life—are you mad?
Another friend has asked: During the night experiment, when we keep our attention on your eyes, you turn your face here and there, you look at different people, and it becomes a hindrance for us.
I did not tell you to keep your attention on my eyes. I said: keep your attention on me. Do not keep your attention on my eyes; keep it on me. Forget about my eyes. In the focus of your gaze, the whole of me should be there. Do not worry about the eyes.
Even when there is no sound it is there. The Zen people call it the sound of one hand clapping. It is their way of saying that it is not an ordinary sound which is created by clapping two hands. It is not a clash. It is unstruck. When you play on the sitar you have to strike, by your strokes you create the sound. There is a fight between you and the strings. You have to pull the strings to a certain tension and then relax them. This is called the struck sound. But the inner sound is unstruck, 'anahat'. Nobody is playing there and nobody is there. It is utter silence. Even you are not there, at least not as you know yourself. A very new awareness is there which has nothing to do with you.
A friend has asked, Osho, why should we be religious when neither the beginning nor the end is known, and there is no trace of God or soul? The enlightened ones speak of truth—if that truth is real, why can’t they make everyone experience it?
No one is telling you to be religious—at least Lao Tzu would not. The so-called religious people have created so much disturbance that it is better you do not become one of them. Lao Tzu does not say, “Be religious.” He simply says: be what you are. You may ask, why should I be what I am? Because that is the only thing you can be. There is no way to be anything else. Yes, you can try to be something else—and in that trying your life can be wasted. You may then say, why not waste life? No one can stop you. And precisely for this reason even the enlightened ones are defeated and cannot give you the knowledge of truth—because you say, why should we know the truth? What can the enlightened do? They can speak. They can try to awaken in you the thirst for the joy…