Do you ever sing and dance, beyond the metaphorical use of the words?

Osho, the other night after darshan I dreamt that you sang "I'm a stranger in paradise" to me. It was incredible, and you were really good at it! Do you ever sing and dance, beyond the metaphorical use of the words? You are so full of grace. Would you do it now?

I AM doing it every moment... yes, even now. And not in a metaphorical sense but in as realistic a sense as possible. Singing or dancing to me mean much more than you understand by those words. Your meaning is very limited; my meaning is vast. It is not metaphorical but certainly vast, unbounded. In fact, once you become aware of your own being you cannot do anything else but sing, dance, celebrate. Before that your singing is not much of a singing, your laughter is not much of a laughter. In fact it is just its opposite. Once Friedrich Nietzsche was asked, "Why do you go on smiling and laughing about very small things which do not seem worth laughing at?" Nietzsche became very serious and said, "I laugh just out of fear. I laugh because if I don't laugh I am afraid I may start crying and weeping."…

Osho, when does dance happen? You are always speaking of dance—what dance? And when does this dance happen?

Certainly I speak of dance, because for me dance itself is worship. Dance itself is meditation. There is no method more effortless than dance, no samadhi so natural. Dance is the most effortless, the simplest. For nowhere else can you melt your ego as easily as you can in dancing. If you can dance with a full heart, you will vanish. You will be effaced in the dance. Dance is a wondrous path of self-forgetfulness, a miraculous alchemy. And dance has another beauty: as you dance, your life-energy begins to flow. You have become inert. You were born to be a river; you have become a stagnant pond. You were born to flow; you have become blocked. Your life-energy must flow again, must gush forth again. Let the waves rise again. For a river one day reaches the ocean; a pond never does. A pond remains closed within itself. That…

Osho, “Ab main nachyo bahut, Gopal”—thus sings the devotee. Does the knower, like the devotee, also sing?

In the knower’s life the same event happens—of zero, or of fullness—but in another way. The knower frees himself from the Thou. That is why Mahavira says, “What God? There is no God. Appa so paramappa—the self itself is the Supreme Self. In my pure perfection, I am God.” Therefore the knower says: “Aham Brahmasmi.” “Ana’l-Haqq.” Other than me, who? So the knower diminishes the Thou, diminishes and diminishes, until a moment comes when the Thou becomes zero and only the I remains. But then the I cannot remain either. To keep the I, a little Thou is needed. The day the I alone remains and the Thou becomes zero, in that very moment the I also disappears. They go together. And when the I disappears, a unique celebration is born. But the knower will not dance; the celebration happens so deeply within, and the knower is inward-turned. These are…

Osho, I am dancing here. I, who never danced. Far from dancing—I had never even thought I would dance. I am astonished at myself. I ask: what has happened to me?

Love has happened to you; religion has happened to you. You have begun to come toward your home. You have turned back. You have set out toward your source. The Ganges has started flowing back toward Gangotri. The current has reversed. Your first steps have begun to fall in the direction from which you came. And when the first steps fall that way, dance is born. The farther you go from the divine, the more dance is lost; gloom, frustration, melancholy spread through life. When you are very miserable, understand that you are very far from the divine. The rishis have described the divine as sat-chit-ananda—being, consciousness, bliss. Saraha says, Tilopa says: it is mahāsukha, the great bliss. That means the more you are in sorrow, the farther you are from it. The proportion of your sorrow is the proportion of your distance. The measure of your sorrow is the…

Osho, something inside has become suspended, and the whole body is in a dance all the time; please say something.

And therefore within, a rhythm of dance is sounding; within, a dance is on. Only when the mind halts does the dance awaken. Only when the mind halts do unfamiliar, ever-new songs arise. When the mind halts, windows open; new breezes, fresh winds of existence begin to ripple through your very life-breath. No sooner do you “die” here than life begins to descend there. Your death is the beginning of the supreme life. Your crucifixion on one side, and on the other side you sit enthroned. The cross and the throne are two sides of the same coin. My senses were lost before Your coming; we ourselves were lost before attaining You. So it will be. The mind will be lost—who will be left to keep awareness? The mind will break—where will the ego remain? The ego is only a construct of the mind, a mirage of the mind. The…