According to Osho, yes: celebration is an unconditional attitude of witnessing life’s totality. Do not identify with misery; watch it as a deep, silent night that contains its own beauty and rest. By accepting both poles—happiness and sadness—you discover depth and rejuvenation. Celebration means gratitude for whatever arises, abandoning escape and interpretation, allowing awareness to transform even sorrow into a nourishing experience.
You can ‘celebrate’ sadness by not fighting it—just watch it kindly, like a quiet night, and be thankful it’s part of life.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Can you talk to us more about celebration? Is it possible to celebrate misery?
But when you are angry, you can't think of dancing. When you are sad, you can't think of singing. Why not make your sadness a song? Sing, play on your flute. In the beginning the notes will be sad, but nothing is wrong with a sad note. Have you heard, in the afternoon sometimes, when everything is hot, burning hot, fire all around, and suddenly from a mango grove you can hear a cuckoo start singing? In the beginning, the note is sad. She is calling her lover, her beloved, on a hot afternoon. Everything is fiery all around, and she is hankering for love. A very sad note, but beautiful. By and by, the sad note changes into a happy note. The lover starts responding from another grove. Now it is no more a hot afternoon; everything is cooling down in the heart. Now the note is different. When…
Osho, when should a person celebrate joy? When is celebration appropriate?
The emperor couldn’t make sense of what to do next. Chuang Tzu had said something astounding: with whom he had seen the colors of life—joys and sorrows, ups and downs—who had been like his shadow every moment, should he not even be able to bid her farewell with a song? That would be ungrateful. This is my gratitude, my “ah!”—I am only expressing my thankfulness. If you seek occasions for joy, you will never find them. If you know how to be joyful, every occasion is an occasion; every season a season. Every moment you will discover some device. What a marvelous man Chuang Tzu must have been—at such a moment he found a reason to play the tambourine! One should be such a person. So I say to you: celebrate every moment. “When is celebration appropriate?” Every moment is appropriate. Because only when you are in celebration are you…
You are at the peak of consciousness, you can celebrate, you are celebrating. But how can the ordinary person share with you in celebration?
Somewhere, Bertrand Russell has written that when for the first time he visited a primitive community of aboriginals living deep in some hills, he felt jealous, very, very jealous. He felt that the way they danced... it was as if everybody were an emperor. They had no crowns, but they had made crowns with leaves and with flowers. Every woman was a queen. They didn't have kohinoors, but whatsoever they had was too much, was enough. They danced the whole night and then they fell asleep, there on the dancing-ground. By the morning they were again back to work. They worked the whole day, and again by the evening they were ready to celebrate, to dance. Russell says, 'That day, I felt really jealous. I cannot do this.' Something has gone wrong. Something frustrates within you; you cannot dance, you cannot sing, something withholds. You live a crippled life. It…
Osho, I cannot accept happiness. It seems sorrow appeals to me. Yet I want happiness. When happiness comes, I can’t trust it. When happiness comes it feels like a dream. Please untangle my confusion!
Keep three things in mind. First, wherever in sorrow you have tied your vested interests, recognize them. Do not derive even the slightest profit from suffering; otherwise happiness will never be yours. Do not give sorrow a place in your life—by any excuse, any pretext. Uproot the weeds of suffering from the garden of your life; only then can roses bloom. And be very alert. For centuries sorrow has been taught. Your saints and sages tell you life is suffering. Your priests say you must suffer the fruits of sins from past lives—someone has to bear them. Endless ideas are thrust upon you for one purpose only: to make your suffering seem natural, inevitable. Supports are placed under your sorrow. Remove all supports and suffering collapses. These props you’ve leaned against—kick them away. You are not suffering the karmic fruits of past births—fruits don’t take that long! They are immediate.…
Osho, in the final stage of active meditation a quietness comes, yet a kind of sadness surrounds me. You say to celebrate—how can one celebrate in this sadness, and how to dance?
The day a society forgets how to dance, that day the society becomes sick. The indigenous people in the forests dance—and their health is of another order! They dance late into the night, under the stars, beneath the open sky. They dance like the stars themselves. They fall asleep tired—but in that tiredness there is no heaviness; there is a lightness in it. Then in the morning, when such a person wakes, his awakening is different from yours. You hardly sleep at all. Even in sleep you go on dreaming; even in sleep you keep the whole business of waking life going. You continue the same nightmares you saw while awake—same market, same friends, same enemies, the same hocus-pocus. You keep tossing and turning; even your sleep is not a peaceful event. Ask the forest-dwellers, “Did you dream?” You will rarely find one who says, “Yes, once in my life…