Being fully aware while creating or enjoying beauty can itself be your meditation and path to enlightenment.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Beloved master, a friend told us that she once heard you say that you want us to become enlightened in the most aesthetic way possible. Will you speak on the aesthetics of consciousness? Have you ever spoken of anything else?
Vadan and Iti, you have raised a very significant question. All the religions that have existed on the earth have been very unaesthetic, because they denied life, they denied all the beauties, all the flowers, all creativity, sensitivity. They killed millions of people's possibility of attaining to enlightenment through aesthetic creativity. They simply closed the door, and for centuries nobody has even asked the question, "Is it possible that just to be a musician is enough to become enlightened?" I say yes. Nobody will agree with me -- neither Mahavira nor Gautam Buddha nor Mohammed nor Jesus. Knowing it well, that the whole history will stand against me, I am absolutely certain that music can become meditation, that sculpture can become meditation, that dancing can become meditation, that painting can become meditation. These doors have simply been closed. It is one of the greatest crimes committed against man. And people…
Beloved master, I never did get turned on by classical music, and art galleries bored me silly. So, is it possible to go from the first layer, the head, to the third layer, the center, and sort of bypass all this aesthetic garbage?
If you are afraid of death, tortured by the idea of death, if you have nightmares about death, and you can paint many paintings of death, you will get rid of those ideas. You have brought them to the conscious from the unconscious. Anything that is brought to the conscious from the unconscious, you become free of it. But humanity has been doing just the opposite. We have been told for centuries to throw things from the conscious to the unconscious -- that's what repression is. Yes, in a way, you appear to have got free of them, but not really. In fact, they have gone deeper in you, they have sunk deeper in you. They will trouble you even more. Now they will control you from the unconscious and you will not even be aware of them. The whole approach of psychoanalysis is against repression: bring all that is…
As an artist, I tend to claim my perceptions, desiring recognition for sharing my visions with others. My ego is strong. How can the western artist be free of ego and transcend the dichotomy of the aesthetic and the spiritual?
If she loves and shares her being, in that sharing she is beautiful. There is no need even to say, "You are beautiful." If someone says it, okay; if somebody doesn't say it, that doesn't mean that it has not been said, because there are deeper ways to say things. Sometimes to remain silent is the only way to speak. I have heard, that in one museum in Europe, there is a piano on which Wagner used to play. A woman came there to see it, and she was just a learner, just knowing only the ABC of it. She immediately started playing on the piano. The guide was shocked, but he was a very polite man, so he remained silent. After a few strokes, the woman said that many great musicians must have come to the museum to see this piano of Wagner, and they all must have played…
The experience of bliss will give you for the first time, a beauty that is indestructible. Not only that, it will give you for the first time, an insight into the very phenomenon of beauty. Not only does it make you beautiful, it suddenly transforms the whole world. The whole world becomes beautiful because the world reflects you, it is a mirror. If you are carrying ugly things inside you those ugly things are bound to be reflected. From the trees, from the mountains, from the rivers, you cannot get more than that which you put in. And you don't have anything beautiful to put in. That's why people live such monotonous, bored lives.
What about art and enlightenment? When you are creating a poem, a painting sculpture, music, you can feel very close to the meditative state. Yet, it is not pure nothing-ness -- because it has an end, a goal. It also enhances the ego. Won't you ultimately have to transcend this kind of creativity?
ART DEPENDS ON YOU. If you are pathological, your art will be pathological. If you are enlightened, your art will be enlightened. The art carries your quality. If you go to Ajanta, Ellora or Khajuraho, you will find a totally different kind of art. If you listen to classical music, you will find a different quality of art. If you listen to modern music, a different kind of art will be found there. If you see Picasso's paintings, they ARE pathological. Something is ill -- something is ill in Picasso and something is ill in the world that Picasso is going to represent in those works of art. Never keep a Picasso painting in your bedroom, otherwise you will have nightmares. It is very representative of this society. The society is ill, neurotic, but the art depends on you. The art does not descend out of the blue, it comes…