What is the relationship between art and enlightenment?

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…

Beloved Osho, since you first spoke about subjective and objective art, the artist and the mystic, a deep reflection has been triggered in me. I'm confused concerning meditation and doing. I have always felt my art to be my meditation, but is it still not a doing? I notice the difference when sitting in vipassana. Must art and sculpture even, fade away into non-doing? Can creativity on the material plane be truly meditative? Will my art remain solely subjective until the ego agrees to commit suicide?

Deva Darpana, the distinction between the subjective and the objective art is basically based on meditation. Anything that comes out of the mind will remain subjective art, and anything that comes out of no-mind, out of silence, out of meditation, will be objective art. This definition is simple and will destroy your confusion. Whether you are creating something -- you may be a sculptor, you may be a carpenter, you may be a painter, a poet, a singer, a musician -- all that has to be remembered is that it is coming out of a silence within you, that it has a spontaneity. It is not prearranged, preprogrammed, pre-thought. As you are creating something you go on being surprised yourself -- you have left yourself in the hands of existence. Now your hands are not your own hands. They are simply following what the existence longs for. You are not…

Beloved master, please share with us your vision of the benefits of the arts for our process of growing towards ourselves, in therapy, meditation, worship.

The arts can be immensely helpful in therapy, in spiritual growth, in your meditations. But it is taking a hard and long way unnecessarily. The shortcut is: first, meditation, and then out of meditation comes creativity of its own accord. Otherwise, it is a long journey; even one life may not be enough. For example, the paintings of Picasso are nothing but his nightmares, as if somebody is not painting but vomiting. It has helped him to relieve himself of his tensions, schizophrenia, paranoia and all kinds of mental repressions. But it is not of much use to you. In fact, if you go on looking at a Picasso painting for a long time, you will feel sick, because it is vomiting. You will start feeling nauseous. This is not real art. The people who created the Taj Mahal -- that is real art. They were Sufi mystics who knew…

I cannot put it into words how much I am always touched by the beauty of your expressions -- in your words, your gestures and now especially in your paintings. What exactly happens, when you are sitting in front of an empty paper? Is there still an urge for artistic creativity when one is enlightened? Could you please tell us about zen and art and creativity?

Zen prevents you from nothing. It opens everything that is potential in you. If you have a potentiality of being a painter, Zen will open it -- you may not have been aware of it. If there is a potentiality for poetry, Zen will open that potentiality, and for the first time you will start thinking in poetry, not in prose. The same is true about music or dance, or scientific exploration. Any kind of original experiences, Zen allows you. It is not preventive of anything. It is affirmative, the most affirmative experience in life. It simply makes you aware of all that is hidden in you, of all that you have never looked at. It not only makes you aware, it helps you to explore that potentiality. Zen is not a dry, desertlike experience, it is very juicy, a beautiful garden -- a spring in your life where flowers…

How blind I have been! There are so many signposts I have missed, and now I am wondering about those who wrote the signs. These days I'm discovering so many traces of how reality truly is through words of others and ask, "where were they?" especially some of the english poets, shakespeare and bob dylan. Did they realize what they were saying? Are they consciously sharing their glimpses? (t.s. Eliot, lewis carroll)

Now this is the whole foundation of Zen Buddhism. This is the whole foundation of Sufism: FANA, all disappears. But Octavio Paz is not a mystic. He's not a Buddha. He's as ordinary as you are. Just one thing is special about him: your doors never open, his doors sometimes -- one knows not how and why -- open. Just a wind comes and flings the door open, then another wind comes and closes it. Maybe your doors are tightly shut; his doors are not so tightly shut. A poet is between you and the mystic. A poet is a little more loose than you are, a little less frozen than you are. Sometimes he melts, sometimes he allows himself to melt. That's what happens when you take a drug: your chemistry changes and you melt. It can happen through alcohol, it can happen through hashish. It can happen through…