According to Osho, the urge to create is the first stirring of the divine—the presence of God knocking at your door. It is the birth of prayer: when you create, the ego dissolves and God moves through you. Therefore choose the new and unknown; follow the creative call. If this energy isn’t expressed creatively, it inverts into destructiveness. Creativity itself is religion and communion.
When you feel like making something, that’s the divine wanting to move through you—say yes and lose yourself in it, or the pent-up energy can turn messy and harmful.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
What is this urge to create?
THE URGE TO CREATE is the first stirring of the divine within you. The urge to create is the presence of God. You have the first message, the first ripple has reached to you. It is the beginning and the birth of prayer. Follow it. To be creative is to be religious. What you create is not the point -- you create. In that very creativity something starts happening which is not of the world. When you create you are lost into your creation. For example, if you are painting or singing or playing on an instrument or dancing, you start disappearing. The dance is really when the dancer is no more. If the dancer is still there then it is not a creative act, then it is at the most a skill. The technician is there but not the dancer -- one who knows how to dance is there…
What is this urge to do something, to create? To free your message, your word, unto the world? I feel like I am in a hurry and that all the people in the commune have the same feeling. It is as if there is no time left, as if any day, this very moment, can be the last moment. Am I dying? I am exploding each and every moment. What is that? What is this urge? Please say something for this thirst.
Sarjano, man is dying, mankind is dying. And in fact there is not much time left. And this is felt not only here around the commune, it is felt everywhere by sensitive, intelligent, creative people. Only the mediocre are unaware of it; only the politicians go on rushing into the danger, the calamity, that awaits, totally unaware where they are going and where they are leading the world. But people of sensitivity, awareness, meditativeness, people of the heart, are everywhere feeling that the danger is very close, that mankind can commit suicide any moment, that the future was never so uncertain as it is today, that the tomorrow may really never come. These are moments of great turmoil, but they can become of great creativity too. When one is encountering death, one can bring one's total potential into manifestation. When there is no time left you cannot postpone. Hence the…
Beloved Osho, I feel a strong urge to create something in my life. I write songs and would like to sing them. They express my feelings and maybe because I feel you inside me, they also express a little bit of you. Can you please say something about the dividing line between expressing neuroses and the creation of something of beauty? Is it good for me to go on this trip?
And the doctor said one day, "It is not gone, it has come to me! Whole hours listening to you -- the same story! And I know no medicine can work because it has not come from my grandfather it has come from your grandfather, and in the whole literature of homeopathy, there is no mention of what to do if some disease from somebody else's grandfather comes to you. Now I have to suffer. How long will you be staying here?" I said, "As long as you want," because he was free and there would have been no problem. But the next morning the doctor had left to a nearby hill station. After seven days, he phoned. "Is your father still there? Because I am a poor doctor and I cannot manage to stay in this hill station, it is too costly." I said, "He has gone, you can…
And the person who enters through the door called good is the person who tries to live a life of simplicity, innocence, purity -- the virtuous one. And by the virtuous I don't mean the moralist. The moralist is an egoist. He is cunning, calculative. His morality is not much, his morality is just a policy; hence he says 'Honesty is the best policy.' It is politics. He is playing a game. He is trying to deceive even god. He is only pretending to be good, he is not good. To be virtuous is totally different. It is not a question of having a good character. It is a question of having more consciousness in your being, not conscience but consciousness. Conscience makes character, consciousness creates virtue. When you are alert, more alert than people ordinarily are, you have the capacity to see what is right and what is wrong.
Once you have an eye to see god, you will find him in every rock, ready to be released. You can touch him and you will feel his breathing. You can touch him and you will feel his warmth. You can touch him and you will feel his response. But that happens only when you really look for him, otherwise not. When you put your total energy into looking, when your whole life energy flows through your eyes... when the intensity is total -- more you cannot do -- then he is there, visible. Ordinarily he is invisible. I give you this name: deva agochara... god invisible. I give you this name as a challenge. He has to be made gochara -- he has to be made visible. I give you this rock... you have to release god from it. And I can see it....