According to Osho, celebration is never a matter of timing or conditions; it is your natural state. Don’t postpone joy for special days or achievements—celebrate now, in every moment. Make celebration a way of living, independent of success or failure, wealth or poverty. Existence is already in festivity; simply drop the stinginess toward happiness and dive in, always.
Celebrate right now, for no reason, because being joyful is what you are.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
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…
Life is not to be renounced but experienced, lived, loved, because it is only at the innermost core of life that you will feel the presence of god. Hence my sannyasins have to be lovers of life, and they have to be dancers, singers, musicians, poets, creators, because the fundamental of my religion is, if you want to come closer to the creative energy of existence you have to be creators yourself. That's the only way to come close to the creative energy, or call it the creator. By your becoming creative, you start participating in god's creation. Celebrate -- don't miss a single opportunity to celebrate. Go on searching for opportunities to celebrate. If you cannot find them, invent them, because the whole point is celebration, not whether there is a real opportunity or a fictitious opportunity -- that doesn't matter.
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…
What is the essence of celebration?
That's what we are doing here, and you are asking about the essence. Why not have a taste of it yourself? But mind is such, it makes questions out of everything: "What is celebration?" Rather than dancing, rather than laughing, rather than loving, rather than enjoying this silence, the mind asks: "What is celebration?" Mind is something like a tree on which questions grow, and you answer one question and out of that one question, another question will come up. Everybody knows what celebration is. I have never come across a person who does not know what celebration is. Just rejoicing in your being, just rejoicing in this moment, this tremendous universe. You had not asked for it, you have simply been given a universe which is infinite and eternal. You have not asked and you have been given a consciousness which is eternal, which can become festive. If you…