Celebration

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, 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…

Beloved Osho, wherever you are, there is a festivity and celebration. What is this wonderful phenomenon?

Narendra, festivity and celebration are our natural states; you have just forgotten them. When you come to me, you suddenly remember that there is no need to be sad, no need to be miserable, that life wants you to sing and dance, that life is not serious, but playfulness. The ancient seers used to call it leela; that word can only be translated as 'playfulness'. It is God's playfulness. You just have to be reminded. Anybody who knows it... being close to him, you see your face in his mirror. And suddenly there is a remembrance, and your misery disappears -- because your misery is false, your sadness is false. Celebration is your truth. It has nothing to do with me; it is just that in my presence you forget for a moment your false mask of misery. Suddenly you-feel-a joy, a cheerfulness, a fragrance arising in you. It is…

And you have asked: “What is celebration?”

A very false form of vitaragata has become prevalent in this country—negational, negative, life-denying, celebration-denying. It teaches shrinking, not spreading. I teach you to expand. I hold that becoming vast is the way to come near Brahman. Our word “expansion” is itself a form of the word “Brahman.” Brahman means that which keeps on becoming vast, whose vastness knows no end—spreading and spreading. Bliss is expansion; misery is contraction. You have experienced it: when you are miserable you shrink completely. When you are miserable, you shut the doors and windows and lie in a corner. You want no one to meet you, no one to speak, no one to see you, and that nothing be seen. In great misery a person even commits suicide. That too is only the final device of contraction. One shrinks so much that one will no longer see the sun’s light, nor people’s faces, nor…