Dance

Osho, I am dancing here. I, who never danced. Far from dancing—I had never even thought I would dance. I am astonished at myself. I ask: what has happened to me?

Love has happened to you; religion has happened to you. You have begun to come toward your home. You have turned back. You have set out toward your source. The Ganges has started flowing back toward Gangotri. The current has reversed. Your first steps have begun to fall in the direction from which you came. And when the first steps fall that way, dance is born. The farther you go from the divine, the more dance is lost; gloom, frustration, melancholy spread through life. When you are very miserable, understand that you are very far from the divine. The rishis have described the divine as sat-chit-ananda—being, consciousness, bliss. Saraha says, Tilopa says: it is mahāsukha, the great bliss. That means the more you are in sorrow, the farther you are from it. The proportion of your sorrow is the proportion of your distance. The measure of your sorrow is the…

Osho, when does dance happen? You are always speaking of dance—what dance? And when does this dance happen?

Certainly I speak of dance, because for me dance itself is worship. Dance itself is meditation. There is no method more effortless than dance, no samadhi so natural. Dance is the most effortless, the simplest. For nowhere else can you melt your ego as easily as you can in dancing. If you can dance with a full heart, you will vanish. You will be effaced in the dance. Dance is a wondrous path of self-forgetfulness, a miraculous alchemy. And dance has another beauty: as you dance, your life-energy begins to flow. You have become inert. You were born to be a river; you have become a stagnant pond. You were born to flow; you have become blocked. Your life-energy must flow again, must gush forth again. Let the waves rise again. For a river one day reaches the ocean; a pond never does. A pond remains closed within itself. That…

Beloved Osho, the way you dance is absolutely unique and outrageous. What is the secret behind the Osho shake?

I have never thought in my life that there is going to be someday the Osho Shake! I don't know dancing, so it is going to be outrageous. And the secret is very simple: It is your love. I don't think any man in the whole history has been loved so much by so many intelligent people. Your love makes me dance. The secret is with you. I cannot believe it, because I don't deserve any love even from a single human being. But one million sannyasins around the earth -- it surprises me! And you are showering so much love that what else can I do? I can do a little Osho Shake!

Osho, the other night after darshan I dreamt that you sang "I'm a stranger in paradise" to me. It was incredible, and you were really good at it! Do you ever sing and dance, beyond the metaphorical use of the words? You are so full of grace. Would you do it now?

I AM doing it every moment... yes, even now. And not in a metaphorical sense but in as realistic a sense as possible. Singing or dancing to me mean much more than you understand by those words. Your meaning is very limited; my meaning is vast. It is not metaphorical but certainly vast, unbounded. In fact, once you become aware of your own being you cannot do anything else but sing, dance, celebrate. Before that your singing is not much of a singing, your laughter is not much of a laughter. In fact it is just its opposite. Once Friedrich Nietzsche was asked, "Why do you go on smiling and laughing about very small things which do not seem worth laughing at?" Nietzsche became very serious and said, "I laugh just out of fear. I laugh because if I don't laugh I am afraid I may start crying and weeping."…