Celebrating Your Existence

LIFE
Life is insecurity. Each moment is a move into more and more insecurity. It is a gamble. One never knows what is going to happen. And it is beautiful that one never knows. If it was predictable, life would not be worth living. If everything was as you would like it to be, and everything was certain, you would not be a man at all, you would be a machine. Only for machines is everything secure and certain.

LOVE Love can exist in two dimensions: either as horizontal or as vertical. We are acquainted with the love which is horizontal. That is also the dimension of time; the vertical is the dimension of eternity.

LAUGHTER
Playfulness is one of the most repressed parts of human beings. All societies, cultures, civilizations, have been against playfulness because the playful person is never serious. And unless a person is serious, he cannot be dominated, he cannot be made ambitious, he cannot be made to desire power, money, prestige.

LIFE LOVE LAUGHTER Nederlands

Celebrating Your Existence

Op tafel ligt voor me het helderblauwe, welbekende, boek van Osho: Life Love Laughter. Het is na jaren van afwezigheid opnieuw uitgebracht door St. Martins Griffin in New York, een uitgever van buitenaf. En daaruit blijkt dat dit boek belangrijk wordt gevonden.
Leven, daar begint het allemaal mee. Maar Osho heeft regelmatig aangetoond, dat wij niet weten wat leven is. De conditionering volgens de godsdiensten is gericht tegen het leven. Hoe kunnen wij dan weten wat leven is?
Osho is de eerste mysticus die de nadruk legt op het scheppen van ons eigen leven hier en nu. Eeuwenlang is het leven uitgesteld en opgeofferd voor een niet bestaand leven in de hemel.
Het gaat erom ieder moment totaal te leven en elke druppel sap uit het leven te persen.Het leven bevestigen en het ten volle leven, dat is waar het om gaat.

Het boek Life Love Laughter, met bijgesloten Dvd, is verkrijgbaar bij de Boekhandel.

Impressie van Life Love Laughter

In this collection of reflections, Osho’s inspiring and loving stories go far beyond the usual chicken-soup fare. Life Love Laughter establishes a new genre of reflective and inspirational text stripped of all platitudes and clichés, and absolutely in tune with the realities of the 21st century. In this artful work, Osho mixes entertainment and inspiration, ancient Zen stories and contemporary jokes to help us to find love, laughter, and ultimately, happiness.

Life Love Laughter includes an original talk by Osho on DVD. This visual component enables the reader to experience the direct wisdom and humor of Osho straight from the source.

Seriousness is a kind of disease: it is the cancer of the soul.
It is only through love and laughter and a tremendous joy in life that you start feeling the presence of something that is beyond.
When life becomes an adventure, a dance of ecstasy, then only do you move beyond the confinement of the body and the mind and soar high towards the infinite.
If you can love and if you can laugh, totally, wholeheartedly, your life will become such a bliss and a benediction, not only to yourself but to everyone else. You will be a blessing to the world.

Life
Life is insecurity. Each moment is a move into more and more insecurity. It is a gamble. One never knows what is going to happen. And it is beautiful that one never knows. If it was predictable, life would not be worth living. If everything was as you would like it to be, and everything was certain, you would not be a man at all, you would be a machine. Only for machines is everything secure and certain.

Man lives in freedom. Freedom needs insecurity and uncertainty. A real man of intelligence is always hesitant because he has no dogma to rely upon, to lean upon. He has to look and respond.

Lao Tzu says, ‘I am hesitant, and I move alertly in life because I don’t know what is going to happen. And I don’t have.any principle to follow. I have to decide every moment. I never decide beforehand. I have to decide when the moment comes!’

Then one has to be very responsive. That’s what responsibility is. Responsibility is not an obligation, responsibility is not a duty — it is a capacity to respond. A man who wants to know what life is has to be responsive. That is missing. Centuries of conditioning have made you more like machines. You have lost your manhood, you have bargained for security. You are secure and comfortable and everything has been planned by others. And they have put everything on the map, they have measured everything. This is all absolutely foolish because life cannot be measured, it is immeasurable. And no map is possible because life is in constant flux. Everything goes on changing. Nothing is permanent except change. Says Heraclitus, ‘You cannot step in the same river twice.’

And the ways of life are very zig-zag. The ways of life are not like the tracks of a railway train. No, it does not run on tracks. And that’s the beauty of it, the glory of it,.the poetry of it, the music of it — that it is always a surprise.
If you are seeking for security, certainty, your eyes will become closed. And you will be less and less surprised and you will lose the capacity to wonder. Once you lose the capacity to wonder, you have lost religion. Religion is the opening of your wondering heart. Religion is a receptivity for the mysterious that surrounds us.

Don’t seek security; don’t seek advice on how to live your life. People come to me and they say, ‘Osho, tell us how we should live our life.’ You are not interested in knowing what life is, you are more interested in making a fixed pattern. You are more interested in killing life than in living it. You want a discipline to be imposed on you.
There are, of course, priests and politicians all over the world who are ready, just sitting waiting for you. Come to them and they are ready to impose their disciplines on you. They enjoy the power that comes through imposing their own ideas upon others.

I’m not here for that. I am here to help you to become free. And when I say that I am here to help you to become free, I am included. I am to help you to become free of me also. My sannyas is a very paradoxical thing. You surrender to me in order to become free. I accept you and initiate you into.sannyas to help you to become absolutely free of every dogma, of every scripture, of every philosophy — and I am included in it. Sannyas is as paradoxical — it should be — as life itself is. Then it is alive.

So the first thing is: don’t ask anybody how you should live your life. Life is so precious. Live it. I am not saying that you will not make mistakes, you will. Remember only one thing — don’t make the same mistake again and again. That’s enough. If you can find a new mistake every day, make it. But don’t repeat mistakes, that is foolish. A man who can find new mistakes to make will be growing continuously — that is the only way to learn, that is the only way to come to your own inner light.

Love
There is deep in myself a Yearning for the permanency of love.
Is that stupid?

Love can exist in two dimensions: either as horizontal or as vertical. We are acquainted with the love which is horizontal. That is also the dimension of time; the vertical is the dimension of eternity.

The yearning in the heart is not for permanency; there you have misunderstood. But that misunderstanding is almost universal because we know only one plane: the horizontal, the dimension of time. In that dimension there are only two possibilities: either something is momentary OR permanent. But the permanent is nothing but many moments; that too begins and ends. Permanency is not eternal, it cannot be. Nothing can be eternal in time. That which is born in time is bound to die in time. If there is a beginning, there is an end.

And your love begins; it begins at a certain moment in time. Then it is bound to end. Yes, it can end sooner or later. If it ends quickly you call it momentary; if it takes a little longer time to end you call it permanent. But permanency also is not going to fulfill the heart, because the heart longs for that which does not end at all, which is forever. It is the longing for God. God is another name for eternal love.

Jesus says: God is love. And that is one of the greatest statements ever made. Love becomes synonymous with God. If you can know the eternal love you have known God. Nothing is left, all is fulfilled.

But the mind knows nothing of eternity. The heart yearns for the eternal, but the heart is continuously being interpreted by the mind. And mind knows only either a very short-lived love or a little long-lived love. But even if love lives a little longer the fear will always be there that it is going to end. And your fear is right — it is going to end. In fact, it will be longer if you are unintelligent. If you are very very thick and very very unintelligent it will take a long long time for you to understand the futility of it all. If you are very intelligent it can end quickly because you will see that there is nothing much in it.Life Love Laughter

The more intelligent a person is, the more short-lived will be his love — love as you know it. That’s why as humanity is becoming more intelligent, love is becoming a short-lived phenomenon. In the past it was almost perm anent; there was nothing like divorce. In uneducated countries still there is nothing like divorce. The more a country becomes educated, cultured, sophisticated, the rate of divorce increases, in the same proportion, for the simple reason that people can see that they get bored with each other. Then there is no point in dragging it on; then it is better to finish it.Life Love Laughter

But the mind can finish one thing and immediately substitute another illusion, again and again. Mind is a non-learner. Even the intelligent person remains a non-learner. And the mind has become so powerful that anything coming from the heart never reaches you, your being, uninterpreted by the mind.

The heart says eternity and the mind interprets permanency. That’s where you are missing the point. The yearning of the heart is for a vertical dimension; that is the dimension of meditation. Mind lives horizontally; hence the mystics of all the ages have realized the fact that mind and time are not two different things: mind is time. Mind cannot live vertically; mind lives in the past, in the future. For the mind, present is non-existential. From the past to the future mind goes on moving. The present seems to be only a passage from the past to the future…

Laughter
Playfulness is one of the most repressed parts of human beings. All societies, cultures, civilizations, have been against playfulness because the playful person is never serious. And unless a person is serious, he cannot be dominated, he cannot be made ambitious, he cannot be made to desire power, money, prestige.

The child never dies in anyone. It is not that the child dies when you grow, the child remains. Everything that you have been is still within you, and will remain within you until your very last breath.Life Love Laughter

But society is always afraid of nonserious people. Nonserious people will not be ambitious for money, or political power; they would rather enjoy existence. But enjoying existence cannot bring you prestige, cannot make you powerful, cannot fulfill your ego; and the whole world of man revolves around the idea of the ego. Playfulness is against your ego — you can try it and see. Just play with children, and you will find your ego is disappearing, you will find that you have become a child again. It is not only true about you, it is true about everyone.

Because the child within you has been repressed, you will repress your children. Nobody allows their children to dance and to sing and to shout and to jump. For trivial reasons — perhaps something may get broken, perhaps they may get their clothes wet in the rain if they run out — for these small things a great spiritual quality, playfulness, is completely destroyed.Life Love Laughter

The obedient child is praised by his parents, by his teachers, by everybody; and the playful child is condemned. His playfulness may be absolutely harmless, but he is condemned because there is potentially a danger of rebellion. If the child goes on growing with full freedom to be playful, he will turn out to be a rebel. He will not be easily enslaved; he will not be easily put into armies to destroy people, or to be destroyed himself.

The rebellious child will turn out to be a rebellious youth. Then you cannot force marriage on him; then you cannot force him into a particular job; then the child cannot be forced to fulfill the unfulfilled desires and longings of the parents. The rebellious youth will go his own way. He will live his life according to his own innermost desires — not according to somebody else’s ideals.
The rebel is basically natural… Life Love Laughter