Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living)

by Osho

Drop all your scientific attitudes. Become a little more fluid, more melting, more merging. Let the flower speak to your heart, let the flower enter your being. Invite him—he is a guest! And then you will have some taste of mystery.

When such deep unity starts happening in many, many phases of your life, when all around you start having such tremendous experiences of disappearance, egolessness, nothingness … when the flower is there and you are not, the rainbow is there and you are not … when the clouds are roaming in the sky both within and without, and you are not … when there is utter silence as far as you are concerned—when there is nobody in you, just a pure silence, a virgin silence, undistracted, undisturbed by logic, thought, emotion, feeling—that is the moment of meditation. Mind is gone, and when mind is gone mystery enters.

Why don’t people trust? Because they don’t trust their intelligence. They are afraid, they are afraid that they may be cheated. They are afraid; that’s why they doubt. Doubt is out of fear.

Trust needs great intelligence, courage, integrity. It needs a great heart to go into it. If you don’t have enough intelligence, you protect yourself through doubt.

If you have intelligence, you are ready to go into the unknown because you know that even if the whole known world disappears and you are left in the unknown, you will be able to settle there. You will be able to make a home there in the unknown. You trust your intelligence. Doubt is on guard; intelligence keeps itself open because intelligence knows, “Whatsoever happens, I will be able to take the challenge, to respond adequately.” The mediocre mind has not that trust in itself. Knowledge is mediocre.

Don’t try to understand life. Live it! Don’t try to understand love. Move into love. Then you will know—and that knowing will come out of your experiencing. That knowing will never destroy the mystery: the more you know, the more you know that much remains to be known.

Life is not a problem. To look at it as a problem is to take a wrong step. It is a mystery to be lived, loved, experienced.

the mind that is always after explanations is an afraid mind. Because of great fear he wants everything to be explained.

And this I call maturity of mind: when somebody comes to the point of looking at life without any questions, and simply dives into it with courage and fearlessness.

So remember, there is a great difference between trust and belief. Trust is personal; belief is social. Trust you have to grow in; belief you can remain in, whatsoever you are, and belief can be imposed on you. Drop beliefs. The fear will be there—because if you drop belief, doubt arises. Each belief is forcing doubt into hiding somewhere, repressing doubt. Don’t be worried about it; let the doubt come.

Trust cannot be “cultivated”—and never try to cultivate it; that is what has been done by the whole of humanity. Cultivated trust becomes belief. Discover trust within yourself, don’t cultivate it. Go deeper into your being, to the very source of your being, and discover it.

Intelligence is intellect in tune with your heart. The heart knows how to trust.

young people are more generous; older people slowly become more miserly, more afraid. Death is coming close by, now money seems to be the only thing that can help. And if they have money then others may help them also; if they don’t have money even their own sons, their own daughters, won’t bother about them.

In the hands of the heart the intellect becomes intelligent. It is a transformation, a total transformation of energy. Then the person does not become an intellectual, he simply becomes wise.

Wisdom comes through the meeting of the heart and the intellect. And once you have learned the art of how to create a synchronicity between your heartbeats and the workings of your intellect, you have the whole secret in your hands, the master key to open all the mysteries.

You have only future, no past. That is the meaning of innocence.

The past corrupts because it gives you memories, experiences, expectations. All those combined together make you clever but not clear. They make you cunning but not intelligent. They may help you to succeed in the world, but in your innermost being you will be a failure. And all the success of the world means nothing compared to the failure that finally you are going to face, because ultimately only your inner self remains with you.

At the end only that remains which you had brought in the very beginning. You can take from this world only that which you have brought in.

In India it is common wisdom that the world is like a waiting room in a railway station; it is not your house. You are not going to remain in the waiting room forever. Nothing in the waiting room belongs to you—the furniture, the paintings on the wall … . You use them—you see the painting, you sit on the chair, you rest on the bed—but nothing belongs to you. You are just here for a few minutes, or for a few hours at the most, then you will be gone.

what is the joy if you go alone and engrave your name and nobody is there even to see?—because the real joy is that the whole world should see.

In this whole world what can you gain? What can you take away with you? Your name, your prestige, your respectability? Your money, your power—what? Your scholarship? You cannot take anything. Everything will have to be dropped here. And in that moment you will understand that all that you possessed was not yours; the very idea of possession was wrong. And because of that possession you were corrupted.

You had to be false, phony, pretending, because these are things that help you to succeed in the world. Authenticity is not going to help you. Honesty is not going to help you. Truthfulness is not going to help you. Without possessions, success, fame—who are you? You don’t know.

So this whole possessiveness becomes your identity. It gives you a false sense of being. That’s the ego.

Ego is not something mysterious, it is a very simple phenomenon. You don’t know who you are, and to live without knowing who you are is impossible.

You don’t know who you are, so some false identity is needed as a substitute. Your possessions give you that false identity.

One rich man, very rich, became in the end very frustrated, which is a natural outcome of all success. Nothing fails like success. Success is significant only if you are a failure. Once you succeed then you know that you have been cheated by the world, by the people, by the society. The man had all the riches but no peace of mind.

Knowing this simple principle, that wherever there is demand there is supply, the cunning and clever people have gone one step ahead. Now they say, “There is no need to wait for demand to happen, you can create the demand.” And that is the whole art of advertisement: it is creating demand.

Success takes all peace from your mind. It simply sucks everything that is significant in life: peace, silence, joy, love. It goes on taking everything away from you. Finally your hands are full of junk, and all that was valuable is lost. And suddenly you realize peace of mind is needed.

If mind is there, then peace is not. If peace is there, then mind is not.

but advice helps nobody.

In fact, only fools give advice, and only fools take advice. Wise people are very reluctant to give you advice because a wise man certainly knows that the only thing in the world which is given freely is advice, and that which is never taken by anybody is advice,

A wise man first prepares you so that you can take the advice. He does not simply give you advi...

Whatever you have, you start taking it for granted. You just have to be given an opportunity to lose it; then immediately you will become aware of what you have lost.

In a better world, every family will learn from children. You are in such a hurry to teach them. Nobody seems to learn from them, and they have much to teach you. And you have nothing to teach them.

Children bring so much from the other world because they are such fresh arrivals. They still carry the silence of the womb, the silence of the very existence.

The mind is very orthodox, very conservative. It wants to move into the track, the trodden path, again and again—the path of least resistance.

To grow to your destiny needs great courage, it needs fearlessness.

Life can only be lived dangerously—there is no other way to live it. It is only through danger that life attains to maturity, growth. One needs to be an adventurer, always ready to risk the known for the unknown. And once one has tasted the joys of freedom and fearlessness, one never repents because then one knows what it means to live at the optimum. Then one knows what it means to burn your life’s torch from both ends together. And even a single moment of that intensity is more gratifying than the whole eternity of mediocre living.

And because you cannot grow you have to find substitute growths. You cannot grow, but your bank balance can grow—that’s a substitute. It needs no courage, it is perfectly adjusted with your cowardliness. Your bank balance goes on growing and you start thinking that you are growing. You become more respectable. Your name and fame go on growing and you think you are growing? You are simply deceiving yourself. Your name is not you, neither is your fame you. Your bank balance is not your being. But if you think of the being you start shaking, because if you want to grow there then you have to drop all cowardice.

Memory creates the knot, the complex called “I,” the ego. And naturally this false entity called “I” is continuously afraid of death. That’s why you are afraid of the new.

This “I” is afraid, not really you. The being has no fear, but the ego has fear, because the ego is very very afraid of dying.

That’s why you don’t accept the new with joy. The ego cannot accept its own death with joy—how

Once you have seen that the ego is your past memory and nothing else, that you are not your memory, that memory is just like a biocomputer, that it is a machine, a mechanism, utilitarian, but you are beyond it … you are consciousness, not memory. Memory is a content in consciousness, you are consciousness itself.

Memory is your record. You are the one who is looking into the record, you are not the memory itself.

Your memory is not you. You are consciousness, memory is content. But memory is the whole life energy of the ego. Memory is of course old, and it is afraid of the new.

The new is a messenger from God, the new is a message from God. It is a gospel! Listen to the new, go with the new. I know you are afraid. In spite of the fear, go with the new, and your life will become richer and richer and you will be able one day to release your imprisoned splendor.

WE GO ON MISSING MANY THINGS in life just because we lack courage. In fact, no effort is needed to achieve—just courage—and things start coming to you rather than you going to them … at least in the inner world it is so.

And to me, to be blissful is the greatest courage.

To be miserable is very cowardly. In fact to be miserable, nothing is needed. Any coward can do it, any fool can do it. Everybody is capable of being miserable, but to be blissful, great courage is needed—it is an uphill task.

Everybody wants to be happy.” That is absolutely wrong. Very rarely does a person want to be happy—notwithstanding what they go on saying. Very rarely is a person ready to be happy—people have so much investment in their misery. They love to be unhappy … in fact they are happy in being unhappy.