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

by Osho

a miserable person never accepts the responsibility—that is his way of remaining miserable. He says, “Somebody else is making me miserable.”

A man really becomes a man when he accepts total responsibility—he is responsible for whatsoever he is. This is the first courage, the greatest courage.

Very difficult to accept it, because the mind goes on saying, “If you are responsible, why do you create it?” To avoid this we say that somebody else is responsible: “What can I do? I am helpless … I am a victim!

Nobody, no other force, is doing anything to you. It is you and only you. This is the whole philosophy of karma—that it is your doing; karma means doing. You have done it and you can undo it. And there is no need to wait, to delay. Time is not needed—you can simply jump out of it!

But we have become habituated. We will feel very lonely if we stop being miserable, we will lose our closest companion. It has become our shadow—it follows us everywhere. When nobody is there at least your misery is with you—one is married to it.

Fear is nothing but absence of love. Do something with love, forget about fear. If you love well, fear disappears.

Darkness does not exist, it only appears to be. In fact it is just an absence of light. Light exists; remove the light—there is darkness.

You can bring a sword and try to kill the darkness: you will only be exhausted. And finally the mind will think, “Darkness is so powerful, that’s why I am defeated.”

You are not impotent; darkness is impotent. In fact darkness is not there—that’s why you could not defeat it.

Menta model forr overthinking and expectations

If you feel there is fear in your being, love more. Be courageous in love, take courage. Be adventurous in love; love more, and love unconditionally, because the more you love the less will be the fear. And when I say love I mean all the four layers of love, from sex to samadhi. Love deeply.

When I say it will dispel all fear I don’t mean that you will become brave, because brave people are nothing but cowards upside down. When I say all fear will disappear I mean there will be no cowardice and no bravery.

Bravery is not fearlessness; it is fear well protected, well defended, armored.

Love people—unconditionally. If you have some conditions in the mind then you will never be able to love; those conditions will become barriers. Because love is beneficial to you, why bother about conditions?

It is so beneficial, it is such a deep well-being—love unconditionally, don’t ask anything in return. If you can come to understand that just by loving people you grow in fearlessness, you will love for the sheer joy of it!

Everybody creates conditions; love disappears.

Whenever love happens it is a part of freedom;

When you fall in love everything looks beautiful, because in those moments you don’t put conditions.

In the first place love helps those who love. In the second place it helps those who are being loved.

And the more you love, the more you become lovable. The less you love and the more you demand that others should love you, the less and less you are lovable, the more and more you become closed, confined to your ego.

Fear is a feeling of no contact with existence.

The whole of humanity has been trained for other things, not for love. To kill, we have been trained. And armies exist, years of training to kill! To calculate, we have been trained;

“You create a home, but let us arrange it so we have some say in it. And don’t fall in love—because when you fall in love, the love becomes the whole world.” If it is an arranged marriage it is just a social affair; you are not in love, your wife is not your whole world, your husband is not your whole world.

The society does not allow love because if a person is really in deep love he cannot be manipulated.

If you love, you have tasted something of life; you would not like death and killing people. When you don’t love you have not tasted something of life; you love death.

Fear kills, wants to kill. Fear is destructive; love is a creative energy. When you love you would like to create—you may like to sing a song, or paint, or create poetry, but you would not take a bayonet or an atom bomb and go rushing off madly to kill people

If you understand me well, drop all fears and love more—and love unconditionally. Don’t think that you are doing something for the other when you love; you are doing something for yourself. When you love it is beneficial to you. So don’t wait; don’t say that when others love, you will love—that is not the point at all. Be selfish. Love is selfish. Love people—you will be fulfilled through it, you will be getting more and more blessedness through it.

The third love energy is prayer. Religions, organized churches, have destroyed it. They have given you ready-made prayers. Prayer is a spontaneous feeling. Remember this story when you pray. Let your prayer be a spontaneous phenomenon. If even your prayer cannot be spontaneous, then what will be? If even with God you have to be ready-made, then where will you be authentic and true and natural?

Say things that you would like to say. Talk to God as you would talk to a wise friend. But don’t bring formalities in. A formal relationship is not a relationship at all. And you have become formal with God also? You miss all spontaneousness.

Bring love into prayer. Then you can talk! It is a beautiful thing, a dialogue with the universe. But have you watched? If you are really spo...

If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, a rose, people will think you are mad. If you go to the church and talk to the cross or to an image, nobody will think you are mad, they will think you are religious. You are talking to a stone in the temple and ...

If you talk to a rose, which is more alive than any stone image, which is more divine than any stone image … If you talk to a tree, which is more deeply rooted in God than any cross because no cross has roots, it is a dead thing—that’s why it kills … A tree is alive, with roots deep into the earth, branches high into the sky, connected with the whole, with the rays of the sun, with the stars—talk to the trees! That can be a contact point with the divine. But if you talk that way people will thi...

Prayer is to be in love—to be in love with the whole. And sometimes you get angry with the whole and you don’t talk; that’s beautiful! You say, “I will not talk, enough is enough, and you have not been listening to me!” A beautiful gesture, not dead. And sometimes you drop praying completely, because you go on praying and God is not listening. It is a relationship with deep involvement in it, you get angry. Sometimes you feel very good, feel thankful, grateful; sometimes you feel put off. But let it be a living relationship.

Prayer should be a lived experience, a heart-to-heart dialogue. And soon, if it is heartful, you will feel that not only are you talking but the response is there.

And I tell you the whole existence is ready to respond. Once your heart is open the whole responds.

when the heart is really full you cannot speak.

When the heart is too overflowing only silence can be the medium.

Love is not a relationship. Love is a state of being; it has nothing to do with anybody else. One is not in love, one is love. And of course when one is love, one is in love—but that is an outcome, a by-product, that is not the source. The source is that one is love.

The real opposite of love is fear. In love one expands, in fear one shrinks.

Look at the flowers with awe, wonder. Don’t become knowledgeable, don’t go on labeling things. That’s what knowledgeability is—the great art of labeling everything, categorizing everything.

Love is a deep desire to bless the whole existence.

don’t take acquaintance as love.

You can allow somebody to enter to your center only when you are not afraid, when you are not fearful.

This is a man who lives in the here and now: This cake is delicious. Even death is irrelevant. The next moment is meaningless. This moment, this cake is delicious. If you can be in this moment, this present moment, this presentness, the plenitude, then only can you love.

people live in the false attitude that they are lovers. They believe that they love, but that is their belief only.

Love is a rare flowering. Sometimes it happens. It is rare because it can happen only when there is no fear, never before. That means love can happen only to a very deeply spiritual, religious person. Sex is possible for all. Acquaintance is possible for all. Not love.

In your love, fear is always there. The husband is afraid of the wife, the wife is afraid of the husband. Lovers are always afraid. Then it is not love. Then it is just an arrangement of two fearful persons depending on each other, fighting, exploiting, manipulating, controlling, dominating, possessing—but it is not love.

Deep contentment is the visible sign of love. Whenever a person is in love, he is in deep contentment. Love cannot be seen, but contentment, the deep satisfaction around him … his every breath, his every movement, his very being, content.

Love begins but ends never; it has a beginning but no end.

So if one wants to move into the world of love, one has to drop the mind. One has to live without the interference of the mind.

So the mind has utility, but the utility is for the outside world. For the inner it is simply irrelevant.