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

by Osho

The more fearless a person is, the less mind he uses. The more fearful a person, the more he uses the mind.

You may have observed that when you are afraid, when there is anxiety, when there is something that troubles you, the mind comes into focus very much. When you are anxious, the mind is there too much. When you are not anxious, the mind is not so much.

Then hate is easy, and love is not only difficult but impossible. Man has been distorted. Man cannot be reduced to slavery if he is not distorted first.

They are destroying every possibility of rebellion in man—and love is rebellion, because love listens only to the heart and does not care a bit about anything else.

And the best way to destroy man is to destroy his spontaneity of love. If man has love, there can’t be nations; nations exist on hate.

Hence the priest and the politician, these two, are the enemies of humanity. They are in a conspiracy, because the politician wants to rule your body and the priest wants to rule your soul.

These so-called religions go on talking about love, and all that they do in the world is create more and more hate.

The ill person gets sympathy from everybody else; nobody hurts him, everybody remains careful what they say to him, he is so ill.

Now, if he becomes too much attached to this importance, to this ego fulfillment, he will never want to be healthy again. He himself will cling to illness.

And psychologists say there are many people who are clinging to illnesses because of the advantages illnesses have.

Only those who are ready to become nobodies are able to love. Only those who are ready to become nothing, utterly empty of themselves, are able to receive the gift of love from the beyond.

Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone.

Slowly slowly, you start feeling a new quality to yourself, a new aliveness, a new beauty, a new intelligence—which is not borrowed from anybody, which is growing within you. It has roots in your existence. And if you are not a coward, it will come to fruition, to flowering.

even a good intention in the hands of an unconscious person turns out to be poisonous.

The crowd is an essential for the false self to exist. The moment it is lonely, you start freaking out. This is where one should understand a little bit of meditation.

All meditative techniques are a help to destroy the false. They don’t give you the real—the real cannot be given.

Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone.

Only the brave, the courageous, the people who have guts, can be religious.

in this world, to be an individual is the greatest courage.

Only people who carry the opinions of others need the support of others.”

Keep yourself a little more independent. Feel more, think less.

There is a sixth sense, the inner sense, that shows and tells you something about yourself and the ultimate source of things. That sense has to be discovered. Meditation is nothing but the discovery of the inner sense.

The judgment day happened on the first day; the moment he created you he already judged you. He knows you, you are his creation.

Never think in terms of being free from; always think in terms of being free for

the original face is a beautiful poetic expression,

Many a hero is a man who did not have the courage to be a coward.

Don’t reduce the woman into a wife. Then you are living dangerously. Don’t reduce the man into a husband, because a husband is an ugly thing. Let your man be your man and your woman your woman, and don’t make your tomorrow predictable. Expect nothing and be ready for everything. That’s what I mean when I say live dangerously.

To live dangerously means to live life as if each moment is its own end. Each moment has its own intrinsic value, and you are not afraid.

Risk is the only guarantee for being truly alive.

The mind has some difficulty in accepting the idea that there is something that is not explainable. Mind has a very mad urge for everything to be explained … if not explained, then at least explained away! Anything that remains a puzzle, a paradox, goes on troubling your mind.

the real is a great emptiness.

Life is risky, death has no risk.

The more alive the person, the more problems there are. But there is nothing wrong in it because struggling with problems, fighting with the challenge, is how you grow.

To be ecstatic means to get out, to be free, to be moving, to be a process, to be vulnerable so that winds can come and pass through you.

All our formalities are nothing but helping each other’s ego. They are lies. You say something to somebody and he returns the compliment. Neither you nor he is true. We go on playing the game: etiquette, formalities, the civilized faces and masks.

Nothing else—no money, no power, no prestige—nothing can be an insurance against death except a deep meditation

many births and many deaths happen within life. Life itself has no beginning, no end; life and eternity are equivalent.

from this height, from this point where you can see the whole valley of your life. Successes were also failures. Failures of course were failures, and pleasures were nothing but incentives to suffer pain.

Courage will come to you. Just start with a simple formula: Never miss the unknown

The ego is always coming out of fear. A really fearless person has no ego.

It is difficult to love real people because a real person is not going to fulfill your expectations. He is not meant to. He is not here to fulfill anybody else’s expectations; he has to live his own life. And whenever he moves somewhere that goes against you or is not in tune with your feelings, emotions, your being, it becomes difficult.

Meditation means that you are feeling good in your loneliness.

when there is happiness and no silence, again something is missing.

Both these ways have failed. The East has failed because it tried meditation without love. The West has failed because it tried love without meditation.

So meditation should be an inner shelter, an inner shrine. Whenever you feel that the world is too much for you, you can move into your shrine.

It is not a question of money, power, and prestige; it is a question of what intrinsically you want to do. Do it, irrespective of the results, and your boredom will disappear. You must be following others’ ideas, you must be doing things in a “right” way, you must be doing things as they should be done. These are the foundation stones of boredom.

when fear disappears there is innocence,

You cannot be truthful if you are not courageous You cannot be loving if you are not courageous You cannot be trusting if you are not courageous You cannot inquire into reality if you are not courageous Hence courage comes first and everything else follows