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

by Osho

A person who is alive, really alive, vitally alive, will always move into the unknown.

A poet lives through the heart and, by and by, in the heart he starts listening to the sounds of the unknown. The head cannot listen; it is very far away from the unknown. The head is filled with the known.

One can never get out of nature, but one can get out of the artificial any moment one decides to.

To come upon reality originally, radically, to come upon reality without any mediator—to come upon reality as if you are the first person to exist—that is liberating. That very newness of it liberates.

The prejudiced eye is blind, the heart full of conclusions is dead. Too many a priori assumptions and your intelligence starts losing its sharpness, its beauty, its intensity. It becomes dull.

If you want to experience the mysterious, you will have to enter through another door, from a totally different dimension. The dimension of the mind is the dimension of science, and the dimension of meditation is the dimension of the miraculous, the mysterious.

Discover trust within yourself, don’t cultivate it. Go deeper into your being, to the very source of your being, and discover it.

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.

The real question is not of courage, the real question is that the known is the dead, and the unknown is the living. Clinging

The man of understanding dies every moment to the past and is reborn again to the future. His present is always a transformation, a rebirth, a resurrection. It is not a question of courage at all, that is the first thing to be understood. It is a question of clarity, of being clear about what is what.

To increase that possession—to have more money, to have more power, to conquer more lands—you were doing things that even you cannot say were right. You were lying, you were dishonest. You were having hundreds of faces. You were not true even for a single moment to anybody or to yourself; you could not be. You had to be false, phony, pretending, because these are things that help you to succeed in the world.

A wise man first prepares you so that you can take the advice. He does not simply give you advice; you need to be prepared. It may take years to prepare you, to prepare the ground, and only then can you sow the seeds. It will be a fool who simply goes on throwing seeds on rocks and stones without even bothering that he is wasting seeds.

To grow to your destiny needs great courage, it needs fearlessness. People who are full of fear cannot move beyond the known. The known gives a kind of comfort, security, safety because it is known. One is perfectly aware, one knows how to deal with it. One can remain almost asleep and go on dealing with it—there is no need to be awake; that’s the convenience with the known. The moment you cross the boundary of the known, fear arises, because now you will be ignorant, now you will not know what to do, what not to do. Now you will not be so sure of yourself, now mistakes can be committed; you can go astray. That is the fear that keeps people tethered to the known, and once a person is tethered to the known, he is dead.

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.

Mind is always old. Mind is never new; it is the accumulation of the past. Newness comes from the beyond; it is a gift from God. It is from the beyond and it is of the beyond.

Remember, anything new coming in your life is a message from God. If you accept it you are religious. If you reject it you are irreligious. Man needs just to relax a little more to accept the new; to open up a little more to let the new in. Give way to God entering you.

You cannot bring the new in your life; the new comes. You can either accept it or reject it. If you reject it you remain a stone, closed and dead. If you receive it you become a flower, you start opening … and in that opening is celebration.

One has to start in a state of not knowing, and one has to move innocently like a child, thrilled with the possibilities—and infinite are the possibilities.

You just act in the moment like a child. Utterly abandon yourself to the moment—and you will find every day new openings, new light, new insight. And those new insights will go on changing you. One day, suddenly you will see you are each moment new. The old no more lingers, the old no more hangs around you like a cloud. You are like a dewdrop, fresh and young.

The being has no fear, but the ego has fear, because the ego is very very afraid of dying. It is artificial, it is arbitrary, it is put together. It can fall apart any moment. And when the new enters, there is fear. The ego is afraid, it may fall apart. Somehow it has been managing to keep itself together, to keep itself in one piece, and now something new comes—it will be a shattering thing.

you are consciousness, not memory. Memory is a content in consciousness, you are consciousness itself.

To die in the ego is to be born into being.

Fear is nothing but absence of love. Do something with love, forget about fear. If you love well, fear disappears. If you love deeply, fear is not found.

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.

When fear disappears you become fearless. And a fearless person is one who never creates fear in anybody and who never allows anybody to create fear in him.

When you don’t love out of your fullness of heart, you are bargaining. You want to force the other person to do something for you, only then will you love; otherwise you will betray your love. Now you are using your love as a punishment, or as an enforcement, but you are not loving. Either you are trying to withhold your love or you are giving your love, but in both cases love in itself is not the end, something else is.

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. And you become touchy—even if somebody approaches you to love you, you become afraid, because in every love there is a possibility of rejection, withdrawal.

Let this be the definition of fear: a state of no contact with existence is fear. You are left alone, a child crying in the house, the mother and father and the whole family gone to the theater. The child cries and weeps in his cradle. Left alone with no contact, nobody to protect, nobody to give solace, nobody to love; a loneliness, a vast loneliness all around. This is the state of fear.

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. Then prayer has come into its own, come of age. When you feel the response, that not only you are talking—if it is a monologue it is still not prayer—it becomes a dialogue. You not only speak, you listen. And I tell you the whole existence is ready to respond. Once your heart is open the whole responds.

In love one expands, in fear one shrinks. In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens. In fear one doubts, in love one trusts. In fear one is left lonely. In love one disappears; hence there is no question of loneliness at all. When one is not, how can one be lonely? Then these trees and the birds and the clouds and the sun and the stars are all within you. Love is when you have known your inner sky.

This existence mothers you, this existence is ready to support you in every possible way. Trust, and you will start feeling a new upsurge of energy in you. That energy is love. That energy wants to bless the whole existence, because in that energy one feels blessed.

What have you got to lose? Nothing. This body will be taken by death; before it is taken by death, give it to love. Whatsoever you have will be taken away; before it is taken away, why not share it? That is the only way of possessing it. If you can share and give, you are the master. It is going to be taken away—there is nothing you can retain forever. Death will destroy everything.

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.

Remember one thing: ordinarily the mind interferes and does not allow love its infinity and its space. If you really love a person, you give him infinite space. Your very being is just a space for him to grow in, to grow with. The mind interferes and tries to possess the person, then love is destroyed. The mind is very greedy—the mind is greed. The mind is very poisonous. 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.

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

But one thing is absolutely certain, that if you hate somebody, first you have to wound your own soul in so many ways; you have to be so full of poison that you can throw poison on others.

Love needs great courage. It needs great courage because it needs the sacrifice of the ego. 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.

The society is not prepared to take the risk. It grabs the child and starts molding him into something that is needed by the society. In a certain sense, it kills the soul of the child and gives him a false identity so that he never misses his soul, his being.

And meditation is only a name for being alone, silent, waiting for the real to assert itself.

That which can be given cannot be real. The real you have got already; just the false has to be taken away.

In a different way it can be said: a Master takes away things from you which you don’t really have, and he gives you that which you really have.

You were born, you have come into the world with life, with consciousness, with tremendous sensitivity. Just look at a small child—look at his eyes, the freshness. All that has been covered by a false personality.

There is no need to be afraid. You can lose only that which has to be lost. And it is good to lose it soon—because the longer it stays, the stronger it becomes.

Don’t die before realizing your authentic being. Only those few people are fortunate who have lived with authentic being and who have died with authentic being—because they know that life is eternal, and death is a fiction.

I look at the validity of my experience—at whether I am just repeating somebody else’s words like a parrot, or the source of my statements is in my own experience.

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

The most fearless grounding is needed to be an individual: “It does not matter that the whole world is against me. What matters is that my experience is valid.”

Stop being influenced by people’s opinions. Rather, start looking in … allow your inner sense to say things to you. Trust it. If you trust it, it will grow. If you trust it, you will feed it, it will become stronger.

Never think in terms of being free from; always think in terms of being free for. And the difference is vast, tremendously vast. Don’t think in terms of from—think for. Be free for God, be free for truth, but don’t think that you want to be free from the crowd, free from the church, free from this and that.

Always remember not to throw the responsibility somewhere on somebody else, because then you will never be free of it. Deep down it is your responsibility.