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

by Osho

You must be asking for something from the crowd—recognition, honor, respect, respectability. If you ask them, you have to repay them. Then the crowd says, “Okay, we give you respect, and you give us your freedom.” It is a simple bargain.

Just be what you are and don’t care a bit about the world. Then you will feel a tremendous relaxation and a deep peace within your heart.

Forget all those conditionings, drop them like dry leaves falling from the trees. It is better to be a naked tree without any leaves than to have plastic leaves and plastic foliage and plastic flowers; that is ugly.

Those who are courageous, they go headlong. They search all opportunities of danger. Their life philosophy is not that of insurance companies. Their life philosophy is that of a mountain climber, a glider, a surfer. And not only in the outside seas they surf; they surf in their innermost seas. And not only on the outside they climb Alps and Himalayas; they seek inner peaks.

There are only two types of people in the world. People who want to live comfortably—they are seeking death, they want a comfortable grave. And people who want to live—they choose to live dangerously, because life thrives only when there is risk.

Reaching higher, going farther away from the settled, the routine life, you again become wild, you again become part of the animal world. You again live like a tiger or a lion, or like a river. You again soar like a bird into the skies, farther and farther away.

When everything is going perfectly well, simply see it—you are dying and nothing is happening. People may respect you, and when you die a great procession will follow you.

They exist as if they are needed for the house. They go on working for the house. As if they are needed for the bank balance—they simply go on collecting money and then they die. And they had never lived.

Expect nothing and be ready for everything. That’s what I mean when I say live dangerously.

I’m not saying don’t get married. It is a formality. Good, satisfy the society, but deep in your mind never possess the woman. Never for a single moment say that “you belong to me.”

Play means doing something for its own sake. If you enjoy many more things for their own sake, you will be more alive. Of course, your life will always be in risk, in danger. But that’s how life has to be.

remember one thing: never forget the art of risking— never, never. Always remain capable of risking. Wherever you can find an opportunity to risk, never miss it, and you will never be a loser. Risk is the only guarantee for being truly alive.

If you welcome the beyond, the beyond welcomes you; the beyond always goes on echoing you.

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.

would you like to remain in the mother’s womb? It is comfortable but it is not life. Life is always in the wild. Life is there outside.

When a seed breaks and the light hidden within starts manifesting, when a child is born and leaves the womb behind, all the comforts and all the conveniences behind, moves into the unknown world—it is ecstasy. When a bird breaks the egg and flies into the sky, it is ecstasy.

The ego is the egg, and you will have to come out of it. Be ecstatic! Get out of all protections and shells and securities. Then you will attain to the wider world, the vast, the infinite. Only then you live, and you live abundantly.

The ego does not allow you to be true, it goes on forcing you to be false.

Only at the moment of death do they recognize the fact that they have not lived. Life has simply passed as if a dream, and death has come. Now there is no more time to live—death is knocking on the door. And when there was time to live, you were doing a thousand and one foolish things, wasting your time rather than living it.

You suffered your whole life for small joys that don’t appear to be more than toys at this stage, 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.

Death has no pain in it, it is absolutely painless. It is really pleasant; it is just like a deep sleep. Do you think deep sleep is something painful? But they are not concerned about death, and deep sleep, and pleasure; they are worried about the known that is slipping out of their hands. Fear means only one thing: losing the known and entering into the unknown.

Always be ready to move from the known to the unknown, in anything, any experience. It is better, even if the unknown proves worse than the known—that is not the point. Just your change from the known to the unknown, your readiness to move from the known to the unknown, is what matters. It is immensely valuable.

as you grow more familiar with the beauty of the unknown, you start creating a new quality in you. It is there, it has just never been used. Before death comes, go on moving from the known to the unknown. Always remember that the new is better than the old.

Start with a simple exercise: always remember, whenever there is a choice, choose the unknown, the risky, the dangerous, the insecure, and you will not be at a loss.

It is natural that man is afraid, trembling. If you accept it, if you say that this is how life is, if you accept it totally, trembling stops immediately, and fear—the same energy that was becoming fear—uncoils and becomes freedom. Then you know that even if the drop disappears in the ocean, it will be there. In fact, it will become the whole ocean. Then death becomes nirvana, then you are not afraid to lose yourself. Then you understand the saying of Jesus: “If you save your life you will lose it, and if you lose it you will save it.”

The only way to go beyond death is to accept death. Then it disappears. The only way to be fearless is to accept fear. Then the energy is released and becomes freedom.

Fighting with the ego will not help; accepting the fear will immediately help.

It is very easy to think about love. It is very difficult to love. It is very easy to love the whole world. The real difficulty is to love a single human being. It is very easy to love God or humanity. The real problem arises when you come across a real person and you encounter him. To encounter him is to go through a great change and a great challenge.

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. You can have a bath in your inner being. You can rejuvenate yourself. You can come out resurrected; again alive, fresh, young, renewed … to live, to be. But you should also be capable of loving people and facing problems, because a silence that is impotent and cannot face problems is not much of a silence, is not worth much.

Only a silence that can face problems and remain silent is something to be longed for, to be desired.

One of the fundamental laws of life is this: whatsoever you hide goes on growing, and whatsoever you expose, if it is wrong it disappears, evaporates in the sun, and if it is right it is nourished.

Why does one feel bored? One feels bored because one has been living in dead patterns given to you by others. Renounce those patterns, come out of those patterns! Start living on your own.

Everybody is somewhere else; nobody is where he should be. One has to risk. Boredom can disappear in a single moment if you are ready to risk.

Vincent Van Gogh was immensely happy just painting. Not a single painting was sold, nobody ever appreciated him, and he was hungry, he was dying. His brother was giving him only a small amount of money so that he could at least manage to survive—four days a week he would fast, and three days a week he would eat. He had to fast for those four days because otherwise, from where was he going to get his canvases and paints and brushes? But he was immensely happy—his juices were flowing. He died when he was only thirty-three; he committed suicide. But his suicide is far better than your so-called life, because he committed suicide only when he had painted the thing that he wanted to paint. The day he finished a painting of the sunset, which had been his longest desire, he wrote a letter saying, “My work is done, I am fulfilled. I am leaving this world immensely contented.” He committed suicide, but I will not call it suicide. He lived totally, he burned life’s candle from both ends together in tremendous intensity.

Accept your innermost core that you have brought from the beyond and then you will not feel that you are missing something. The moment you accept yourself without any conditions, suddenly an outburst of joy happens. Your juices start flowing, life really becomes ecstatic.

But the known is the mind and the unknown is God. The unknown never becomes part of the known.

if you become aware of anything in your memory, you are freed from it. Awareness liberates, unconsciousness creates a bondage. Then trust will become possible.

When you have touched the rock bottom of fear you will simply laugh, there is nothing to fear. And when fear disappears there is innocence, and that innocence is the summum bonum, the very essence of a religious man. That innocence is power. That innocence is the only miracle there is.

From my own experience I can say to you: the fear is not more than six inches deep. Now it is up to you whether you want to go on clinging to the branch and turn your life into a nightmare, or whether you would love to leave the branch and stand on your feet. There is nothing to fear.