| |
- True celebration should come from your
life, in your life. And true celebration cannot be according to the
calendar, that on the first of November you will celebrate. Strange,
the whole year you are miserable and on the first of November
suddenly you come out of misery, dancing. Either the misery was
false or the first of November is false; both cannot be true. And
once the first of November is gone, you are back in your dark hole,
everybody in his misery, everybody in his anxiety. Life should be a continuous celebration, a festival of lights the
whole year round. Only then you can grow up, you can blossom.
Transform small things into celebration.
- Your life becomes a vital celebration,
your relationship becomes a festive thing; whatsoever you do, every
moment is a festival. You eat, and eating becomes a celebration; you
take a bath, and bathing becomes a celebration; you talk, and
talking becomes a celebration; relationship becomes a celebration.
Your outer life becomes festive, there is no sadness in it. How can
sadness exist with silence? But ordinarily you think otherwise: you
think if you are silent you will be sad. Ordinarily you think how
you can avoid sadness if you are silent. I tell you, the silence
that exists with sadness cannot be true. Something has gone wrong.
You have missed the path, you are off the track. Only celebration
can give proof that the real silence has happened.
- Meditation doesn't lead you to silence;
meditation only creates the situation in which the silence happens.
And this should be the criterion -- that whenever silence happens
laughter will come into your life. A vital celebration will happen
all around. You will not become sad, you will not become depressed,
you will not escape from the world. You will be here in this world,
but taking the whole thing as a game, enjoying the whole thing as a
beautiful game, a big drama, no longer serious about it. Seriousness
is a disease.
- My whole approach towards life is that of
total acceptance, is that of celebration, not of renunciation.
- Religion cannot be anything other than a
celebration of life. And the serious person becomes handicapped: he
creates barriers. He cannot dance, he cannot sing, he cannot
celebrate. The very dimension of celebration disappears from his
life. He becomes desert-like. And if you are a desert, you can go on
thinking and pretending that you are religious but you are not.
- I am not serious, I am just celebrating.
And when I talk to you, I am not giving you an idealogy, a
philosophy, a religion — no. I simply want to share my celebration.
Shift from the words to silence. Don’t listen to my words; listen to
me. There, precisely there, is the message.
- Death becomes the ultimate celebration if
your life is a celebration. Let me tell you in this way: whatsoever
your life was, death reveals it. If you have been miserable in life,
death reveals misery. Death is a great revealer. If you have been
happy in your life, death reveals happiness. If you have lived only
a life of physical comfort and physical pleasure, then of course,
death is going to be very uncomfortable and very unpleasant, because
the body has to be left. The body is just a temporary abode, a
shrine in which we stay for the night and leave in the morning. It
is not your permanent abode, it is not your home.
- Celebration is possible only when
existence is a continuous newness, and existence is always young.
When nothing grows old, when nothing really dies — because
everything is constantly reborn — it becomes a dance. Then it is an
inner music flowing. Whether you play an instrument or not is not
the point, the music is flowing.
- Delight, enjoy. God is not a thing, it is
an attitude, an attitude of celebration and festivity. Drop sadness.
He is so close by; dance! Drop long faces, it is sacrilege --
because He is so close by. Forget your childish miseries and
worries; He is so close by. Don't go on brooding about immaterial
things; He is so close by. Allow Him to hold your hand. He has been
waiting for you for long.
- When awareness is very very deep-rooted,
when you are present to the present, you attain to a psychedelic
vision of life. That's why mystics talk of so much beauty, and you
don't find it. Mystics talk of immense celebration going on, and you
don't see any celebration anywhere. Mystics talk of great music, but
you don't hear any music. And the mystics are right -- a great music
is passing by, but you are deaf. Great beauty is all around, but you
are blind. The whole existence is celebrating this very moment, as
much as it was celebrating when Atisha was alive. Existence is
celebration.
But your heart is dead. Only your physical heart is beating, your
spiritual heart is completely nonfunctioning. And without it you
will not be able to see the celebration of life. How can you feel
grateful to God if you don't see the celebration? How can you feel
thankful to God if you don't see the gift? For what to be thankful?
You can only be full of complaints, regrets, grudges. You can only
be angry at existence. Why have you been created, why this
suffering? You see only suffering, because your eyes can only see
suffering. Otherwise existence is a blessing, a benediction.
- Life has become a torture chamber, a
concentration camp; it is no more a celebration. It should be a
celebration. If nature is allowed to take its own course, it is
bound to be a celebration.
- I am in tremendous love with life, hence I
teach celebration. Everything has to be celebrated, everything has
to be lived, loved. To me nothing is mundane and nothing is sacred.
To me all is sacred, from the lowest rung of the ladder to the
highest rung. It is the same ladder: from the body to the soul, from
the physical to the spiritual, from sex to SAMADHI -- everything is
divine!
- Life should be a continuous celebration, a
festival of lights the whole year round. Only then you can grow up,
you can blossom. Transform small things into celebration.
- We celebrate everything. Celebration is
our way to receive all the gifts from God. Life is his gift, death
is his gift; the body is his gift, the soul is his gift. We
celebrate everything. We love the body, we love the soul. We are
materialist spiritualists. Nothing like this has ever happened in
the world. This is a new experiment, a new beginning, and it has a
great future.
|
|
