:: OSHO SPEAKS ::

ZEN : THE ONLY RELIGION OF LIFE

“Zen is the way of the spontaneous -- the effortless effort, the way of intuition”, says Osho. Zen is a way of life that lives in a totally different dimension where everything is a dance and a celebration. Zen believes in a life which one is not acquainted with and love that one has not dreamt of. Read on……….

Zen’s approach to find the truth is not as hard as philosophers tend to be, it is more graceful and peaceful. Zen has a very musical approach, a very poetic approach, the approach of a dancer, the approach of a lover. 

Zen brings a totally new form of religion to the world. Osho says, “Zen is going to be the religion of the future of humanity, because it teaches how to renounce and it teaches how to renounce renouncing also. It teaches how to go beyond the world, and it teaches how to go beyond the beyond. It looks paradoxical but it is not, because when you go beyond the beyond you are back in the world; the circle is complete.” Read on as Osho brings out the essence of Zen.

“Zen is the only religion of life. Others are worshippers of the dead. Life contains millions of things, from the very small trivia to the greatest sacred peaks of consciousness. Zen does not renounce anything but transforms it as a stepping-stone towards the higher.
It is the only life-affirmative religion that has arisen during the past centuries. Its affirmation is total. All other religions are religions of denial. Anything that seems to be a hindrance, they escape from it. Zen tries to turn it from a hindrance into a help -- and it has succeeded. Its success is of profound interest for the coming new man.
The new man will not think of Christianity as a religion, or Hinduism or Mohammedanism or any other religion, because they are all carrying a dead past. Life has escaped from them long before. They have not laughed for centuries; they have not been in tune with the universal music. They have forgotten the language of dance.
Zen alone seems a possibility for the future man. It will survive -- when all other religions are gone, Zen will be the only religion around the earth. In fact, all other religions are already dead. Just because of old habit, old conditioning, we go on carrying them, but they have not contributed anything to human consciousness. Rather than contributing they have destroyed much. They have enslaved man, they have oppressed man, they have put man against man; they have created immense violence, war, massacre.
Zen is a religion of flowers, is a religion of songs, is a religion of ecstasy. It has nothing in it which in any way tries to avoid life in any form. It lives life in its totality -- and the miracle is that by living totally, each moment becomes so precious... there is no way to measure the beauty of the moment when a person is total, here now.
These two anecdotes are very small, but great is their significance. The first will look very strange unless you understand that in each activity, a Zen master almost disappears in the action itself. His totality is so great that you can almost say that only the dance remains; the dancer disappears.”

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