Festival of Holi
Holi is an ancient annual festival of joy, dance, color and expression, originated from India but
now also celebrated in many other parts of Asia. According to Indian calendar holi is celebrated
on full moon of phalguna month, which is today, the 18 th March. It lasts for a night and a day,
starting on the evening of the Purnima, the first evening is known as  Holika Dahan  (burning of
demon holika) or Chhoti Holi and the following day as Holi, Rangwali Holi,  Dhuleti, Dhulandi
or Phagwah.
Holi celebrates the arrival of spring, the end of winter, the blossoming of love, and for many it’s
a festive day to meet others, play and laugh, forget and forgive, and repair broken
relationships. It is a very playful festival. For one day people really get very open, they dance,
play with colors, water, flowers, enjoy sweets. For one day everyone rich or poor, young or old,
male or female, everyone simply express themselves in a very colorful way. For one day
everyone forget about their regular life.
But during the discourses Osho explains that whole existence, every single moment, is
enjoying like a festival so why to constrict ourselves to one day. He also says When Holi
comes, and we sing and dance, breaking all bounds and throwing off our normal codes
of conduct. On that day we throw all our morality, rules and etiquette to the winds; for
one day our river flows, breaking all disciplines. But do you think that a river that flows
for one day of the year is going to reach the ocean? And even this one day is only an
apology for the real flowing; it is just a mockery of our real selves! Look at nature: there
is Existence enjoying Holi every day.
Osho has also said that This Holi festival is just a catharsis for the whole country to throw
out all nonsense. It is good, it cleanses. More days are needed because more nonsense
is there. One Holi is not enough. In fact, every month a Holi-day is needed so people can
throw stones, rubbish at each other, throw colours, dirt, and can use four-letter words. It
cleanses.

GEETA THAT AMONG SACRIFICES HE REPRESENTS JAPA OR CHANTING AND THAT
CHANTING WILL BE THE PATH FOR THE KALI-YUGA, THE DARK AGE, IN WHICH WE ARE
LIVING. PLEASE COMMENT.

No, I did not say that no one was poor in Krishna’s time, or that no one is poor in the present-
day West. There are poor people in the West, but their society as a whole is affluent. In the
same way, although poor men like Sudama existed in Krishna’s time, his society was very
prosperous. A poor society is one thing; the existence of a handful of poor people in a rich
society is different. The Indian society today is definitely poor, although there are Tatas and
Birlas among us. The presence of Tatas and Birlas does not make the society affluent. Similarly,
in spite of the Sudamas, Krishna’s society was prosperous and rich. The question is whether a
society on the whole is rich or poor. There are rich people even in an utterly poor society like
India’s, and similarly there are poor people in the very affluent society of America.

The society of Krishna’s time was rich; good things of life were available to the vast majority of
people. The same is true in today’s American society. And only an affluent society can afford
celebration; a poor society cannot. As a society sinks into poverty it ceases to he celebrative, to
be joyous. Not that there are no festivals in a poor society, but those festivals are lack-luster, as
good as dead. When the Festival of Lights — Diwali — comes here, the poor have to borrow
money to celebrate it. They save their worn out clothes for Holi — the Festival of Colors. Is this
the way to celebrate a festival like Holi? In the past, people came out in their best clothes to be
smeared with all kinds of colors; now they go through it as if it is a kind of compulsory ritual.

The festival of Holi was born when Indian society was at the peak of prosperity; now it is
only dragging its feet somehow. In the past people were pleased when someone poured
colors on their clothes; now in the same situation they are saddened, because they
cannot afford enough clothes. The West now can well afford a festival like Holi. They
have already adopted Krishna’s dance; sooner or later they are going to adopt Holi as
well. It does not need an astrologer to predict it. They have everything — money, clothes,
colors and leisure — which is necessary to celebrate such a festival as Holi. And unlike
us they will celebrate with enthusiasm and joy. They will really rejoice. When a society on
the whole is affluent, even its poor are not that poor; they are better off than the rich
people of a poor society. Today even the poorest of America does not cling to money in
the way the richest of India does. Living in a sea of poverty, even the rich people of this
country share the psychology of the poor. Their clinging to money is pathetic.

I have heard that on a fine morning a beggar appeared at the doors of a house. He was young
and healthy and his body was robust and beautiful. The housewife was pleasantly surprised to
see such a beggar, he was rare, and she gave him food and clothes with an open heart. Then
she said to the beggar, “How is it that you are a beggar? You don’t seem to be born poor.”
The beggar said, “It seems you are also going the same way. I gave away my wealth in the
same way you gave me food and clothes a little while ago. You will not take long to join me in
the street.”

Clinging to money is characteristic of a poor society; even its rich people suffer from this
malady. And clinging disappears in a rich society; even its poor can afford to spend and enjoy
what little they have. They are not afraid, they know they can make money when they need it.
It is in this sense that I said Krishna consciousness happens in an affluent society, and the West
is really an affluent society.

The questioner also wants to know why the revolt, the breakthrough in the West is being led by
people like Ginsberg, who are irrationalists. It is true that all the young rebels the West, whether
they are existentialists, the Beatles, the beatniks, or the hippies or the yippies, are irrationalists
who represent a revolt against the excessive rationalism of their older generations. It is also true
that the intellectuals of the West are yet uninfluenced by these offbeat movements. In fact,
irrationalists appear only in a society that goes to the extreme of rationalism. The West has
really reached the zenith of rationalism. Hence the reaction; it was inevitable. When a society
feels stifled and strangled by too much logic and rationalism, it inevitably turns to
mysticism. When materialism begins to crush a people’s sensitivity they turn to God and
religion.

And don’t think that Ginsberg, Sartre, Camus, and others who speak about the absurd,
the illogical are like illiterate and ignorant villagers. They are great intellectuals of
irrationalism. Their irrationalism, their turning to the unthinkable is not comparable to the
ways of the believers, the faithful. It is a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, like
Chaitanya who after stretching thinking to its extremity, found that it was unthinkable. So
if Ginsberg’s statements and his poetry are illogical and irrational, it has nonetheless a
system of its own. Nietzsche has said somewhere, “I am mad, but my madness has its
own logic. I am not an ordinary madman; my madness has a method.” This irrationalism
is deliberate. It stands on its own ground, which cannot be the ground of logic. It is a
candid, ingenuous refutation of rationalism. Certainly it will not base its assault upon
logic; if it does, it will only support rationalism. No, it opposes rationalism through an
irrational lifestyle.

Somewhere Ginsberg is reading his poetry to a small gathering of poets. His poetry is
meaningless; there is no consistency between one concept and another. All its similies and
metaphors are just inane. Its symbolism is utterly unconventional; it has nothing to do with
poetic tradition. It is really a great adventure; there is no greater adventure than to be
inconsistent and unconventional. He alone can have the courage to be inconsistent who is
aware of his innate consistency, his inner integrity, whose innermost being is consistent and
clear. He knows that however inconsistent his statements may be, they are not going to affect
the integrity and consistency of his being. People lacking in spiritual consistency and innate
harmony weigh every word before they make a statement, because they are afraid that if two of
their statements contradict each other their inner contradictions will be exposed. One can afford
to be inconsistent only when one is consistent in his being.

This Ginsberg is reading a poem which is full of inconsistencies and contradictions. It is an act
of rare courage. Someone from among his listeners rises up in his seat and says, “You seem to be an audacious person, but to be audacious in poetry is nothing. Do you have the courage to
act with audacity?”
And Ginsberg looks up at the questioner, takes off his clothes and stands naked before his
listeners saying, “This is the last part of my poetry.” Then he says to the man who has
interrupted him, “Now please take off your clothes and bare yourself.”
The man says, “How can I? I cannot be naked.”
The whole audience is in a state of shock. No one had thought that poetry reading would end
like this, that its last part would come in the form of the nude poet. When they asked him why he
did this he said, “It just happened; there was nothing deliberate about it. The man provoked me
to act audaciously, and I couldn’t think of anything else. So I just concluded my poetry reading
this way.”

This is a spontaneous act; it is not at all deliberate. And it is wholly illogical; it has nothing to do
with Ginsberg’s poetry. No Kalidas, no Keats, no Rabindranath could do it; they are poets tied to
tradition. We cannot think of Kalidas, or Keats, or Tagore baring himself the way Ginsberg does.
Ginsberg could do it because he rejects logic, he refuses to confine life into the prison of
syllogisms. He does not want to reduce life to petty mathematical calculations. He wants to live
and live in freedom, and with abandon. A man like Ginsberg cannot be compared with a gullible
villager. He represents the climactic point of a profound rationalist tradition. When a rationalist
tradition reaches its climax and begins to die, people like Ginsberg come to the fore to repudiate
the rational.

I think Krishna too, represents the peak point of India’s great rationalist tradition. This country
had once scaled the highest peaks of rationalist intelligence and thinking. We had indulged in
hair-splitting analysis and interpretation of words and concepts. We have with us books that
cannot be translated into any other languages of the world, because no other language
possesses such refined and subtle words as we have. We have such words that only one of
them can cover a whole page of a book, because we use so many adjectives, prefixes and
suffixes to qualify and refine them. Krishna comes at the pinnacle of a rationalist, intellectual
culture that had left no stones unturned. We had thought everything that could be thought. From
the VEDAS and Upanishads we had traveled to vedant where knowledge ends. VEDAS itself
means the end of knowledge. Giants like Patanjali, Kapil, Kanad, Brihaspati and Vyas had
thought so much that a time came when we felt tired of thinking. Then comes Krishna as the
culmination, and he says, “Let us now live, we have done enough of thinking.”

In this context it is good to know that Chaitanya happened in Bengal exactly at a similar time.
Bengal reached the zenith of dialectics and reasoning in the form of the navya nyaya, the new
dialectics. Navadip, the town in which Chaitanya was born, was the greatest center of learning
and logic. It was called the kashi of the logicians. All logical learning of India found its apex in
Navadip, and it became known as navya nyaya, which represents the Everest of dialectical
reasoning. The West has yet to reach that peak. Western logic is old; it is not new. It does not
go beyond Aristotle. Navadip took logic beyond Aristotle and carried it to its last frontier.

It was enough to say anywhere in the India of those days that such-and-such a scholar comes
from Navadip — nobody dared enter into a debate with him. He was supposed to be invincible
as a dialectician; nobody could think of defeating him in polemics. Students from all over India
went to Navadip to learn logic. Scholars of logic went there to debate with their counterparts,
and if once someone won a debate he immediately became famous all over the country; he was
acclaimed as the greatest pundit — the scholar laureate of India. Often enough it happened that
someone who went to Navadip to debate got defeated at the hands of some scholar and
became his disciple. It was impossible to defeat Navadip; the whole town was full of logicians;
every home was the home of a scholar. If someone defeated one scholar there was another
round the comer ready to challenge him. The town was a beehive of scholars.

Chaitanya was born in Navadip, and was himself a towering scholar of logic. He was the
top logician of the Navadip of his time, held in great respect by all. The same Chaitanya
one day said goodbye to scholarship and went dancing and singing ecstatically through
the streets of Navadip saying that everything is unthinkable. When such a person says
something it is bound to have tremendous significance. Chaitanya too represents the
climactic point of a great tradition. After exploring and analyzing every nook and comer
of thinking and intellectual understanding, after going to the very roots of words,
concepts and their meanings, he renounces knowledge and returns to his basic
ignorance and declares he is now going to sing and dance like a madman. He said that
he would not argue any more, not search truth through logic, he would simply live and
live with abandon. Life begins where logic ends.

Source:

Listen to complete discourse in Hindi at mentioned below link.
Discourse Series: Krishna Smriti
Chapter #13
Chapter title: Krishna Goes to the West
1 October 1970 pm in

References:

Osho has spoken on ‘Holi, festival, prosperity, celebration, rejoicing, affluence’ in many of His
discourses. More on the subject can be referred to in the following books/discourses:

1. Until You Die
2. Death is Divine
3. The Great Path
4. Nowhere To Go But In
5. The True Name, Vol 2
6. Beyond Enlightenment
7. From the False to the Truth
8. I Celebrate Myself: God Is No Where, Life Is Now Here
9. Sufis: The People of the Path, Vol 1, 2
10. Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance
11. The Discipline of Transcendence, Vol 4
12. The Last Testament, Vol 4
13. The Secret
14. Tao: The Pathless Path, Vol 2
15. The Path of Love