Osho on Eminent English Poet Shelley 04th August is the birthday of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (better known by his last name Shelley). Shelley is widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric and philosophical poets in the English language. But he did not see fame during his lifetime despite being prolific throughout his life. His poetry bordered on the radical and therefore sometimes it had only an underground readership. Most publishers and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested for either blasphemy or sedition. It is widely believed that Shelley’s writing, directly or indirectly, influenced many great thinkers and poets like Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, G.B. Shaw, W.B. Yeats, Bertrand Russell, Henry Thoreau, Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and others.&nbsp; Osho has often referred to Shelley as one of the greatest poets the West has known. Osho says Shelley’s poetry has something extraordinary in it, all of his 2000 poems can be transformed into music, composed into songs. The only other poet that comes in the same category as Shelley is Rabindra Nath Tagore.&nbsp; Osho says one has to learn the ways of being poetic. The world teaches every child to be logical and ambitious, because that is needed for survival. But one needs to put aside the cunning and calculative ways, the ways of the mind and the ego, to experience life. Bliss is poetry; it is not mathematics or science. Poetry means that you have to be in a love affair with life. Looking at life with the eyes of a child, the whole world becomes god-full. If your heart is full of wonder, then the world is full of god; if your heart is calculative and cunning, god disappears from the world, god dies. And living in a godless world is not worth living at all.<div class="raw-html-embed"><div style="width:100%;height:1px;background:#00000036;margin:10px 0;"></div></div>Life is three-dimensional. And up to now there have been people, great people, but they were all one-dimensional. For example, Buddha is logical, so is Socrates. There have been great poets -- Kalidas, Rabindranath, Shelley, Shakespeare. They are one-dimensional: beauty is their god. And there have been moral people, absolutely moral people, virtuous people whose whole life was devoted to being just as virtuous as possible: Mahavira, Lao Tzu. But all are one-dimensional. Humanity has come now to a crossroads. We have lived the one-dimensional man; we have exhausted it. We need now a more enriched human being, three-dimensional. I call them three C's, just like three R's. The first C is consciousness, the second C is compassion, the third C is creativity. Consciousness is being, compassion is feeling, creativity is action. My sannyasin has to be all the three simultaneously. I am giving you the greatest challenge ever given, the hardest task to be fulfilled. You have to be as meditative as a Buddha, as loving as a Krishna, as creative as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci. You have to be all together simultaneously. Only then your totality will be fulfilled; otherwise something will remain missing in you. And that which is missing in you will keep you lopsided, unfulfilled.&nbsp; You can attain to a very high peak if you are one-dimensional, but you will be only a peak. I would like you to become the whole range of the Himalayas, not just a peak but peaks upon peaks! The one-dimensional man has failed. It has not been able to create a beautiful earth, it has not been able to create paradise on the earth. It has failed, utterly failed! It created a few beautiful people, but it could not transform the whole humanity, it could not raise the consciousness of the whole humanity. Only a few individuals here and there became enlightened. That is not going to help anymore. We need more enlightened people, and enlightened in a three-dimensional way. That is my definition of the new man. Roderick, you ask me, "Was Buddha not a poet?" He was not! But the people who will become awakened here with me are going to be poets. When I say "poets" I don't mean that you have to WRITE poetry -- you have to be poetic. Your life has to be poetic; your approach has to be poetic. Logic is dry, poetry is alive. Logic cannot dance; it is impossible for logic to dance. To see logic dancing will be like Mahatma Gandhi dancing! It will look very ridiculous. Poetry can dance; poetry is a dance of your heart. Logic cannot love; it can talk about love, but it cannot love. Love seems to be illogical. Only poetry can love; only poetry can take the jump into the paradox of love. Logic is cold, very cold; it is good as far as mathematics is concerned, but it is not good as far as humanity is concerned. If humanity becomes too logical then humanity disappears; then there are only numbers, not human beings -- replaceable numbers.&nbsp; Poetry, love, feeling give you a depth, a warmth. You become more melted; you lose your ice-coldness. You become more human. Buddha is superhuman, about that there is no doubt, but he loses the human dimension. He is unearthly. He has a beauty of being unearthly, but he does not have the beauty that Zorba the Greek has. Zorba is so earthly. I would like you to be both together: Zorba the Buddha! One has to be meditative, but not against feeling. One has to be meditative but full of feeling, overflowing with love. And one has to be creative. If your love is only a feeling and it is not translated into action, it won't affect the larger humanity. You have to make it a reality, you have to materialize it. These are your three dimensions: being, feeling, action. Action contains all creativity, all kinds of creativity: music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture, science, technology. Feeling contains all that is aesthetic: love, beauty. And being contains meditation, awareness, consciousness. You ask me, "It seems awareness is your basic teaching, as well as that of Buddha....". I have no basic teaching; I cannot have a basic teaching. I am not a teacher at all. I don't teach you; I am simply a presence. You can learn, but I don't teach. You can imbibe my spirit, and my spirit and its implication will depend on you. There are people to whom awareness will help as a basic teaching; they will learn awareness from me. And there are people to whom love will help; then they will learn love as a basic teaching from me. It will depend on you.&nbsp; I am multi-dimensional; hence I can absorb all kinds of people. Buddha would not have accepted you all, remember, neither would Jesus or Mahavira; they would have chosen. A few people would have been chosen by Buddha and a few would have been chosen by Jesus and a few would have been chosen by somebody else. But I don't choose at all, I am absolutely choiceless. Whosoever comes to me is accepted, absolutely accepted, totally accepted, because I don't have a basic pattern. I have only hints -- and hints for all, for all kinds of people. It is not a teaching; teaching becomes rigid, becomes defined. It is only a presence. I am only a window; through me you can look into God. And once you have looked into God, then you can look into God on your own -- I am not needed anymore. Source: Listen to complete discourse at mentioned below link. Discourse series: <a href="/dhammapada-way-of-buddha-vol-10-13">The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol 10, Chapter #13</a> Chapter title: Religion is a song, poetry, a dance of your heart 4 March 1980 am in Buddha Hall References: Osho has spoken extensively on poetry and great poets like Coleridge, Byron, Keats, Kalidas, Khalil Gibran, Milton, Omar Khayyam, Shakespeare, Tagore, Tennyson, etc. in the course of His talks. More on this subject can be referred to in the following books/discourse titles: 1. Beyond Enlightenment 2. Light on The Path 3. Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance 4. The Golden Wind 5. The Last Testament Vol.2 6. The Transmission of the Lamp 7. The New Dawn 8. The Secret 9. Vigyan Bhairav Tantra Vol.1 &nbsp;