This is the last dance

Question 1:

Kishor Bharti, it is one of the basic human problems, because our whole upbringing creates a split in our very mind. You have to show a face to the society, to the crowd, to the world -- it need not be your real face; in fact, it must not be your real face. You have to show the face that people like, that people appreciate, that will be acceptable to them -- their ideologies, their traditions -- and you have to keep your original face to yourself.

This split becomes so unbridgeable because most of the time you are in the crowd, meeting with people, relating with people -- very rarely are you alone. Naturally, the mask becomes more and more part of you than your very nature itself.

And society creates a fear in everybody: the fear of rejection, the fear of somebody laughing at you, the fear of losing your respectability, the fear of what people will say. You have to adjust to all kinds of blind and unconscious people. You cannot be yourself. This is our basic tradition all over the world, up to now, that nobody is allowed to be himself. It is because of this that the problem has arisen -- it is everybody's problem.

You are asking, "While reading your books and listening to your tapes when I am alone, I become immensely happy and I weep, cry, and dance in aloneness. But I can't express my feelings in the presence of others, even though I wish very much to do so."

The moment the other is there, you are less concerned about yourself; you are more concerned about what his opinion will be about you. When you are alone in your bathroom, you become almost like a child -- sometimes you make faces before the mirror. But if you become suddenly aware that even a small child is looking through the keyhole, you immediately change: you become your ordinary, old self again -- serious, sober, as people expect you to be.

And the most amazing thing is that you are afraid of those people and they are afraid of you -- everybody is afraid of everybody else. Nobody is allowing his feelings, his reality, his authenticity -- but everybody wants to do it, because it is a very suicidal act to go on repressing your original face.

This is the last dance You are not living; on the contrary you are simply acting. And because the whole world is watching, your centuries-long unconscious holds you back -- not to express, not to come out of the mask of your personality. Everybody is hiding behind something false -- it hurts.

To be dishonest, to be insincere to yourself, is the worst punishment you can give to yourself.

And you are not going to do something harmful to anybody -- you just want to cry, and your tears will be of joy; you want to dance, and dance is not a sin, is not a crime. You simply want to share your blissfulness -- you are being generous. Still, the fear is that people may not accept your blissfulness. Somebody may say it is false, somebody may say it is just acting, somebody may say you are hypnotized.

It is a strange thing that if you are miserable, nobody says anything to you. In a miserable society, you fit perfectly well. But where everybody is miserable, if you suddenly start dancing you fall out of tune with the crowd.

You want to express your joy but you are not courageous enough to be alone... but in fact, who cares? Perhaps people will think, once, that you are a little crazy -- at the most -- and once they have accepted that you are a little crazy, then there is nothing to fear. And what is wrong in being called crazy? The world has known such beautiful, crazy people... in fact, all the great people in the world have been a little bit crazy -- crazy in the eyes of the crowd.

Their craziness was expressed because they were not miserable, they were not in anxiety, they were not afraid of death, they were not worried about trivia. They were living each moment with totality and intensity, and because of this totality and intensity, their life became a beautiful flower -- they were full of fragrance, love and life and laughter.

But this certainly hurts millions of people who are around you. They cannot accept the idea that you have achieved something which they have missed. They will try in every way to make you miserable. Their condemnation is nothing but an effort to make you miserable, to destroy your dance, to take away your joy -- so that you can come back into the fold.

One has to gather courage. And if people say you are crazy, enjoy the idea. Tell them, "You are right; in this world, only crazy people can be happy and joyful. I have chosen craziness with joy, with bliss, with dance; you have chosen sanity with misery, anguish and hell -- our choices are different. You be sane and remain miserable; leave me alone in my madness. Don't feel offended; I am not feeling offended by you all -- so many sane people in the world, and I am not feeling offended."

It is only a question of a very short time. Soon, once they have accepted you as crazy, they will not bother you; then you can come into the full light with your original being -- you can drop all your falsities.

I was a student in the university... I had not chosen the university for itself but because of a professor who was so alive, so full of love, and so unafraid of the world. I had chosen the professor. And because he was in that university and he had invited me to join the university where he was teaching... and he said he would make every kind of facility possible for me.

He loved me immensely, because every year I used to go to that university for an inter-university debating competition; for four years continually I had been the winner. The very first year, he was one of the judges. He took me aside and told me, "I cannot say this to anybody else but I cannot keep it to myself either. I can only say it to you: I have given you a ninety-nine percent mark in the debate, and I am sorry, because I wanted to give you a

This is the last dance hundred percent. But I could not gather the courage. Because people may think that I am prejudiced, I am favoring. I became afraid. But forgive me, because I have taken off one percent of the marks which were yours."

Each year he was one of the judges, and the fourth year, when I graduated, he invited me to join the university for my post-graduation. I said, "I am coming here just because of you."

He took me the very first day to the vice-chancellor, and on the way he told me, "Don't get into any argument -- because this man, the old vice-chancellor, is very stubborn, and one has to be very diplomatic with him."

I said, "You can be diplomatic with him; I will be simply myself."

He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "To be diplomatic means to be somebody else, diplomacy is another name of hypocrisy. You be diplomatic -- I will be simply myself. And if the worst comes to the worst, at the most he will not grant me the money for two years' education, and he may not grant me other facilities -- but just for those facilities, I cannot be dishonest to myself."

He said, "At least can you remain silent? Don't say anything; I will talk to him on your behalf."

I said, "I cannot promise, because if he says something stupid, I cannot resist the temptation to tell him that it is stupid."

He said, "I had never realized that you are such a tough person."

I said, "It is good to know from the very beginning. This is the first day; there is still a chance: you can simply tell me and I will leave."

"No," he said, "we will try." He took me to the vice-chancellor.

I always used to live in my own way, and the vice-chancellor had been a professor at Oxford, had lived almost his whole life in England, and had become almost a proper Englishman. He said something about my beard which I was just growing: "Why have you not shaved your beard?" My professor became afraid that this was the beginning of the end.

I said, "You are asking a wrong question; in fact, I should ask why you have shaved your beard -- because I am not growing mine; it is growing itself. Your question is nonsensical -- you could ask why have I not cut my fingers, you could ask anything. It is natural that a man should have a beard, you are being unnatural. You have to answer me -- why have you been shaving your beard?"

My poor professor, who was sitting by my side, started nudging me. I had to tell him, "You stop nudging me. I don't care about all the facilities for which you have brought me to the vice-chancellor. In this moment, my only concern is that he should accept that he has asked a wrong question."

There was great silence for a moment, and the old man said, "In fact, you are logically right. And right now I don't have any answer, because nobody has ever asked this in my life -- I have never thought about it."

I said, "It is your beard, and you have been cutting and cutting and shaving and shaving, perhaps for fifty years, without ever thinking about what you are doing." So I said, "Okay, you

This is the last dance can have time. I will be coming every day at eleven o'clock when the office opens; you can meet me in front of the office. You have to find the answer."

But my professor said, "We have not come here to discuss the beard! It is a question of your further education, your post-graduation, and he is the man who can decide."

I said, "I don't care. For the present, my whole concern is to make him realize that he has lived an unconscious life."

The old man said, "From the beard you have reached to 'an unconscious life'?" He asked my professor, "What are the requirements? I will grant him a scholarship for two years." Free lodging, free boarding, he signed everything, and he said, "Just don't stand every day in front of my door! If you need anything, you simply come and tell me, and I promise that I will not ask anything -- it was my fault."

So I said, "It is decided? Once you ask me a question, then that becomes my priority for that moment; whatever I have to sacrifice, I will sacrifice."

He said, "I promise, and your professor is the witness." But it was difficult for him -- it would have been difficult for anybody, because I used to wear a robe without any buttons so my whole chest was exposed... And the next time I went because I wanted to be allowed to take as many books as I wanted from the library to my room, the rule that only one book could be issued at a time, should not be applied to me.

He said, "We can talk about that, but where are your buttons?"

I said, "You are getting into trouble; you have forgotten your promise. In fact, I should ask again, that in a hot country like India... and it is summertime, and you are perspiring, and still you are using a necktie and wearing a coat? I don't use buttons because I want my chest to have the fresh breeze. Is it something wrong?"

He said, "It is not wrong."

I said, "Something immoral? Something against the rules of the university? Why should you be concerned about it? It is my chest, and I want it to have as much breeze as possible."

He said, "I forgot my promise. You are allowed to take as many books as you want. I will not even ask why you want so many books because I don't want to get into any argumentation.

One thing is decided: it is better not to argue with you."

The first meeting that I attended in which he spoke was the birthday of Gautam Buddha.

He was a very good orator, and a good actor too. When he was talking about Gautam Buddha, tears came to his eyes, and he said, "I have always felt that if I was in the time of Gautam Buddha, I would have gone and sat at his feet and learned the art of attaining more consciousness, of becoming enlightened."

I was sitting in the middle; I stood up. As he saw me standing, he said, "Have I said anything wrong?"

I said, "You have not only said something wrong, you are behaving very falsely. At least before your students you should not be so insincere. Whatever you have said, you don't mean; your tears are false."

All the professors of the university were present; the whole student community was present. They were all shocked that I would say before everybody, to the vice-chancellor, "You are insincere."

This is the last dance I said, "You have heard the name, Raman Maharshi?"

He said, "Yes, I have heard it."

"Have you ever been there to sit at his feet? -- because he is of the same calibre and same consciousness as Gautam Buddha. And I can say with authority that even in Gautam Buddha's time you would not have gone to him. This century is also not without enlightened people.

You have to take your words back."

People used to think he was very stubborn... but perhaps he had never met somebody so authentically sincere that it could bring his original face into the public. He wiped his tears and he said, "Perhaps you are right -- I might not have gone. It was just oratory and nothing else; I did not mean it. In this whole gathering, perhaps you are the only person who is listening -- not only to the words, but also to the meaning behind them.

"I would love you to take your dinner with me tonight, because I would like to discuss a little more. I have never come across anybody in my whole long life who has brought my original face before the crowd. And something is very strange -- I don't feel angry at you; I simply feel a deep sadness about myself. Why can't I be true? But nobody has ever pointed it out to me."

Everybody in the world wants to be true, because just to be true brings so much joy and such an abundance of blissfulness -- why should one be false? You have to have the courage for a little deeper insight: Why are you afraid? What can the world do to you? People can laugh at you; it will do them good -- laughter is always a medicine, healthful. People can think you are mad... just because they think you are mad, you don't become mad.

And if you are authentic about your joy, your tears, your dance -- sooner or later there will be people who will start understanding you, who may start joining your caravan. I myself had started alone on the path, and then people went on coming and it became a worldwide caravan. And I have not invited anybody; I have simply done whatever I felt was coming from my heart.

My responsibility is towards my heart, not towards anybody else in the world. So is your responsibility only towards your own being. Don't go against it, because going against it is committing suicide, is destroying yourself. And what is the gain? Even if people give you respect, and people think that you are a very sober, respectable, honorable man, these things are not going to nourish your being. They are not going to give you any more insight into life and its tremendous beauty.

And moreover, everybody is so concerned with their own problems, who cares whether you are laughing, dancing? Who has time for it? It is only your mind that is thinking that the whole world is thinking about you. My own experience is: everybody is so crowded, worried, with the rush of thoughts about himself, his life, his problems -- do you think he has time even to look at you, or to think about you?

One Jewish doctor to another: "All day long, I hear stories of pain and suffering: 'Doctor, my back... Doctor, my stomach... Doctor, my wife.' It is awful, I tell you. Tell me, Sam, how come you look so serene after a day listening to the world's troubles?"

Second doctor: "So, who listens?"

You should not be worried at all. Everybody is so concerned with his own world, they don't have time, they don't have energy to bother about you. And even if they have some

This is the last dance opinion, it is their problem. You are alone in the world: alone you have come into the world, alone you are here, and alone you will leave this world. All their opinions will be left behind; only your original feelings, your authentic experiences will go with you even beyond death.

Even death cannot take away your dance, your tears of joy, your purity of aloneness, your silence, your serenity, your ecstasy. That which death cannot take away from you is the only real treasure; and that which can be taken away by anybody is not a treasure -- it is simply befooling you.

How many millions of people have lived before you on this earth? You don't even know their names; whether they ever lived or not does not make any difference. There have been saints and there have been sinners, and there have been very respectable people, and there have been all kinds of eccentrics, crazy, but they have all disappeared -- not even a trace has remained on the earth.

Your sole concern should be to take care of and protect those qualities which you can take with you when death destroys your body, your mind -- because these qualities will be your sole companions. They are the only real values, and the people who attain them -- only they live; others only pretend to live.

The KGB knocks on Yussell Finkelstein's door one dark night. Yussel opens the door. The KGB man barks out, "Does Yussel Finkelstein live here?"

"No," replies Yussel, standing there in his frayed pajamas.

"No? So what is your name then?"

"Yussel Finkelstein." The KGB man knocks him to the ground and says, "Did you just say that you did not live here?"

Yussel replies, "You call this living?"

Just living is not always living. Look at your life. Can you call it a blessing? Can you call it a gift, a present of existence? Would you like this life to be given to you again and again? It is so empty. Because of its emptiness, your prayers are empty. You cannot fill your prayers with gratitude. Gratitude for what? You are doing no more than acting parts in a drama; you are not being yourself.

I am reminded... a very beautiful young woman had gone to see the great painter, Picasso.

And she saw there a photograph of Picasso hanging on the wall. She asked Picasso, "Is that your photograph? Is that you?"

Picasso said, "No."

The woman said, "Strange. It looks exactly like you. Do you have a twin brother? It is so absolutely alike."

Picasso said, "It may be like me but it is not alive. And if it were me, it would have come out of the frame to give you a kiss. It is certainly not me."

Are you really yourself, or just pretending to be somebody that the crowd around you wanted you to be? As far as I am concerned, a seeker of truth should begin by dropping all that is false in him, because the false cannot seek the truth. The false is the barrier between you and the truth. If all that is false is dropped, you need not seek the truth -- truth will come to you. In fact, it is only words when I say, "Truth will come to you." When all that is false is dropped, you are the truth.

This is the last dance Nothing comes; nothing goes.

There is no journey.

Question 2:

Vimal, it is easy to say "I do not honestly care about the world," but let your heart feel it.

The world is not something that is only outside you; the world is within you too. You are the world.

And this issue of the darkness that is coming closer and closer has to be given significance, so that your choice becomes "now" and you stop postponing. It is true -- "Now or never" -- but there are so few people in the world who live now. They are always living either in yesterdays or in tomorrows.

Why am I insisting that there is, for the first time, a possibility that there will not be any tomorrow at all? There is an old proverb: Tomorrow never comes. But the old proverb has been only a proverb and in spite of that proverb, tomorrow has kept on coming. It may not come as tomorrow; it will always come as today -- in that sense the proverb is right.

But today the situation is totally different:

Tomorrow really may not come.

I want it to sink deep in your being that we have come to the very end of the road -- and there is nothing left except dancing and rejoicing. To make it NOW , I am destroying your tomorrow completely. I am taking it away from your mind -- which is deeply involved with tomorrows. Even if you say you understand that perhaps tomorrow the world will end, deep down your mind goes on saying, "There have been thousands of wars, and the world has survived. One war more is not going to make much difference."

Mind is very clever in finding excuses, that something or other will prevent the destruction. And I am not saying that the destruction should not be prevented. What I am saying is that in your mind, there should be no excuse left for postponement -- so your whole energy gathers in the now; it is not spread in the future. And if the whole energy is concentrated in this point, then this moment can become the moment of enlightenment.

Enlightenment is nothing but your consciousness being concentrated on a single point -- now and here.

You are saying, "Enough is enough." No, Vimal. Looking at the human mind, nothing is enough. People will go on living in their old unconscious ways -- hoping against hope that although there have always been people like Jesus and Buddha predicting the end of the world, the world is still there. But this time the situation is totally different. I am not

This is the last dance predicting the end of the world; it is simply becoming so certain, so logically certain, that there seems to be no possibility to avoid it.

But my interest is not in avoiding it -- if it can be avoided, it will be avoided -- my interest is to make it so clear to you that it cannot be avoided, and that you don't have any future to invest your energy in, that you have to pull all your energy back to the present moment. And the moment the whole energy becomes a pool, here and now, the explosion of light happens and you are, for the first time, absolutely yourself -- an eternal being, an immortal being, who knows nothing of death, who has never come across any darkness.

You are saying, "So let us do it now. Let us dance." But your dance has to be total -- because you can dance and still think of the future; you can dance and still think that tomorrow we will be dancing again.

Dance as if this is the last dance.

Dance with abandon, holding nothing back.

That will bring transformation to your being, and a possibility of transformation for other people too.

A politician is making a speech and says: "Fellow electors, we must restore the status quo." A man shouts from the audience, "What does 'status quo' mean?"

The politician replies, in a rare fit of honesty, "Actually, it is Latin for 'the mess we are in.'" On the surface it seems everything is going perfectly well, but deep down there is great turmoil in the unconscious layers of human beings. You are not even aware of your own unconscious nightmares, but humanity is suffering as it has never suffered before.

It is restless as it has never been before. It has forgotten the language of relaxation, it has forgotten the language of totality, it has forgotten the language of intensity. And all those qualities are needed to make your meditation a revolution in your being. It is not a question of morality, not a question of character, not a question of virtue -- religions have been concerned with all those things for thousands of years, and they have not been successful in changing man. It is a totally different approach, a different dimension: the dimension of energy and the concentration of energy.

And just as atomic energy is the explosion of a small atom into its constituent of electrons, protons and neutrons -- it is not visible to the eyes, but the explosion is so vast that it can destroy a great city like Nagasaki or Hiroshima -- exactly parallel is the inner explosion of the living cell. The atomic energy is outside and destructive -- objective and destructive. The inner energy, the subjective cell of your being, has the same qualities, the same tremendous power once it explodes -- but it is creative.

It is a chain reaction: one cell inside you explodes, and then other cells inside you start exploding in a chain. The whole life becomes a festival of lights. Every gesture becomes a dance; every movement becomes sheer joy. My emphasis that there is no future has nothing to do with gloom; it has something to do with you. If you can drop the idea of future completely, your enlightenment becomes immediately possible. And it is a good opportunity to drop the idea of future because the future itself is disappearing. But don't even in any corner of your mind, go on carrying the idea that perhaps this too is a device. These are the strategies of the mind to keep you the same old zombie.

This is the last dance Mind is clever. If you want to get up early in the morning, you put on an alarm clock, and you hear the alarm... the mind is so clever, it may start dreaming that you are in a church and church bells are ringing. The poor alarm clock cannot do anything more than that; the mind has created a dream and made it possible for you to go on sleeping.

The old religions were basically insistent on one thing, and that was future. You should note it: not only future in this life, but after life; their whole program was to take you whole energy as a project for a future life, after death, in paradise far, far away. This strategy worked; it took away the very juice of human life. People were simply waiting to live in paradise; this place, this earth, became just like a waiting room in a station.

Everybody is waiting for the train. And the train never comes, and people go on consulting the timetable. And they don't improve the waiting room because it is a waiting room -- particularly in India. I have been traveling so much -- almost hundreds of waiting rooms -- and I saw why people behave in a waiting room differently than they behave in a house. They go on eating bananas and throwing banana peels all over the waiting room -- after all, it is a waiting room; they are not going to live here. Their train is going to come and they will be gone. The waiting rooms are so dirty, their bathrooms are so impossible, and nobody takes any care not to make them more dirty -- because everybody's eyes are hooked on the future. They are consulting their timetables, when their train is to come, and they will go.

All the religious scriptures say this world is nothing but a waiting room; your real home is far away, above the clouds. There is real living; here is only waiting.

I am trying to change the whole pattern of religious thinking. I am trying to say to you:

This is your home; this very moment is your paradise. It all depends on you. You do not need to be virtuous to dance totally; you do not need to be learned to dance totally; you do no need to be pious to dance totally. To dance totally, all that is needed is that we accept the reality only of this moment. We will accept the reality of the next moment when it arrives, but we will not be waiting for it.

All the religions have been teaching you to wait. I am teaching to live, to love, to dance, to sing -- and don't wait.

It is Easter and a priest is getting cost estimates for the church flower arrangements. A Catholic florist says, "Three hundred dollars."

"Much too much," says the priest... but the florist is one of the flock.

A Protestant florist offers to do the arrangements for two hundred and fifty dollars.

"Cheaper," thinks the priest, "but he is not of the flock, and the difference is not that great."

While he is pondering, Solly Goldberg gives him a price of seventy-five dollars.

"That settles it; Solly gets the contract."

On Easter morning, the flock files into a church filled with magnificent azaleas, camelias, carnations and roses, and above the altar, spelled out in daffodils is the Easter message:

"Christ has risen, but Goldberg's prices never vary."

Okay, Vimal? Yes, Osho.