1.Remember, you can know much about love, but that cannot help to know love. Love can be known only by loving. It means you have to move into love without knowing anything about it. That’s why it needs courage. You have to move in the dark, with no map, nobody to guide, not even a torch. You have to move in the dark not knowing where you are moving, not knowing whether you are on the right track or not, not knowing whether you will find the path or you will fall in a ditch and be lost forever. This is the courage.
2.Faith is dangerous, never cheap. You will have to put your whole life at stake. It needs courage, but only a courageous person can be religious.
3.My whole love and respect is for the person who accepts himself totally, as he is. He has courage. He has courage to face the whole pressure of the society which is bent upon splitting him into divisions — into good and bad, into saint and sinner. He is really a brave, courageous being who stands against the whole history of man, of morality, and declares to the skies his reality, whatever it is.
4.By and by, drop the manipulations, because when you drop manipulations you become natural near me and this will give you the first glimpse. To be natural will give you the first glimpse, and then you can gather courage to be natural in life. For if you cannot be spontaneous near me how will it be possible to be spontaneous in life?
5.Love is a dangerous path and only those who have courage can travel it. And I say to you it is the same, just like meditation — only for those who are courageous. And there are only two ways to reach the divine: either meditation or love. Find out which is your way, which can be your destiny.
6.When death knocks at your door, all your certainties will be simply riddles and foolish. Don’t cling to any certainty. Life is uncertain — its very nature is uncertain. And an intelligent man always remains uncertain. This very readiness to remain in uncertainty is courage. This very readiness to be in uncertainty is trust. An intelligent person is one who remains alert whatsoever the situation — and responds to it with his whole heart. Not that he knows what is going to happen; not that he knows that ‘do this’ and ‘that will happen’. Life is not a science; it is not a cause and effect chain. Heat the water to a hundred degrees and it evaporates — it is a certainty. But like that, in real life, nothing is certain.
7.A real person takes the courage to move with things that make him happy. If he remains poor, he remains poor; he has no complaint about it, he has no grudge. He says: “I have chosen my way — I have chosen the cuckoos and the butterflies and the flowers. I cannot be rich, that’s okay! But I am rich because I am happy.”
8.People live and go on missing life. It needs courage. It needs courage to be realistic, it needs courage to move with life wherever it leads, because the paths are uncharted, there exists no map. One has to go into the unknown. Life can be understood only if you are ready to go into the unknown. If you cling to the known, you cling to the mind, and the mind is not life. Life is non-mental, non-intellectual, because life is total. Your totality has to be involved in it, you cannot just think about it. Thinking about life is not life. beware of this ‘about-ism’. One goes on thinking about and about: there are people who think about God, there are people who think about life, there are people who think about love. There are people who think about this and that.
9.Beware of learning, otherwise you may never become wise. To be knowledgeable is very easy; it is not risky, it is safe. To move into the dimension of wisdom is risky; it is going into the unknown, into the uncharted. Great courage is needed, guts are needed.
10.A religious person has to drop all diplomacy. He has to be authentic, sincere; he has to be as he is: no pretensions, no false personalities, no facades; just being utterly nude as you are, utterly naked in your reality. The moment you can gather that much courage you will be so filled with joy…you cannot believe right now, you cannot even conceive right now, because it is our falsities which are like parasites on our being; they go on sucking our blood. The more falsities you create around yourself, the more miserable you become, the more you are in a hell. To live in falsities is to live in hell: to live authentically is to be in heaven.
11.Meditation is just a courage to be silent and alone.
12.You need tremendous courage to drop the ego to achieve enlightenment. You will need a million times more courage to drop yourself to attain the beyond — and the beyond is the real.
13.The real question is not of courage; the real question is that you don’t understand that the known is the dead, and the unknown is the living. Clinging to the known is clinging to a corpse. It does not need courage to drop the clinging; in fact it needs courage to go on clinging to a corpse. You just have to see… That which is familiar to you, which you have lived — what has it given? Where have you reached? Are you not still empty? Is there not immense discontent, a deep frustration and meaninglessness? Somehow you go on managing, hiding the truth and creating lies to remain engaged, involved.
14.The man of understanding dies every moment to the past and is reborn again to the future. His present is always a transformation, a rebirth, a resurrection. It is not a question of courage at all, that is the first thing to be understood. It is a question of clarity, of being clear about what is what.
15.Whenever there is really a question of courage, nobody can give it to you. It is not something that can be presented as a gift. It is something that you are born with, you just have not allowed it to grow, you have not allowed it to assert itself, because the whole society is against it. The society does not want lions, it wants a crowd of sheep. Then it is easy to enslave people, exploit people, do whatever you want to do with them. They don’t have a soul; they are almost robots. You order, and they will obey. They are not free individuals.
16.This courage is in everybody. It is not a quality to be practiced; it is something that is part of your life, your very breathing. It is just that the society has created so many barriers against your natural growth that you have started thinking from where to get courage? from where to get intelligence? from where to get truth?
17.I seem to you self-contradictory, inconsistent, for the simple reason that I have decided not to die before I die. I am going to live to the very last breath, so you cannot be certain about me till my last breath. After that you can make any image of me and be satisfied with it. But remember, it will not be me. To be with me needs courage, and the greatest courage is being capable of seeing the change and moving with it. It may be difficult; it is easy to have one idea once and then be finished.
OSHO
