IS THE ORIGIN OF DANCE, LOVE AND MEDITATION IN SYNCHRONICITY?
WHY HAS DANCE BEEN THROUGHOUT THE AGES THE HIGHEST ART?
PLEASE COMMENT.
Everything that is of authentic value in life has arisen out of meditation. There is no other way. Meditation is the mother of art, music, poetry, dance, sculpture. All that is creative, all that is life-affirmative, is born out of meditation. All that is life-negative — hate, anger, jealousy, violence, war — is born out of the mind. Man has two possibilities: mind and meditation.
Meditation can be translated as no-mind; then things will be simple. Either something comes out of the mind, or something comes out of no-mind. Mind is noise, it is craziness, insanity. No-mind is silence, health, wholeness. Mind cannot create anything which is not poisonous. And out of no-mind there is no possibility of anything arising which will serve death.
You ask about love. Your love is not out of meditation; you don’t know meditation, you are acquainted only with the mind. Just look at your mind. For ten minutes sit silently and write down whatever comes into your mind, without editing, without adding anything — exactly whatever is arising in the mind.
Howsoever irrelevant, stupid it may be, just write for ten minutes, and then read it. And you will be surprised: this is your mind? And if this is mind, then what is madness? And this mind is continuously running — in every action, feeling. If you love, this mind is bound to pollute that love with hate.
Psychotherapists, who do not know anything about no-mind, have finally decided that love and hate are not two things, and they have started using one word, “love-hate.” … Because love can change into hate any moment, hate can change into love any moment.
And this is not a new insight. One of the most cunning and clever men, Machiavelli, writes in his book, THE PRINCE — it is advice to kings — “Never say a thing to a friend that you would not like to be said to an enemy.” Three hundred years before psychotherapy, he was giving its whole insight — because the friend can become tomorrow the enemy. So never say to the friend what you would not like to say to any enemy.
And his second statement is, “Never say about the enemy anything that you would not say about a friend” — because tomorrow the enemy can turn into a friend, and then it will be very embarrassing, that you said such an ugly thing about him.
Machiavelli was certainly a genius of cunningness. He was the tutor of almost all the princes of Europe.
This man is not considered a great philosopher, but he should be. Even though he was a philosopher in favor of evil, his insight is deep. Love can become hate, hate can become love. Your love, which can within a moment change into hate, is not love. It has come from the mind, and mind always lives in contradictions. If there is love, then just behind love there is hate. If there is compassion, just behind compassion there is anger.
Mind is a duality, so everything is balanced by its opposite; that is the way of the mind. No-mind means you become a witness of all the processes of the mind. You detach yourself. Your consciousness is not part of the mind; it can watch the mind. Just the way you can watch a movie on the screen, your consciousness can watch on the screen of the mind all its craziness. This witnessing will lead you into a new space within yourself.
The arithmetic is very simple. When there is no witnessing in you, you are one hundred percent mind. One percent witnessing, and you are ninety-nine percent mind. And as witnessing grows, your mind starts disappearing. They cannot exist together; there is no coexistence between no-mind and mind, between meditation and mind — it is either/or.
When your witnessing is ninety percent, your mind is reduced to ten percent. And when your witnessing is one hundred percent — total, absolute — the screen is empty, the film has disappeared. This is the state of meditation: when there are no thoughts, no feelings — nothing moves, everything stops. There is tremendous serenity. Out of this serenity, silence, peace, a new kind of experience arises, new flowers blossom.
If love happens now, it will not have with it jealousy, hate, anger, and all those poisons which kill love. Now it will be pure love, unconditional. It will not ask anything in return, it will rejoice only in giving. It will be grateful that you accepted whatever was given to you; it will not burden you by making you feel obliged. It will not destroy your freedom. If you love somebody else and you are happy with somebody else, the meditator will feel very happy because you are happy — it does not matter with whom. He loves you, and he wants you to be happy.
Love out of meditation gives total freedom, accepts you the way you are, never tries to mold you into a certain pattern — that is ugly, that is violent. It respects your dignity. It has no suspicion….
Your love comes from the mind, which is basically mean. Love coming out of no-mind has a splendor of its own, a grandeur, something of the divine in it. Anything that comes out of meditation comes with the aura of eternity: painting, sculpture, poetry, music.
Look at modern music: it is simply insanity, it is not music. Just making noise is not music. It may help you to have some catharsis — that’s what music like jazz does, it is cathartic. You feel afterwards a kind of well-being, relaxed; but it is not music.
Music will make you silent, will make you disappear, will make you almost absent. Only the music will be there, not the musician — because in meditation the musician cannot exist. And if you are listening, soon you will find yourself melting, disappearing. It will create a new space within you. It has come out of meditation, and anyone who listens to it will feel something of meditation.
Old mystics have used music to convey their experience — for example, Kabir, Meera, Nanak. They will not discuss, they will not talk with you. They will simply play some instrument, sing a song — which has nothing to do with God, heaven and hell; which has nothing to do with theology, with any creed or cult.
Love out of meditation is not a relationship: it is a state of your being. You love because you cannot do otherwise; you have to love. You have only love to give — and this love will be expressed in many ways. Different people, different talents — somebody will paint, somebody will compose music, somebody will dance; but the basic quality is the same.
While painting, the meditator disappears; there is only painting going on, there is no painter. The dancer disappears; there is only dance, there is no dancer. The poet disappears; there is only poetry. And the same is true about all the dimensions in which your creativity can have its expression. You create because you are so overflowing with energy you cannot contain it. So whatever your talent, whatever your genius, your energy will take that dimension.
Any act arising out of meditation has no goal, it has no motivation; its value is intrinsic. While dancing, you are getting all the reward; there is no need for any other reward afterwards. There is no ambition, that you want to become famous, the greatest painter, the greatest poet — all that nonsense is part of the mind, which is egocentric.
Meditation is your egolessness. Just a little taste of it and you will be drawn into the very center of your being. And you will find the paradise that people have been thinking is somewhere in the clouds, far away in the stars.
Paradise is within you, in your state of no-mind. And hell is also within you, in your very mind. The choice is yours. You can move from the mind to no-mind; the bridge is witnessing.
OSHO
from : From Bondage to Freedom ch.39
