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Chapter 15 - 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 Osho - The Hidden Splendor
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