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Chapter 15 - 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.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 159
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