Tarot in the Spirit of Zen

by Osho

  “Energy is delight”—that is a statement made by William Blake, one of the most mystical poets of the West. Energy is delight. When there is great energy, what are you going to do with it? It is bound to explode.

  Action comes out of energy, out of delight. Activity is businesslike. Action is poetry; activity creates bondage because it is result oriented. You are doing it not for its own sake, you are doing it for some goal. There is a motive. And then there is frustration. Out of a hundred cases, ninety-nine times you will not achieve the goal, so ninety-nine times you will be in misery, frustration. You did not enjoy the activity itself, you were waiting for the result. Now the result has come, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred there is frustration. And don’t hope for the remaining one percent, because when you achieve the goal, there is frustration also. The goal is achieved, but suddenly you realize that all the dreams you have been dreaming about the goal are not fulfilled.

  Activity means there is a goal; activity is only a means to an end. Action means that the means and the end are together. That’s the difference between action and activity.

  When action arises in you, it has a totally different dimension. You act for the sheer joy of acting. Action is an end unto itself; it has no utility. When the mind disappears, with it all utilitarian activities will also disappear, because mind is the cause of goal orientation. It contains all your motives. It contains your past and the future; it does not contain the present at all. And when there is no mind, all that is left is pure present. You act moment to moment, and each moment is enough unto itself.

  Response

  Action means response; activity means reaction. When you are in action, it means the mind is put aside and your consciousness is in a direct contact with existence; hence the response is immediate. Then whatsoever you do is not ready-made. It is not a ready-made answer given by the mind; you are responding to the reality as it is. Then there is beauty, because your action is true to the situation.

  But millions of people in the world are simply living through ready-made answers. They are already carrying the answer; they don’t listen, they don’t see the situation confronting them. They are more interested in the answer that they are carrying within themselves than in the question itself, and they go on living their answer again and again. That’s why their life becomes repetitive, boring, a drag. It is no longer a dance, it cannot be a dance.

  Action is a dance; activity is a drag. Activity is always untrue to the situation; action is always true to the situation. And activity is always inadequate because it carries an answer from the past, and life goes on changing every moment, so whatsoever you bring from the past is never adequate, it always falls short. So whatsoever you do, there is frustration; you feel that you have not been able to cope with reality. You always feel something is missing, you always feel your reaction was not exactly as it should have been. And the reason is that you have simply repeated, parrotlike, a ready-made answer, cheap but untrue—untrue because the situation is new.

  Action means there is no goal to it. Just as the poets say “poetry for poetry’s sake” or “art for art’s sake,” the same is the situation with the mystic. His action is for action’s sake; there is no other goal to it. He enjoys it just like a small child; innocently he enjoys it.

  King of Fire: The Creator

  The creator’s joy is in creation itself; there is no other reward.

  The only virtue worth calling virtue is creativity. What you create does not matter, but it should enhance life, beautify existence, make living more joyous, the song a little more juicy, the love a little more glorious—and the life of a creator starts becoming part of eternity and immortality.

  Millions of people live, but they don’t create anything. And it is one of the fundamentals of life that unless you create—it may be a painting, a song, a dance—you cannot be blissful, you will remain in misery. Only creativity brings to you your dignity. It helps you to blossom in your fullness.

  The creator cannot be part of the crowd. The creator has to learn to be alone, to go apart, to learn the beauty of solitude, because only in that space does your potential start changing into actuality. The way of the creator ultimately leads you to yourself, because you are going away from the crowd, away from the mass—you are going into aloneness. A painter is absolutely alone in his vision. A dancer is absolutely alone in his dance.

  One of the great dancers, Nijinsky, was asked once, “You dance before big audiences—don’t you feel nervous?” He said, “As far as I am concerned, I feel nervous, but only to the point before the dance starts. Once I am in my dance I am absolutely alone, there is nobody else. Not only do others disappear, a moment comes sometimes—and that is the greatest moment—when I myself disappear and only the dance remains.”

  This has been observed about Nijinsky by scientists, that there were some moments when he would jump so high that it was not physically possible because of gravitation. And more amazing was the part when he would come down. He would come down so slowly—just as if a leaf is falling slowly towards the earth; there is no hurry. That, too, gravitation does not allow; gravitation pulls things forcibly.

  He was asked about this and he said, “It is a mystery to me. Whenever I try, it never happens, because I am there. Perhaps I am the weight on which gravity works. When I forget myself completely, suddenly it is there—I am just a watcher as you are a watcher, full of wonder. I don’t know how it happens.”

  Perhaps the ego is the heaviest thing in you. In the moment when Nijinsky felt that he himself had disappeared—only the dance was there, the dancer no more—he touched on the same experience as Gautam Buddha or Lao Tzu, but from a very different dimension. His dance became a mystic experience.

  The creator’s joy is in creation itself; there is no other reward. And the moment you start thinking of any reward beyond your act, you are only a technician, not a creator.

  The creator is not ambitious and he is not lusting for eminence.

  Those who are ambitious and who are lusting for eminence are only third-rate people. They may be composers, but they are not creators. A creator has no intention of being famous, has no intention of being respectable. His whole energy is involved in only one thing: his creation.

  All the old, great pieces of art … for example, we don’t know who was the architect of the Taj Mahal, the most beautiful architecture in the whole world. We don’t know who created the Upanishads, the most beautiful statements about the ultimate experiences of man. They thought themselves simply vehicles, mediums of existence, only instrumental to the creativity of existence—they never thought that they were the creators. It is ugly even to sign your name.

  And you see the masses … they have not created anything, but in every public toilet they have signed; in movie houses they have engraved their names on the seats. Such a desire that your name should remain after you are gone, such a desire to be eminent, to be ambitious, is not part of a creative soul, it is part of the mundane and the mediocre.

  Queen of Fire: Sharing

  The more you share, the more you will have. In the ordinary economics you share and you lose; in the spiritual economics you share and you get more.

  In ordinary economics you have to be a miser, then only can you become rich … accumulate, never share. In the spiritual economics, if you are a miser whatever you have will be lost. It can live only if you share; it is a living experience. By sharing it continues a dynamic movement.

  I have heard about a young man who had just received a great lottery prize, and he was immensely pleased. He stopped his car because a beggar was standing there. The beggar had been standing there every day, but he had never stopped his car. But today was different. The young man gave him a hundred-dollar bill. The beggar laughed.

  The man said, “I don’t understand. Why are you laughing?”

  He said, “It reminds me … once I used to have my own car and I used to be just as generous as you are. I am laughing because soon you will be
standing by my side. Don’t be so generous! Learn something from my experience.”

  In the ordinary economics, the moment you give something, you have that much less. But have you felt that by giving love you have less love? Or by sharing your joy, have you felt that your joy is a little bit less? If you have watched, you will be surprised: by sharing, your joy is a little bit more; by loving, your sources of love are flowing more—you are juicier. By dancing … just to share yourself with your friends, you will not find yourself losing something, but gaining something.

  Don’t listen to the advice of other people. They know only about the ordinary economics. They don’t know anything about a higher economics, where giving is sharing and where not giving is very destructive.

  The more you give, the more you will have, the less you give, the less you will have. And if you don’t give at all, you will not have anything at all.

  Give with more totality, without any hesitation, and without holding anything back. Don’t listen to others. Listen to your own experience; watch your own experience—when you give, do you lose something or do you gain something? That should be the decisive thing.

  Knight of Fire: Intensity

  If you live totally, intensely, then you are free, you have lived the moment and it is finished. You don’t look back and you don’t look ahead, you simply remain here now.

  If you are just lukewarm in your search, then the ultimate is very far away from you. If you are total in your thirst and nothing is being held back—you have taken a jump into it, you have not left anything behind, no part of you is missing; you have jumped as a whole organic unity with your anger, your love, your hate, your greed, all together; you have staked whatsoever you have, whatsoever nature has given you—then the distance is almost nil.

  It depends on your intensity. The proportion of your intensity will decide the proportion of the distance between godliness and your ungodly sleep.

  Have you watched it, that whenever you are intense in anything the self disappears? You are in love with someone—in the very intensity of your love, the self disappears. You are no more, there is only love. Or you are in anger—in the intensity and totality of anger, the self disappears. You are no longer there, only the anger exists.

  You can watch it in your own life. Whenever something is there, possessing you all in all, the self is not found. That is a great clue. The self is there only when you are half-hearted in something. That which you hold back becomes the self.

  If you are totally involved in painting, in doing some work, singing a song or dancing or playing guitar, if you are totally in it, you will immediately see you are not there. Something of the beyond has taken possession of you. The self is not there, unself is.

  And you have come to this point many times, unawares of course.

  Seeing a beautiful sunset, you were so lost in the beauty of it that for a moment there was no idea of the self. You were not there. There was a totally different quality: you were not there. Something was there, but you cannot call it “I,” you cannot call it any frozen state of the ego. You were fluid, flowing.

  This is what Krishnamurti calls the moment when the observer becomes the observed. The sunset was there and the sunset was too much. It possessed you. The observer disappeared into the observed. The sunset was all; you were not separate, you were not standing aloof and watching, you were not a spectator. You were in it, you were part of it. You started feeling a kind of melting, merging.

  Hence the liberating experience of beauty; hence the liberating experience of love; hence the liberating experience of music, great music. These moments you have known—they come naturally, and they go. But you have never been able to reduce them to a scientific approach. You have not meditated over them, you have not looked into the keys that are hidden in them.

  Just look at a child of three and you will see what liveliness should be, how joyous he is and how sensitive to everything that goes on happening around him, how alert, watchful; nothing misses his eye. And how intense in everything: if he is angry, he is just anger, pure anger. It is beautiful to see a child in anger, because old people are always half-hearted, even if they are angry they are not totally in it, they are holding back. They don’t love totally, they are not angry totally, they don’t do anything in totality, they are always calculating. Their life has become lukewarm. It never comes to that intensity of one hundred degrees where things evaporate, where something happens, where revolution becomes possible.

  But a child always lives at one hundred degrees—whatsoever he does. If he hates you he hates you totally, and when he loves you he loves you totally; and in a single moment he can change. He is so quick! He does not take time, he does not brood over it. Just one moment before, he was sitting in your lap and telling you how much he loves you. And then something happens—you say something and something goes wrong between you and him—and he jumps out of your lap and says, “I never want to see you again.” And see in his eyes the totality of it!

  And because it is total, it does not leave a trace behind. That’s the beauty of totality: it does not accumulate psychological memory. Only partial living creates psychological memory. Then everything that you have lived only in part hangs around you, and the hangover continues for your whole life. Thousands of things are hanging there unfinished.

  That’s the whole theory of karma: unfinished jobs, unfinished actions go on waiting to be finished, to be completed, and they go on goading you: “Complete me!” Because every action wants to be ful-filled … .

  But if you live totally, intensely, then you are free of it, you have lived the moment and it is finished. You don’t look back and you don’t look ahead, you simply remain here now. There is no past, no future. That’s what I mean by celebration. In a real moment of celebration only the present exists.

  Page of Fire: Playfulness

  Play is something in which a goal is not at all involved. The very being together is beautiful—for the sheer joy of it! In a better world, with more understanding, games will disappear; there will only be play.

  There cannot be any map to the land of playfulness. All maps lead to seriousness. Playfulness is when all maps have been burned. There is no way to playfulness, because playfulness is not a goal and cannot be a goal. When you forget about goals, when you are not going anywhere, when the very idea of going is dropped, then here-now playfulness starts growing in you, happening in you.

  Playfulness is not then and there; it is here, now. So how can there be a road map? You are not to go anywhere, you are just to be.

  Seriousness is goal-oriented. And when a serious person starts playing, he even transforms the quality of the play—it becomes a game; it is no longer play. That is the difference between a game and play. When play becomes serious, it becomes a game.

  People go to see wrestling, people go to see bullfights or American football—ugly, violent, inhuman. The people who are going to see these things are immature, and a little perverted too. The spectators are as ungrown-up as the gladiators. And both are in some way catharting; in the name of the game they are throwing their rubbish, they are simply vomiting their violence.

  This is a very violent, violent world. That’s why love cannot exist here. When human beings really become human beings, things like bullfighting and wrestling will be unheard of, they will become part of history. Just to imagine that thousands of people have come to see a bullfight looks so ugly, disgusting. But people are serious. They change play also into seriousness.

  Play is something in which a goal is not at all involved. The very being together is beautiful—for the sheer joy of it! In a better world, with more understanding, games will disappear; there will only be play. There will be nobody as a winner, nobody as the defeated—because the very idea of defeating and winning is inhuman. There is no need for it! Why can’t we enjoy the sheer togetherness? There should be no counting, no marking. There should not be any result out of it.

  If you are in love with playing football
, play football—just play it! Don’t look for the result. If the result comes in, you become serious. The play is destroyed; it has become almost businesslike. Enjoy the sheer outpouring of energy, enjoy the moment—don’t sacrifice it for anything else.

  Ace of Fire: The Source

  When the energy is just there—not going anywhere, just pulsating at the original source, just radiating its light there, blossoming like a lotus, neither going out nor going in—it is simply here and now.

  When I say go inward, I am simply saying don’t go on moving in the head. The whole society forces your energy to move in the head. All education consists of the basic techniques for how to pulsate the energy only in the head—how to make you a great mathematician, how to make you a great physician. All the education in the world consists of taking the energy into the head.

  Zen asks you to come out of the head and go to the basic source—the place from where the educational system around the world has been taking the energy, putting it into the head, and turning it into thoughts, images, and creating thinking. The head has its uses. It is not that Zen is not aware of the uses of energy in the head, but if all the energy is used in the head, you will never become aware of your eternity. You may become a very great thinker and philosopher, but you will never know, as an experience, what life is. You will never know, as an experience, what it is to be one with the whole.