A few days for celebration

Do you hear the firecrackers outside? Have you ever thought about why, all over the world, in every culture, in every society, there are a few days in the year for celebration?

These few days for celebration are just a compensation – because these societies have taken away all celebration of your life, and if nothing is given to you in compensation your life can become a danger to the culture.

Every culture has to give some compensation to you so that you don’t feel completely lost in misery, in sadness. But these compensations are false.

These firecrackers outside and these lights outside cannot make you rejoice. They are only for children; for you they are just a nuisance. But in your inner world there can be a continuity of lights, songs, joys.

Always remember that society compensates you when it feels that the repressed may explode into a dangerous situation if it is not compensated. The society finds some way of allowing you to let out the repressed. But this is not true celebration, and it cannot be true.

True celebration should come from your life, in your life.

And true celebration cannot be according to the calendar, that on the first of November you will celebrate. Strange, the whole year you are miserable and on the first of November suddenly you come out of misery, dancing. Either the misery was false or the first of November is false; both cannot be true. And once the first of November is gone, you are back in your dark hole, everybody in his misery, everybody in his anxiety.

Life should be a continuous celebration, a festival of lights the whole year round. Only then you can grow up, you can blossom.

Transform small things into celebration. […]

Everything that you do should be expressive of you; it should have your signature on it.

Then life becomes a continuous celebration.

Osho, Beyond Enlightenment, Ch 28

Quote published in The Book: An Introduction to the Teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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