Osho - Creativity is one of the fundamentals of my Sannyas

Osho - Creativity is one of the fundamentals of my sannyas. A sannyasin should not be uncreative -- that has been the traditional way. In all the religions all over the world monks and nuns have been very uncreative. The very idea of religion was to renounce life, and if you renounce life, creativity is renounced automatically.

To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it. You love life so much that you would like to leave it a little better than you found it. But if you are against life, there is no question of making it better, beautiful, rich prosperous.

You can ignore it, you can neglect it. It is just as if you are staying in a hotel -- who cares about the hotel? You are not going to stay there forever, so why bother? That was the old idea of all the religions: that we are only here for a few days so why bother? Just pass these days somehow -- praying for a better world, the other world -- not for the betterment of this world, not any prayer to create a paradise now and here. The goal of the old sannyas was beyond death.

My sannyas knows only the present -- the now and the here. Of course the other shore is there, but it will take its own course. In the course of time it will arrive. And we have to learn here to be able to live there. If we are uncreative here, how can you be creative in paradise?

Life is a school of learning. The old saints and the old mahatmas remain the same -- in heaven too! Even if they reach heaven -- and I suspect, I doubt very much that they can! If by some accident they do, they will start renouncing paradise because that's all that they are accustomed to, that's all that they have practised for their whole life -- and not one life but for many lives they have been practising and practising renunciation.

Even in paradise they will find a thousand and one faults. That has been their way here, to find faults -- not to try to make life a little better, but just to find faults so it can be condemned. They will condemn paradise. I don't think they will ever be allowed in paradise -- they are not good company! If they don't go to hell, they must be somewhere in limbo, hanging between the two, which is far worse -- neither here nor there because nobody wants to take them in.

One has to love life enough to beautify it, to pour one's energy into it. Yes, we are here for a few days, but a few days are more then enough. It is not a question of time, you have to do something in these days. Try to make it a little cleaner. Try to make it a little healthier, try to make it a little hygienic, try to make it a little happier. That very effort will change you. That very idea is what service is.

To be creative is to really be in the service of God. And that is the only true way of prayer and meditation. If God is a creator, then we can participate with him only when we are creators. In our own small way, painting or poetry or pottery, whatsoever small thing we can do. But while we are creating it, we are participating in the vast process of creation. In those moments we disappear and God is.

Creativity certainly brings peace. And if there is creativity and there is peace, one starts feeling existence is full of Godliness. Then there is no need to go to the church, or the temple, or the mosque. The whole of life is your temple. The whole earth is sacred. Wherever you are, you are on sacred ground.

Source - Osho Book "Eight Four Thousand Poems"