Spiritual Reading Discussion - Maturity by Osho, All of life should be a celebration

As your silence grows, your friendliness, your love grows; your life becomes a moment-to-moment dance, a joy, a celebration.

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 the 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.

Firecrackers and colored lights 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 can you grow up, can you blossom.

Transform small things into celebration.

Osho. Maturity: The Responsibility of Being Oneself (Osho Insights for a New Way of Living) . St. Martin's Press.pp. xvii-xviii

Comment:

Do UUs say grace before meals? Do they practice mindful eating? I have done this with evangelical Christians but never with UUs. Why is that?

Do UUs say their prayers before they go to bed and when they awake in the morning? I was taught to do this as a child having been raised as a Roman Catholic, but I have never heard of this practice in Unitarian Universalism.

Do UUs pray five times a day directing their prayers towards Mecca as the Muslims do, or follow the practice of praying the hours as Christians do? I have never heard of such a thing in Unitarian Universalism.

There is some effort to be mindful and mindfulness practices have been encouraged by and for UUs, and these mindfulness practices take many forms such as mindful eating, mindful walking, mindful working.

The Buddhists have told us that prayer can be chopping wood and carrying water. It can be driving to work and home and doing our paperwork. Can running errands and taking the kids to their activities be a prayer? If so, Osho tells us, there is no need for holidays, for vacations, for celebrations. All of life is a celebration and every day is a holiday - a holy day.

Slow down and smell the roses and have a holy day today with several holy moments.