Zorba The Buddha (uniting Spirituality With Enjoyment Of Life)

[Juan Cruz Giusto]

This are all extracts from Osho that I really like. Some people that are in this quest for enlightenment often forget to live too and enjoy the mundane and physical things. We think that the physical world is worse than the spiritual (awareness) and we should only focus on this path, but we have the opportunity to live, and to live as a whole!

With this said, this is what my friend Osho thinks about:

 

"If we want a whole man – and to me a whole man is the only holy man – then Zorba has to be absorbed into Buddha. They have to be accepted totally as one. And I don't see where the trouble is. In fact, Zorba plus Buddha will be a tremendous enrichment.

"Buddha cannot laugh, cannot dance, cannot sing, cannot love. Now what kind of life will it be? Hollow!

"Zorba can sing, dance, enjoy food, drink, love. He will have a life, but he will not know who he is. He will not know the meaning of existence. He will never come to experience the deathlessness of life, the eternity of his existence – that he has been here always, and will be always; only forms change. He will never enter into his own center. He will always remain in the cyclone, very busy, concerned with everything except himself. And the center of the cyclone is the most ecstatic experience, the ultimate experience of human consciousness. Beyond that there is nothing; you have arrived home.

"But I don't see that there is any problem, there is no contradiction. You can arrive home, you can be at your center – what prevents you from laughing? In fact, you should be the only one who can really laugh, can become laughter; who can really love, can become love itself – where the lover disappears and only love remains; one who can dance and dance to such abandon that the dancer is completely gone, there is only dance.

"This is my effort: To bring Zorba the Buddha into the world.

"That will create a unity in you; your body and soul will have a unity. You will not have to fight against your nature, you can use it as a stepping stone. There is no need to fight, there is no need to repress. All psychological diseases are out of repression. All psychopathological people are just incurable unless they accept their nature totally, without any grudge. You have to use your natural energies to grow. It will bring man into a totality.

"All religions have made you schizophrenic, split. They have created guilt in you by creating a split; it is their whole business. Only a guilty man will go to church, will go to the synagogue, will go to the temple; otherwise there is no need. If you are one, you would like to dance in the open air under the sun. That will be your real prayer. Nothing is said, nothing is asked, but you are showing your gratitude to existence.

"Zorba the Buddha will not only destroy the split in man, it will destroy the split in society."

[Mppdidi]

I have not dig into osho's views, but this concept sounds familliar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel)

 

All the best

[Patrick]

14 hours ago, Juan Cruz Giusto said:

"All religions have made you schizophrenic, split. They have created guilt in you by creating a split; it is their whole business. Only a guilty man will go to church, will go to the synagogue, will go to the temple; otherwise there is no need. If you are one, you would like to dance in the open air under the sun. That will be your real prayer. Nothing is said, nothing is asked, but you are showing your gratitude to existence.

@Juan Cruz Giusto  Man, how true I have found this to be. Whenever I wanted to attend church in my earlier days... It was always attached to some feeling of guilt. Always (i.e. "God will punish me if I do not go"). I am grateful; growth is possible!

[Pelin]

I've recently read Zorba by Kazantzakis, and recommend everyone to read it. The time Kazantzakis met Zorba (a real person by the way, not fictional), he was struggling with writing about Buddha, and in a way he was trying to deal with the contradiction. And then when I saw Osho merging these two seemingly-different lifestyle, it made a lot of sense to me.

p.s. While reading the book I sincerely thought Zorba was an enlightened human being.

Edited July 26, 2016 by Pelin

[Leo Gura]

Yes, of course! Real enlightened people ARE both Buddha and Zorba. They enjoy life! They do not take themselves or life seriously at all.

This idea of an enlightened person being an overly-serious Zen monk is a myth. It's just an excuse unenlightened people create so that they can say, "Oh, I don't want to be enlightened because it's a drag." In fact, an enlightened Zen monk will have way more personality and range of emotions than the average American.