Giving Birth to Your Consciousness Is the Greatest Creativity

Osho, what is creativity?

“Creativity is a very paradoxical state of consciousness and being: it is action through inaction, it is what Lao Tzu calls wei wu wei. It is allowing something to happen through you.

“It is not a doing, it is an allowing. It is becoming a passage so the whole can flow through you. It is becoming a hollow bamboo, just a hollow bamboo.

“And then immediately something starts happening, because hidden behind man is godliness. Just give it a little way, a little passage, to come through you. That is creativity: allowing godliness to happen is creativity.

“Creativity is a religious state. That’s why I say that a poet is far closer to godliness than a theologian, a dancer even closer. The philosopher is the farthest away, because the more you think, the greater the wall you create between you and the whole. The more you think, the more you are. The ego is nothing but all the thoughts accumulated in the past.

“When you are not, godliness is. That is creativity.”

The Bridge of Love and Laughter

Is creativity an essential part of mysticism then?

“For the mystic, his very existence is creativity. He walks, and that is creativity. He talks, and that is creativity. He remains silent, and that is creativity. Buddha, sitting in silence, is far more creative than Rabindranath writing poetry, far more creative than Picasso doing his painting, far more creative than Moore working on his sculpture… just sitting silently!….

“At the ultimate peak of being a mystic, creativity is just a climate. Lower than that is the poet; then creativity brings great songs, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music, painting. And even the scientist, the lowest in this categorization — lowest because he works with the lowest form of existence, matter — even the scientist, when he is creative, has a few glimpses like the mystic….

“So creativity has three layers; the ultimate is the mystic: he lives in a climate of creativity. The poet, once in a while, brings some treasures from the beyond; the scientist, also very rarely, but whenever he can visit the ultimate he brings something precious to the world. But…