[A sannyasin who is an artist is visiting. He says: I came back to get some feeling for my paintings and to try to get more vision in my inner eye.]
Osho – Many more… many more visions will be coming to you. Because paintings can either be from the mind or can be from somewhere else. When they are from somewhere else, when they are not from your mind, when you cannot really sign them as yours, then they have something of tremendous beauty. When they come from the beyond they are divine, they are sacred. That is the distinction between the sacred and the profane art.
The profane art is human. It is entertainment. It can’t soar very high; it remains within the field of gravitation. But there are a few things which have happened — for example, a Taj Mahal or the temples of Khajuraho or the Zen paintings, Zen haikus; they are not from the mind. They come from somewhere else, and because they come from somewhere else, the painter, the poet, the musician, the sculptor, are just vehicles, instrumental, mediums.
Meditation will make you a medium. Just give a little more time to meditation: just sitting silently, doing nothing, just waiting for something to arrive — not even actively searching for it but just waiting, just waiting for the guest to knock on the door. One never knows when the guest is going to come.
So go on sitting in meditation every day, whenever you can find time. Don’t make it a ritual, don’t make it formal. There is no need to make a fixed time for it — just whenever the feeling comes. In the middle of the night sit on your bed doing nothing, sitting silently, and you will be surprised: slowly slowly you start becoming a passage and many things start flooding you which are not yours. You had never thought about them, never dreamed about them. They have a different color, a different shape, a different taste, a different texture, which is not of your mind.
And then art becomes sacred. Then art is worship. Then there is no need for any other prayer. That is your prayer, and it is far more valuable than the prayers that priests go on doing in the temples, because it is creative. If God is the creator then the only way to participate in his being is to be a creator. Create something, and in a small measure you start overlapping the boundaries of God; he starts overlapping the boundaries of your being.
In the past religion became very uncreative. It even became very destructive, because it became life-negative, life-denying, world-denying — and if you are world-denying you can’t be creative. Then what is the meaning of a painting? If the whole world is illusory then your painting is just a reflection of a reflection. Then what is the meaning of poetry? — all nonsense, because the whole world is illusory! Then what is the meaning of love?
Religion became more and more world-denying, life-negative, and naturally, all creativity was lost. And whenever a religion is no more creative, it is no more a religion. It has lost its soul; it is only a dead body, a corpse. You can go on worshipping it for centuries but nothing is going to happen through it.
What I am doing here is bringing creativity back to religion. I would like painters and poets and musicians and all kinds of people who have some idea to do something. I would like my whole commune to be in a passionate, creative love affair with existence. Then whether they pray or not, whether they believe in God or not, doesn’t matter at all; they are religious, they are holy people.
Source – Osho Book “Don’t Let Yourself Be Upset by the Sutra, rather Upset the Sutra Yourself”