Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously
About This Book
Revered as the returned King David of the Old Testament by the Anabaptists, reviled as a murderous villain, hailed by Marx and Engels as a hero of the people, the young tailor's apprentice called Jan van Leyden turned his world upside down. Nearly five centuries ago, as the leader of persecuted Anabaptists, Jan created a New Zion in the north German city of Muenster. The local Prince Bishop attacked the walled city to destroy the upstart king. After repeated attacks were repulsed with ease by the shopkeepers and artisans who formed King Jan's army, a 16-month-long siege began.
What You'll Learn
• Understand Osho's distinction between the courage that faces external danger (which may or may not require genuine inner development) and the more demanding courage of emotional, relational, and spiritual honesty in the conditions of ordinary life
• Grasp the relationship between courage and love: why genuine love — as distinct from the possessive attachment most people call love — requires the ultimate courage of fully opening to another person with no guarantee of the response, and why this is simultaneously the most terrifying and the most alive thing a human being can do
• Recognise the relationship between courage and creativity: how every genuinely new act — in art, in thought, in relationship, in spiritual inquiry — requires the courage to move beyond the territory mapped by previous experience into the genuine unknown
• Learn Osho's understanding of why most people choose safety over genuine life: the specific social, psychological, and philosophical mechanisms through which the courage to live fully is systematically educated out of human beings from early childhood
• Appreciate the paradox Osho consistently points to: that the safety sought through avoiding risk never actually produces the security it promises, while the acceptance of genuine insecurity — the willingness to live without guarantees — paradoxically produces a quality of aliveness that conventional safety can never offer
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