The Song of Ecstasy

Book excerpt: Talks on Adi Shankara’s Bhaj Govindam “Shankara is a unique person. And it is very easy to misunderstand the unique person because he is beyond your common understanding. It seemed to people that he was a logician, a great logician. But can a great logician say, ‘Sing! Dance! Sing the song of the divine’? It is just not possible for him to say so. Such words can be spoken only by a lover of the divine from the depths of his heart.” —OSHO The eighth-century enlightened mystic, Adi Shankaracharya, traveled across India arguing, debating and defeating all the renowned scholars, theologians and religious leaders of the time, but at the same time he never forgot to sing his song of ecstasy and live his joy in life. Shankara is a man close to Osho’s heart – a man who has an enlightened consciousness, a towering intellect, but who also came to understand, from his own experience, the opportunities for awareness and self-understanding that living each moment “in the marketplace” can give. As he comments on Shankara’s Bhaj Govindam, his song of ecstasy, and responds to related questions, Osho introduces his vision of the New Man, the whole man – joyous, silent, ecstatic; repressing nothing, delighting in and watching everything.