https://oshofriends.com/dictionary/69665Sensuousness
Sensuousness means you are open, your doors are open, you are ready to throb with existence. If a bird starts singing, the sensuous person immediately feels the song echoed in his deepest core of being. The non-sensuous person does not hear it at all, or maybe it is just a noise somewhere. It does not penetrate his heart. A cuckoo starts calling -- a sensuous person starts feeling as if the cuckoo is not calling from some faraway mango grove, but from deep down within his own soul. It becomes his own call, it becomes his own longing for the divine, his own longing for the beloved. In that moment the observer and the observed are one. Seeing a beautiful flower bloom, the sensuous person blooms with it, becomes a flower with it.
The sensuous person is liquid, flowing, fluid. Each experience, and he becomes it. Seeing a sunset, he is the sunset. Seeing a night, a dark night, beautiful silent darkness, he becomes the darkness. In the morning he becomes the light.
He is ALL that life is. He tastes life from every nook and comer. Hence he becomes rich; this is real richness. Listening to music he is music, listening to the sound of water he becomes that sound. And when the wind passes through a bamboo grove, and the cracking bamboos... he is not far away from them. He is amidst them, one of them -- he is a bamboo.
A Zen Master told one of his. disciples who wanted to paint bamboos, "Go and first become a bamboo."
He was an accomplished painter, he had passed all the art examinations, and with distinction. His name had already started becoming famous. And the Master said, "You go to the forest, live with the bamboos for a few years, become a bamboo. And the day you can become a bamboo come back and paint, not before it. How can you paint a bamboo if you have not known what a bamboo feels like from within? You can paint a bamboo from the outside, but that is just a photograph."
And that is the difference between photography and painting. A photograph can never be a painting. Howsoever skillfully, artfully done, it remains only the reflection of the circumference of the bamboo. No camera can enter into the soul.
When for the first time photography was developed, a great fear arose in the world of painting that maybe now painting would lose its old beauty and its old pedestal; because photography would be developed more and more every day and soon it would fulfill its requirement. That fear was absolutely unbased. In fact after the invention of the camera, photography has developed tremendously, but simultaneously painting has learned new dimensions, new visions, new perceptions. Painting has become richer; it had to become. Before the invention of the camera the painter was functioning as a camera.
... The Master said, "You go to the forest." And the disciple went, and for three years he remained in the forest, being with the bamboos in all kinds of climates. Because when it is raining the bamboo has one joy, and when it is windy the bamboo has a different mood, and when it is sunny, of course everything changes in the being of the bamboo. And when a cuckoo comes into the bamboo grove and starts calling, the bamboos are silent and responsive. He had to be there for three years.
And then it happened, one day it happened: sitting by the side of the bamboos, he forgot who he was. And the wind started blowing and he started swaying -- like a bamboo! Only later on did he remember that for a long time he had not been a man. He had entered into the soul of the bamboo, then he painted the bamboos.
Those bamboos certainly have a totally different quality which no photograph can ever have. Photographs can be beautiful, but dead. That painting is alive because it shows the soul of the bamboo in all its moods, in all its richness, in all its climates. Sadness is there, and joy is there, and agony is there, and ecstasy is there, and all that a bamboo knows, the whole biography of a bamboo is there.
To be sensuous is to be available to the mysteries of life. Become more and more sensuous, and drop all condemnation. Let your body become just a door. All your senses should become clear doors with no hindrances, so when you hear you become the music, and when you see you become the light, when you touch you become that which you have touched.
-Osho, "The Secret of Secrets, Vol 2, #14, Q1"
