To live dangerously means to live vertically.

And after nine years, when I resigned from the professorship, the first thing I did was burn all the certificates.

My father was there; he said, ”Even if you have resigned, there is no need to burn the certificates.

They can remain here. What is the trouble? You give them to me, I will keep them.”

I said, ”No, that means you are still hoping that someday I may need them.

No, once I have passed a bridge I want to destroy it, so that I cannot go back. I am not going to give these certificates to you.”

I burned them in front of him, and he said, ”You are strange. I am not preventing you from resigning.”

I said, ”Once I have resigned, I am never going to need these certificates in my life, so why carry them?”

Rules of any kind I have never followed, so it is very natural for me to forget.

Yes, I forgot to tell you that it is one of my requests to you to live dangerously.

What does it mean exactly?

It simply means that in life there are always alternatives. You are always at a crossroad, always and always.

Each moment is a crossroad, and you have to choose where you are going, what is going to be your path; each moment you have to choose.

Each moment is decisive because you are discarding many ways and choosing one.

Now, if you choose the comfortable, the convenient, then you will never be able to live intensely.

The comfortable, the convenient, the conventional, which the society approves, means that you are ready to become a psychological slave.

That’s why all this convenience....

The society will give you everything, if you give your freedom to it. It will give you respectability, it will give you great posts in the hierarchy, in the bureaucracy – but you have to drop one thing: your freedom, your individuality.

You have to become a number in the crowd.

The crowd hates the person who is not part of it. The crowd becomes very tense seeing a stranger amongst it, because the stranger becomes a question mark.

You have been living a certain life, a certain style, a certain religion, a certain politics.

You have been following the way of the mob, and you were very comfortable, cozy, because those surrounding you were all people just like you.

What you were doing, they were doing. Everybody else was doing the same; that gave the feeling that you were doing the right thing.

So many people could not be wrong.
And in gratitude that you are following them, they give you respectability, honor.

Your ego is fulfilled.

Life is convenient, but it is flat. You live horizontally – a very thin slice of life, just like a slice of bread cut very thin. In a linear way you live.

To live dangerously means to live vertically.

OshO 
CHAPTER 30. THE ONLY GOLDEN RULE IS THERE ARE NO GOLDEN RULES
From Unconciousness to Consciousness page 361