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The Japanese have a word ‘campai’. It literally means empty cup. Most commonly, it is the word used when making a toast: like the Germans say prost, the Danes skål, the English cheers, the Italians cin-cin. Which reminds me . . .

One of the biggest faux pas I ever committed in Japan happened one evening after an event in Osaka, one of Japan's major cities. I was sitting around a table waiting to have dinner with some Japanese friend. I was feeling a little tired and spaced-out from the day’s activities, when drinks arrived and I proposed a toast.

"Cin-cin!" I said.

The red faces and looks of shock all around me indicated something had gone terribly wrong. Then someone leaned close to my ear and whispered: Cin-cin means prick in Japanese.

“Skål!" I quickly said.

Oops, wrong country again. "Uh…Campai!" I shouted.

Everyone laughed nervously, then proceeded to drain their glasses - very politely of course - in one gulp.

In Japan, as with other modern cultures, celebration is simply skål! You clink and drain your glasses of beer with so-called friends and hope for a better day tomorrow. A friend of mine who teaches English in Japan was sharing how beautiful and full of life the young children are who come to his school; yet how quickly their society seems to crush them, squeezing out all their joy of life. I have heard Osho say most people in the world die around the age of thirty: maybe not physically, but spiritually. They just give up - and the rest of their life is a long, boring march to the grave. Sure, you can find beautiful temples in Japan - perhaps once upon a time they even provided shelter and inspiration to meditators - but nowadays, they are museums to a dead past. Within their aesthetic gates, you will find no music, no dancing or singing: Just the boring silence of a graveyard. A kind of silence, yes - but no celebration of it. Things look beautiful on the outside, but are very seriousness on the inside. Is this not the nature of the world we live in?

It has always puzzled me why Osho made celebration the last stage of Dynamic Meditation: Why it doesn't just end in silence like Kundalini and Nadabrama. Is it because he realized that not only is mankind not capable of silence, but has forgotten the language of celebration, too? This koan finally unraveled itself during a recent tour of mine in Japan.

At one of my events in the Spring of 2002, I was participating in Dynamic Meditation with a group of enthusiastic Japanese. On this particular morning, the meditation in the fourth stage went very deep. Suddenly, the silence was pierced by the first notes of music heralding the fifth and final stage, and the roomful of meditators began to pulse with joy and dance. I remembered how it was to be a child again: innocent, a clean slate, tabula rasa - how I came into this world before society, the priests, my parents and educators got hold of me. I had an insight into a deeper meaning of campai.

Campai is the last stage of Dynamic Meditation. And like the seqquence of stages in Dynamic, one reaches campai via silence. For in silence, we remember who we are again. We become the small children we once were - dancing and singing in the sun and rain, life worth living and full of magic. Where laughter and joy arise spontaneously from deep sources within us. In knowing who we are, the real celebration - the real campai - begins. Campai is our birthright. Campai is our empty cup - empty, yet full, and overflowing with love and the wine of life. Sound Zen? Let’s just say: Campai!