Osho shares how a man inflicts misery, desire, greed and happiness on himself
Man is in misery, and man has remained in misery down the centuries. Rarely can you find a human being who is not miserable. It is so rare that it almost seems unbelievable. The misery is such and they are entangled into it so deeply, that they don’t see that any escape is possible.
If you want to get out of misery, you will have to get out of your desire for happiness — then nobody can make you miserable. Here is what Freud missed. He could not understand that the very desire for happiness can be the cause of misery. How does it happenIJ Why in the first place do you desire happinessIJ And what does it do to you, the desire for happinessIJ
The moment you desire for happiness, you have moved away from the present, you have moved away from the existential, you have already moved into the future — which is nowhere and has not come yet. You have moved in a dream. Now, dreams can never be fulfilling. Your desire for happiness is a dream. The dream is unreal. Through the unreal, nobody has ever been able to reach to the real. You have taken a wrong train.
Awareness of the desire brings desirelessness. And this key has to be used to open many locks. If you are greedy, don’t ask how to get rid of it, because that is greed again, under another name, in another form.
Right now the body follows the mind, and the mind is the culprit and you go on punishing the body. It is almost like a small child — he comes running into the room, gets hit by the door, gets angry at the door, starts beating the door as if the door is the culprit. Not only children but even grown-ups do such things. You are writing and your fountain-pen is not flowing well, you get angry and throw it on the floor — you punish the fountain-pen!
If you live a bored life, nobody else is responsible for it but you. You ask for boredom and boredom is misery. You ask for boredom because you ask for repetition. Something happened; for example, you were sitting and the first star of the evening was becoming visible. You watched and it was a quiet evening — it was cool and birds were returning back to their nests. Just watching the star becoming visible you felt beautiful. Now, you have tasted something — you will gather it like a treasure. This treasure will make you miserable.
First, you will hanker for it again and again. That hankering will create misery and it cannot be repeated by your hankering, remember because it happened only because there was no hankering in you. You were simply sitting there not knowing what was going to happen. It happened in a state of innocence. It happened in a state of non-expectation, you were not looking for it. That is a basic ingredient in it. You were not looking, you were not asking. In fact, you were not desiring, you were simply there.
Suddenly you became aware — the first star. In that moment when you became aware of the first star, you were not thinking that it was happiness, remember that too. That comes later on, that is a recapitulation. In that moment you were simply there — not happy, not unhappy, nothing. These words don’t mean anything. Existence is so vast that no word is meaningful about it.
courtesy Oshoworld