Osho Rajneesh – The Art of Living 6

Osho
Heaven is not born out of hell. If you are miserable today how do you think tomorrow is going to be blissful. Tomorrow will come out of you. Your tomorrow comes out of you. All your yesterdays together plus today is going to be your tomorrow. Simple arithmetic. How will tomorrow be happy… unless you dies because with your death all yesterdays die. Then it will not come out of your miseries. It will be fresh, something which happens for the first time. It will not come out of your mind, it will come out of your being. You become dwij, twice born. Try to understand your misery. What creates so much misery. I watch you and look inside… layers upon layers of miseries. How can you live. Must be stronger experience. You have nothing to live except hope that somehow tomorrow is the miracle. You’ve been thinking this for many lives. The hope survives, goes on living.

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You live not because you have life but because you have hope. Hope is your only life. Just a dream of heaven and you forget the hell around you. You live in dreams… sustaining you. Reality is ugly. Why so much misery happens. And why can’t you see it. Why can’t you find the cause of it. To find the cause of misery, one has to start evading it. How can you know a thing evading it? You have to encounter it face to face. When you’re miserable you have to start hoping. Tomorrow becomes more important that today. Now hope is functioning as a drug. You take it and you forget. Drunk with hope… not drug like it. No marijuana, no LSD, hope is the ultimate LSD. Because of hope you can tolerate everything. Thousands of hell is nothing. You immediately escape it. My talk my also be functioning as an escape. You listen to me you have to be attentive. You forget yourself, your real situation.

I talk about bliss but it’s real to me. Again it becomes a hope that you will meditate and work for it and it will happen to you also. Don’t use the master as an hope. Don’t dream against the reality. If you are sad then sadness is reality. Remain with it! Don’t move! Let it be. Don’t move to the opposite. It is going to be a very bitter experience in the start. When you face sadness it surrounds you from everywhere, you become a small island. One feels afraid and trembling into the deep. But let it be, don’t escape. PEnetrate deep into it… see what? Don’t judge… you’ve been doing that for millions of lives. Soon the bitter experience is no more bitter. Soon reality arises. Soon you’ll find the cause. The cause is not outside. Misery is just like a smoke. Somewhere there is fire inside you. Penetrate deep into the smoke so you can find the fire. You can’t put the smoke off as its a byproduct. Only by the cause can something be done. If you fight with the effect it’s all in vain. Go to the cause… it’s somewhere there.

Don’t dream about the day there is not smoke… this is not only foolish, it’s suicidal. This is how you’re missing the cause. As you are, everything leads to misery. And if you remain as you are… it will all lead to misery. It’s not a question of changing the situation… it’s a deep rooted thing in you. A man of awareness comes to know that everything leads to misery. EVERYTHING. You have done everything. If you hate it leads to misery, if you love… same. There seems to be no logical system in life. Is life absolutely absurd? Is it a chaos? It seems misery is the road. And from there you can start. Everything leads to misery. Whatsoever you do is irrelevant. Finally you come to the goal and it is misery.

Every road leads to hell? Whats the matter. There seems to be no choice. Yes everything leads to misery if you remain the same. If you change everything leads to heaven. If you remain the same… it is you. Not what you do. It is you who finally creates the phenomenon of misery or ecstasy. Unless you change. Just changing from hate to love, this woman to that, this house to that. Wont help… you’re wasting time, energy. You have to change yourself. In life everything is a flux. With such a fluxed life you cannot expect anything. If you expect you’ll be in misery. Expectations work in a fixed worked not in a fluxed life. You love a woman. She seems very happy. Next morning she’s not. You loved her because of her happiness, because she was always smiling, because she has a quality… next morning it’s no more there. You cannot expect, everything changes. Every moment. All your expectations will lead you to misery.

Marry a beautiful woman… she can fall ill and lose her beauty. What will you do? Things change. Happy becomes unhappy, soft becomes hard person. Singing disappears, quarrelsome attitudes appear. How can you expect… if you do there will be misery. If life was fixed… you married a 16 year old girl and you loved each other and it never changes… life will not be life. Expectations will be fulfilled but boredom will come out of it. If things don’t change you’ll get bored. If the wife keeps smiling everything… you’ll become worried after a few days. Is her smile real or is she acting? I’ve seen people even in sleep they are smiling… politicians (laughter). Their job is to continuously smile. If you tell them not to… they cannot do it.

Bertrand Russell writes he would not like to be in such a paradise. Just think of a place where all the enlightened have gathered and nothing changes. Russell is right… you’d be bored to death. So change is happening but then expectations cannot be fulfilled. In this life where you are living… change creates misery, anxiety. There is always anxiety in you… always. If you’re poor… how to achieve riches. If you are rich how to retain. Fear of thieves and the government… which is an organised robbery. Taxation. If without woman… loneliness. If with woman… she brings her own problems. And problems are not only doubled they are multiplied. You cannot live single you cannot live with someone. Anxiety remains. Past experience, sanskaras… create misery. Because whenever you move through an experience, it creates a groove in you. And if it is repeated many times the groove becomes deeper. If life moves in different ways and the energy is not flowing in that groove… you feel unfulfilled. And if life continues in the same groove you feel bored… you want excitement. If excitement is not there you think whats the use of living.

You cannot eat the same food everyday. If you do, you feel frustrated because it loses taste, excitement. But if you change it everyday it too will bring anxiety because the body chemistry changes. The body feels comfortable with the same food but the mind does not. If you live through your past habits the body will always feel comfortable it does not hanker for the new. It need routine. The mind always needs change because mind itself is a flux phenomenon. Anxiety is always there because the way you live creates anxiety. The mind says excitement is need but the body gets disturbed. This is why people are in misery… what to do? Only you can be changed.

Future misery can be avoided… has to be avoided. How to avoid it? The link between the seer and the seen. You have to be a witness of the mind. Tricks, traps, games, habits, past, change, expectation… you have to be aware of all this and remember one thing… the seer is not the seen. Whatever you can see, if you can see your habit of laziness… you are not that. Workaholics, past conditionings… the seer is not the seen. You are awareness. It is transcendental to what can be seen. The observer can be observed. This is Vivek, awareness. What a Buddha attends to. You can’t attend to it constantly but even for a moment if you can rise to the seer beyond the seen. Misery will disappear, clouds will not be in the sky. You can see the freedom and bliss that comes with it.