Osho Quotes on Misery
- Desire itself is the root cause of your misery.
- There is a cause to your misery: YOU are the cause. Your sleepiness is the cause, your unconsciousness is the cause. And in your unconsciousness you go on dreaming and desiring stupid things, with such great fervor, with such great enthusiasm. It is strange to see people putting so much effort into creating their own hell; with the same effort they can create a thousand and one paradises. The effort that you put into creating one hell is enough to create one thousand and one paradises. Buddha says: There is a cause to it — your constant desire. And there is a way to remove it — becoming aware of your desire, seeing it through and through. And there is then the ultimate state of freedom, when desire ceases, disappears. You are left without any desire, without any dream, without any sleep — alert, aware, conscious. Then you know real life.
- Buddha says that this “Eat, drink, be merry” philosophy is sheer unconsciousness. And this unconscious state can create more and more misery for you. Unconsciousness is misery, so if your life is unconscious it IS misery. Consciousness is bliss. If your life is consciousness then it is bliss, but then it becomes a totally different kind of life. It becomes the life of the awakened one, of the enlightened one.
- You become respectable and your misery remains. You become highly praised by the society — your misery remains. You are decorated by medals, gold medals — Padma Bhushan, Victoria Cross — but your misery remains. These gold medals are not going to destroy your misery.
- Except for meditation, nothing can help you to get out of your misery. And meditation is a simple phenomenon. Just whenever you have time, sit silently, doing nothing. Relax, close your eyes, watch your thoughts as if you are watching a movie on the screen. You are just a watcher. And you are in for a great surprise, perhaps the greatest surprise of life. If you can watch your thoughts just as if they are moving there on the screen, and you are not involved in them, they start dispersing. It is your involvement that gives them life energy. When you withdraw yourself and become just a witness, thoughts start falling, like leaves which are dead start falling from the trees. Soon you will be surprised, the screen is empty. The moment the screen of the mind is empty, a miracle happens. Your consciousness, which was focused on the screen of the mind, finding nothing there, turns upon itself. The circle is complete. It went from you up to the screen, but there is nothing there to stop it, and it comes back to the original source. Consciousness coming back to the original source is what I call enlightenment. You have become awakened, you have opened your eyes for the first time. Now for you there is no death, no misery, no pain; for you there is only blissfulness. And this blissfulness is not something that you will attain after death. This blissfulness is something that happens here and now. I teach the religion of here and now.
- My effort is to leave you alone with meditation, with no mediator between you and existence. When you are not in meditation you are separated from existence and that is your suffering. It’s the same as when you take a fish out of the ocean and throw it on the bank — the misery and the suffering and the tortures he goes through, the hankering and the effort to reach back to the ocean because it is where he belongs, he is part of the ocean and he cannot remain apart. Any suffering is simply indicative that you are not in communion with existence, that the fish is not in the ocean. Meditation is nothing but withdrawing all the barriers, thoughts, emotions, sentiments, which create a wall between you and existence. The moment they drop you suddenly find yourself in tune with the whole; not only in tune, you really find you are the whole.
- Meditation is an UPAYA, a device. It simply helps you to get nd of that which you have not got in the first place — the fly: the ego, the misery, the anguish! It helps you to get free of it.
- Be more meditative, become more conscious of your being. Let your inner world become more silent, and love will be flowing through you. People have all these problems. The problems are different — violence, jealousy, misery, anxiety — but the medicine for all these illnesses is only one, and it is meditation.
- When God becomes your personal experience, naturally you are free from being a Christian or a Hindu or a Mohammedan; hence, no religion wants you to be meditators. They want you to be educated in physics, in chemistry, in biology. No university in the world has a department for meditation. And without meditation, a man remains incomplete. This is one of the root causes of our misery.
- Misery is the shadow of the mind: mind means sleep, mind means unconsciousness, mind means unawareness. Mind means not knowing who you are and still pretending that you know. Mind means not knowing where you are going and still pretending that you know the goal, that you know what life is meant for — not knowing anything about life and still believing that you know.
- Truth is very simple, and because it is very simple you don’t look at it. You will have to learn, you will have to become aware, of the simplicity and obviousness of truth. There is nothing more to it. It is simply this: consciousness is bliss, unconsciousness is misery.
- The fool goes on creating ditches for himself. You create your own misery, because you act out of unconsciousness, you act out of a noisy, cloudy mind. You don’t act out of clarity; your action is not out of spontaneity; your action is not out of meditative silence. It creates fire. You may be thinking you are creating it for others, but everything rebounds on you. There is no hellfire anywhere else unless you create it. Everybody has to carry his heaven or hell within himself — it is your own creation.
- Remember: ego can create misery, ego can create anguish, ego can create hate, ego can create jealousy. Ego can never become a vehicle for the divine, it can never become the passage for the beyond.
- Misery nourishes your ego — that’s why you see so many miserable people in the world. The basic central point is the ego.
- The ego is afraid. The ego can remain in misery., it can remain even in the seventh hell, but even a slight breeze of happiness and the house of the ego starts falling, collapsing. Nothing kills like happiness, nothing kills like ecstasy; but that risk is worth taking because only after that death does real life arise. You disappear. Then God lives in you
- Misery has many things to give to you which happiness cannot give. In fact, happiness takes away many things from you. Happiness takes all that you have ever had, all that you have ever been; happiness destroys you. Misery nourishes your ego, and happiness is basically a state of egolessness. That is the problem, the very crux of the problem. That’s why people find it very difficult to be happy. That’s why millions of people in the world have to live in misery… have decided to live in misery. It gives you a very very crystallized ego. Miserable, you are. Happy, you are not. In misery, crystallization; in happiness you become diffused.
- Misery makes you capable of attracting people’s attention. Whenever you are miserable you are attended to, sympathized with, loved. Everybody starts taking care of you. Who wants to hurt a miserable person? Who is jealous of a miserable person? Who wants to be antagonistic to a miserable person? That would be too mean. The miserable person is cared for, loved, attended to. There is great investment in misery. If the wife is not miserable the husband simply tends to forget her. If she is miserable the husband cannot afford to neglect her. If the husband is miserable the whole family, the wife, the children, are around him, worried about him; it gives great comfort. One feels one is not alone, one has a family, friends. When you are ill, depressed, in misery, friends come to visit you, to solace you, to console you. When you are happy, the same friends become jealous of you. When you are really happy, you will find the whole world has turned against you. Nobody likes a happy person, because the happy person hurts the egos of the others. The others start feeling, “So you have become happy and we are still crawling in darkness, misery and hell. How dare you be happy when we all are in such misery!”
- Remember these things: a religious person is one who is so happy that he will never be able to feel jealous. He is so happy, he lacks nothing. I cannot see how I can be jealous of anybody. Impossible. I am so happy that more is not possible. And if more is not possible, then how can you be jealous? People try not to be jealous. That is not possible. Be happy and you will be nonjealous. Be happy and you will be nonambitious; be happy and the ego will disappear. The ego can exist only in deep unhappiness and misery. It is a dweller in hell; it abides only in hell.
- Let-go is totally a different approach. Its first step is dropping the ego, remembering that you are not separate from existence: with whom are you fighting? You are not separate from people: with whom are you fighting? With yourself… and that’s the root cause of misery. With whomsoever you are fighting, you are fighting with yourself — because there is nobody else.
- If you think you are special then you are bound to create misery for yourself. If you think that you are higher than others, wiser than others, then you will attain to a very strong ego. And the ego is poison, pure poison. And the more egoistic you become, the more it hurts, because it is a wound. The more egoistic you become, the more you become unbridged from life. You fall separate from life; you are no longer in the flow of existence, you have become a rock in the river. You have become ice-cold, you have lost all warmth, all love. A special person cannot love, because where are you going to find another special person?
- If you are living in the ego, Krishna, then your life will be a struggle; it will be violent, aggressive. You will create misery for others and misery for yourself too, because the life of conflict cannot be anything else. So it all depends on you, who you are. If you are the ego, still thinking of yourself in terms of the ego, then you will have a certain stinking quality. Or if you have come to understand that you are not the ego, then your life will have a fragrance. If you don’t know yourself, you are living out of unconsciousness, and a life of unconsciousness can only be one of misunderstanding. You may listen to Buddha, you may listen to me, you may listen to Jesus, but you will interpret according to your own unconsciousness — you will MISinterpret.
- Jealousy means ego, jealousy means unconsciousness. Jealousy means that you have not known even a moment of joy and bliss; you are living in misery. Jealousy is a by-product of misery, ego, unconsciousness.
- The fool is always concerned with only one thing — his ego. Anything that is for him is good — anything. And he is ready to cling to it. The fool even clings to misery, because it is HIS misery. He goes on accumulating whatsoever he can get, because the fool has no idea of his inner kingdom, of his inner treasures; he goes on accumulating junk because he thinks this is all that can be possessed. Junk outside and junk inside; that’s what people go on collecting — things they collect and thoughts they collect. Things are junk outside, thoughts are junk inside, and you are drowned in your junk. Have a look, a dispassionate, detached look at your life, what you have been doing with it, and what you have got out of it. And don’t try to befool yourself, because this is how mind goes on. It says, “Look how much you have got! So much money in the bank, so many people know you, respect you, honor you; you have such a great post, politically you are powerful…what else? What else can one hope for? Life has given all that one can hope for.” But money or power or prestige are nothing, because death will come and all your great citadels of wealth, power, prestige, respectability, will just start falling as if you have made them with playing cards. Just a blow of death and everything shatters. Unless you have something that you can take beyond death, remember, you don’t have anything at all — your hands are empty. Unless you have something deathless, eternal, you are a fool. The Buddha calls that man wise who has attained some real treasure — of meditation, of compassion, of enlightenment.
- Die! Die to the ego, die to your past, and you will be resurrected. That resurrection will make you go beyond death, beyond time, beyond misery, beyond the world — what Buddha calls “beyond this shore.”
- You have lived through the ego, and your life has been just a misery and nothing else. Enough is enough! One day the realization comes that, “I have wasted a great opportunity by constantly listening to my own ego. It has been driving me onto unnecessary paths which lead nowhere, and it has been creating a thousand and one miseries.” The day one realizes that “The ego is the root cause of my misery,” one starts searching for a place where the ego can be dropped. The master is an excuse to drop the ego. You can drop your ego only if you come across a person who catches hold of your heart so tremendously that his being becomes more important than your own being, that you can sacrifice all that you have for him.
- Sannyas means an operation. Buddha transformed thousands of people through sannyas, through initiation. He was a great surgeon. And once you become aware that you are the cause of your own misery, things start changing. You no longer help your own misery, you no longer feed it. And once you become aware that you are not your mind but a witness to it, you start rising above the mind, you are no longer tethered. You start growing wings, you start soaring higher and higher. Mind remains always groping in the dark valleys of life, but you can become an eagle, you can soar high. You can be the master and then you can use the mind — and very purposely it can be used.
- Man is mad. Madness is not a disease, it is the normal condition of mankind. Yes, people differ in degrees, but that is not much of a difference. Man as he exists on the earth is insane. The effort of all the buddhas is to bring sanity to you, to dispel your madness. But because everybody is mad, just like you, you remain oblivious of the fact your whole life. Unless you come across a buddha you will never be aware of the fact that you are mad. The buddha becomes a mirror: he reflects your reality, he shows you your face as it is — and it is utterly distorted. It is not the way you are meant to be. Something has gone fundamentally wrong, something very basic is missing. Man is born in such a state of unconsciousness that whatsoever he does brings more and more misery to him and to others. He goes on blaming fate, he goes on blaming nature, he goes on blaming the society — but he always goes on blaming others, he never blames himself. The moment you gather courage enough to blame yourself, the moment you accept the responsibility of whatsoever you are, a ray of light enters into your being. You are on the path of inner transformation.
- As you start looking inwards, you are amazed: you were ignoring yourself, and that was the trouble. That was why you were in misery, anxiety, suffering. You were trying everything to remove the misery, but it was caused by your unawareness, by your unconsciousness, by your ignorance of your own being. That was the cause. And unless that cause is removed, you will never have a taste of blissfulness, of ecstasy, of immortality, of the divineness of existence.
- Meditation is a drop into eternity. That’s why all techniques, all methods of meditation, insist: don’t be too obsessed with the past, let it go; and don’t be too infatuated with the future, let it go too. Slowly, slowly withdraw yourself from past memories and future projections. The past is no more, the future is not yet; both are non-existential. To remain in the non-existential is to remain in misery, because existence is bliss, satchitananda — it is truth, it is consciousness, it is bliss. Non-existence is untruth, unconsciousness, misery; just the opposite. And we live in the non-existential.
- I am against drugs. I have to be against drugs for the simple reason that meditation cannot grow if you are taking drugs. Drugs make you unconscious, and meditation makes you conscious. They are opposite to each other. Drugs are needed by people who are miserable so that they can drown their misery in unconsciousness. People who are meditating do not need drugs, because if they use drugs they will drown their blissfulness into unconsciousness and that will be absolutely irrational, unnatural. Who wants to forget blissfulness? Everybody wants to forget misery, suffering, anguish. My whole teaching is meditation, and drugs are against it. How can I support drugs? It is a contradiction.
- Bliss is a state of infinite light, just as misery is a state of infinite darkness. Darkness represents unconsciousness; light represents consciousness. In darkness all kinds of errors are possible, bound to be. I don’t call them sins; they are only errors, mistakes. They are natural, nothing to be condemned for, nothing to be punished for. They have their own punishment: each mistake brings its own misery. The punishment is not something outside, it is inbuilt. When your inner being becomes full of light, all those errors disappear. Not that you Stop making them, simply you cannot make them. When one can see, one behaves differently than the person who cannot see. The blind person is bound to stumble. Not that he wants to stumble, he also does not want to stumble, but what can he do? — he is blind. He cannot see the table, he cannot see the chair, he cannot see the door. He cannot see so he bumps into people or into things. But when you have eyes, you simply don’t bump. It is not that you prevent yourself from bumping, effort is needed: you simply see and you move through the door and not through the wall. Your seeing is enough, your seeing is a transformation. The basic foundation of religion is how to transform your inner unconscious into a conscious phenomenon, how to change your darkness into light. That’s what my work is here. The moment you become a sannyasin that becomes your life’s work. Constantly remember that one has to become more and more alert. Alertness has to go deeper and deeper. Do things more consciously than you have ever done before. Think consciously, feel consciously; don’t miss any opportunity to be conscious, and drop by drop your being will become full, brimful of light.
