Osho on why I am miserable:
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. And you watched. And it was a quiet evening; and it was cool and birds were returning back to their nests. And it was silent and it was very musical and you were in tune. 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 nonexpectation.It happened because 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. And 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.
But then it is gone and there remains a memory. And you say again and again, “It was beautiful—how beautiful! how divine!” Now a desire arises to repeat it every evening. Next day you are waiting again, but now the whole situation has changed: you are waiting for it, you are looking for it. You want to repeat the old experience. Now, this is something new which was not present in the previous experience. So this won’t allow you. You are looking too much. You are not relaxed; you are tense—you are afraid you may miss the first star. You are apprehensive. You are worried whether it is going to be again or not. It is not going to be.
First, it is not possible now because you have lost that innocence, that unexperienced state where no memory existed, where past was not, where future was not. Secondly, if some day it is repeated it will be boring because it will be a repetition. You have already known it. The beauty is in the new, it is never in the old. The beauty is in the fresh, it is never in the dead. The beauty belongs to the original, never to the carbon copy. The beauty is when an experience is firsthand, not secondhand. Now, if it happens at all, it will not make you happy; it will be a secondhand experience. And remember: God is never secondhand. God is always fresh.
To know that God in the beauty of the evening, or in the beauty of a bird on the wing, means you have to be absolutely innocent. The past has to be completely dropped and the future is not to be allowed to interfere. Then, and only then, there is beauty and there is benediction, there is blessing, there is happiness and bliss. Once you experience something, you start asking for it, you become a beggar. Then it will never happen. And you will carry the memory like a wound. Have you watched it? Watch it: whenever you are happy, in that moment you don’t know it is happiness. It is only afterwards, when the experience is gone, faded away, is no more, then mind comes in and starts looking for it, starts comparing, evaluating, judging, and says, “Yes, it was beautiful! so beautiful!” When the experience itself was present, mind was not present.
Happiness is when mind is not.
( The Dsicipline of Transcendence vol. III discourse 9)
