11 Feb Joy is mad. And only mad people can afford it. (OSHO)
Joy is mad. And only mad people can afford it. The ordinary sane person is so clever, so cunning, calculating, he cannot afford joy, because you cannot control joy. When the mother feels guilty because she is not giving as much love as there would have been naturally, she starts substituting. She forces the child to eat too much. She cannot fill the child’s soul with love; she tries to stuff his body with food. It is a substitute.
The child says, “I am not hungry,” and the mothers go on forcing. They have nothing to do with the child, they don’t listen to the child. They are substituting: they cannot give love, so they give food. Then the child grows: they cannot love; they give money. Money becomes a substitute for love.
And the child also learns that money is more important than love. If you don’t have love, nothing to be worried about, but you must have money. In life he will become greedy. He will go after money like a maniac. He will not bother about love. He will say, “First things first. I should first have a big balance in the bank. I must have this much money; only then can I afford love.”
Now, love needs no money; you can love as you are. And if you think love needs money and you go after money, one day you may have money, and then suddenly you will feel empty because all the years were wasted in accumulating money. And they are not only wasted! All those years were years of no love, so you have practiced no love. Now the money is there, but you don’t know how to love. You have forgotten the very language of feeling, the language Or love, the language of ecstasy.
Yes, you can purchase a beautiful woman, but that is not love. You can purchase the most beautiful woman of the world, but that is not love. And she will be coming to you not because she loves you; she will be coming to you because of your bank balance.
This is symbolic; money is a symbol. Power, political power, is a symbol. Respectability is a symbol. These are not realities; these are human projections. These are not objectives; they have no objectivity. They are not there. They are just dreams projected by a miserable mind.
If you want to be ecstatic you will have to drop out of the symbolic. To be freed of the symbolic is to be freed of the society. To be freed of the symbolic is to become a sannyasin. To be freed of the symbolic you have taken courage to enter into the real. And only the real is real. The symbolic is not real.
BEING AND BECOMING
What is ecstasy? Something to be achieved? No. Something that you have to earn? No. Something that you have to become? No. Ecstasy is being; and becoming is misery. If you want to become something you will be miserable. Becoming is the very root cause of misery. If you want to be ecstatic – then it is just now, here-now, this very moment. Look at me. This very moment – nobody is barring the path – you can be happy. Happiness is so obvious and so easy. Its your nature. You are already carrying it. Just give it a chance to flower, to bloom. Ecstasy is not of the head, remember. Ecstasy is of the heart. Ecstasy is not of thought; it is of feeling.
Become more of the heart, less of the head. Head is just a part; heart is your whole being. Heart is your totality. So whenever you are total in anything, you function from feeling. Whenever you are partial in anything, you function from the head.
Ecstasy is being; and becoming is misery. If you want to become something you will be miserable.
Watch a painter painting – and that is the difference between a real artist and a technician. If the painter is just a technician who knows the technique of how to paint, who knows the know-how, who knows all about colors and the brushes and the canvas and who has gone through the training, he will function through the head. He will be a technician. He will paint, but he will not be totally in it.
Then watch a real artist who is not a technician. He will be absorbed in it, drunk. He will not only paint with his hand, and he will not only paint from his head. He will paint with his whole being; his guts will be involved in it – his feet as much, his blood and bones as much, his marrow. Everything will be involved in it. You can watch it, you can see, you can feel he is totally in it, lost. Nothing else exists. He is drunk. In that moment, he is no more. He is not a doer. The head is a doer. In that moment of total absorption, he is not a doer; he is just a passage, as if God is painting through him.
Joy: The Happiness That Comes from Within
OSHO
