Living in misery is a choice...

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.

When two miserable people meet it is not an ordinary addition, it is a multiplication. They create much more misery for each other than they could have created in their loneliness.

Your joy in a world full of misery has no relatedness to the miserable humanity. You are completely alone.

You would like to be happy, but then suddenly you start thinking about the world. The beggars on the street, the poverty, the starvation and the wars – all kinds of problems simply start coming from every direction to your mind. And your mind starts saying, “When the world is in such misery how can you be happy? You have to share, you have to go and serve society.” This is a very, very cunning device of the mind.

I have seen people living together for years, their whole life, thinking only of divorce – just thinking, but never being courageous enough to be alone. How are you going to live without misery? When you come home, it will look so empty, with nobody there to nag you.

You suffer misery in the hope of pleasure. If it is pure misery it is impossible to cling to it. Just watch, be more alert about your misery. For example, you are feeling jealous. It creates misery. But look around — there must be something positive in it. It also gives you some ego, some sense of your being separate from others, some sense of superiority. Your jealousy at least pretends to be love. If you don’t feel jealous you will think maybe you don’t love anymore. And you are clinging to jealousy because you would like to cling to your love — at least your idea of love.

If you want your love you will have to accept your jealousy and the misery that is created by it.

Man remains a slave of misery because he has chosen it. It is easier to be miserable because the whole crowd is miserable. It feels more comfortable to be with the crowd than to be alone. To be blissful means to be alone. To be blissful means to seek and search for something inside you and not to imitate the crowd.”

Osho