Needs can be fulfilled, desires never. Needs are natural, desires are perverted.
Misery has only one meaning, that things are not fitting with your desires – and things never fit with your desires, they cannot. Things simply go on following their nature.
And desires are never here and now – they are non-existential. They are just mental, in the mind. And they cannot be fulfilled because their very nature is to move into the future.
Future is your projection of unfulfilled desires. The more unfulfilled you are, the bigger a future you have. The more unfulfilled is your being, the richer the dreams you have of the future. But it is just in your mind.
Your desires are immense, almost infinite. Because of your desires life becomes a competition, and wherever there is competition, there is anxiety and angst; and at the end everybody is aware deep down there is death.
The whole blame goes to the parents. They have lived as ambitious beings; they have destroyed themselves. Now they go on giving their heritage to their children – their unfulfilled desires, their incomplete ambitions. In this way diseases pass on from one generation to another.
Only those people are really sane who have transcended the mind, who have gone beyond it into silence where no thoughts, no desires, no emotions, nothing exists. Only in that peace is your real health.
Be creative. Don’t be worried about what you are doing – one has to do many things – but do everything creatively, with devotion. Then your work becomes worship. Then whatsoever you do is a prayer. And whatsoever you do is an offering at the altar.
Devotion has its own strange ways. It is not something rational, logical, something that can be explained to you. But it is something, if you go on growing from a student into a disciple, from a disciple into a devotee, and you come so close to the master that there is no distinction at all.
It has happened, women have helped their husbands, sacrificed their whole lives, never thought about themselves. Their surrender, their devotion to their lovers has been total. In this totality, they have achieved before their lover has.
The whole art of meditation is, how to leave the personality easily, move to the center, and be not a person. Just to be and not be a person is the whole art of meditation, the whole art of inner ecstasy.
The whole art of ecstasy, meditation, samadhi, is: How to become one with the rhythm of the universe. When it exhales, you exhale. When it inhales, you inhale. You live in it, are not separate, are one with it.
The mind is the world and the no-mind is freedom from the world. The mind is misery and no-mind is the end of misery and the beginning of ecstasy.
There is no other greater ecstasy, no other greater blissfulness, than to know who you are. To know the inner space is to know all. It is unlimited silence but not dead, it is alive with songs of its own, with dances of its own.
Meditation is not your doing. You simply make the effort, but it is not your doing. Your effort is needed to prepare the ground. As the ground is ready, immediately you see you are no more; the whole cosmos is. You have entered a greater womb, an eternal womb of tremendous peace and ecstasy.
Begin with dhyana, with meditation, and end in samadhi, in ecstasy, and you will know what God is. It is not a hypothesis, it is an experience. You have to LIVE it – that is the only way to know it.
As the witnessing deepens, you start becoming drunk with the divine. This is what is called ecstasy.
Unless you come out of your mind and become a no-mind you will not know what life is all about, you will live in vain. You will not have your honeymoon, it is impossible. You will not know the sweetness that existence is full of and the ecstasy.
If you come to a really religious man you will feel a grace around him, effortless. He has not done anything to himself, he has simply relaxed into the ultimate, and you feel the effortlessness around him.
The whole zen attitude is to bring to your notice the fact that there is no effort to be made. The zen attitude is that of effortlessness.