Astrall
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"There is pleasure.
There is bliss.
Abstain from the first to master the second..."(c)
Meditate on these sutras as deeply as possible, because they contain the most fundamental truths. These four words must be understood and reflected upon. The first is pleasure, the second is happiness, the third is joy, the fourth is bliss.
Pleasure belongs to the physical, the psychological. Pleasure is the most superficial thing in life; it is a tickle. The pleasure of sex, the pleasure of other senses, an obsession with food—all of this is rooted in the body. The body is your periphery; it is not your center. And to live on the periphery means to place yourself at the mercy of many random circumstances around you. A person who seeks pleasure is at the mercy of chance.
Just as waves in the ocean depend on the whims of the winds. When a strong wind blows, they exist; when there is no wind, neither do they. They have no independent existence; they are dependent, and everything that is dependent on another brings shackles.
Pleasure depends on another. If you love a woman, if this is your pleasure, then the woman will become your master. If you love a man, if this is your pleasure and you feel miserable, sad and fall into despair when he is gone, it means you have created slavery for yourself. You have created a prison; you no longer have freedom.
If you seek money and power, then you will depend on money and power. A person who continues to accumulate money, if for him pleasure is having more and more money, he will become more and more miserable—because the more he has, the more he wants, and the more he has, the more he fears losing it. It is a double-edged sword: the more he wants... that is the first edge of the sword. Therefore, he becomes increasingly miserable.
The more you demand, desire, the more you feel that something is missing, the more hollow and empty you seem to yourself. On the other hand—the other edge of the sword—the more you have, the more you fear it will be taken from you; it can be stolen. A bank can go bankrupt, the political situation in the country may change, the country may become communist. Your money depends on a thousand and one things. Money does not make you a master; it makes you a slave. Pleasure is peripheral; therefore, it necessarily depends on external circumstances. It is only a tickle.
If your pleasure is in food, what exactly brings you enjoyment? —simply the taste! For that moment when the food passes over the taste receptors of your tongue, you experience a sensation that you interpret as pleasure. This is your interpretation. Today it looks like pleasure, and tomorrow it may not look like pleasure. If you continue to eat the same food, the receptors on the tip of the tongue will lose sensitivity to it. Soon you will grow tired of it—this is exactly how people grow tired of everything.
One day you run after a woman or a man, and the next day you look for an excuse to get rid of him or her. The same person, nothing has changed! What happened in that time? You grew tired of the other because all the pleasure was in discovering something new. Now the other is no longer new; you have become acquainted with their territory. You are familiar with the other's body, the curves of the body, the sensation of the body. Now the mind craves something new.
The mind always craves something new. This is exactly how the mind always keeps you on the leash of the future. It makes you continue to hope, but never fulfills its promises—and cannot. It only knows how to create new hopes, new desires.
Just as leaves grow on a tree, desires and hopes grow in the mind. You wanted a new house, and you got it—but where is the pleasure? It arose for a moment when you reached the goal. Once you reached the goal, the mind is no longer interested in it;
it has already begun to weave the nets of a new desire. It has already begun to think of other houses that are larger. And so it is with everything.
Pleasure keeps you in a neurotic state, in eternal anxiety and disorder. So many desires—and each of them insatiable!—demand attention. You remain a victim of a crowd of mad desires—mad because they are unattainable—and they continue to pull you in different directions. You become a contradiction.
One desire pulls you left, another right, and simultaneously you feed both desires. Then you feel split, divided; you feel that you are being torn apart, you feel that you are falling to pieces. No one else is responsible for this. It is all because of this foolish pursuit of pleasure.
This is a complex phenomenon. You are not the only one seeking pleasure; millions like you seek the same pleasure. Hence so much struggle, Competitive spirit, violence, wars. Everyone becomes each other's enemy because they strive for the same goal and cannot achieve it; therefore, the struggle must be total. You must risk everything—for nothing, because when you achieve, you achieve nothing, and on this struggle you waste your entire life. A life that could have become a celebration becomes a long, contrived, meaningless struggle.
When you strive so much for pleasure, you cannot love, because a person who seeks pleasure uses another as a means. And to use another as a means is the most immoral action of all possible ones, because every being in itself is an end and cannot be used as a means. But in search of pleasure, you will have to use another as a means. You will become cunning because of this struggle. If you are not cunning, you will be deceived, and before others deceive you, you must deceive them.
Machiavelli advised seekers of pleasure: the best defense is offense. Never wait until another attacks you; by then it may be too late. But before he attacks you, attack him yourself! This is the best way of protection. And, whether knowing about Machiavelli or not, you follow this.
This is something very strange: people know about Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, Krishna, but no one follows them. People know little about Chanakya and Machiavelli, but they follow them—as if Chanakya and Machiavelli were very close to their hearts! You don't need to read them; you already follow them. Your entire society is built on the principles of Machiavelli; that is the whole political game. Before someone snatches something from you, snatch it from another. Always be on guard. Naturally, if you are always on guard, you will be tense, anxious, worried. Such is the struggle, and it continues constantly. You are one, and there are millions of enemies.
For example, if you want to become the Prime Minister of India, then all those millions of people who also want to be Prime Ministers are your enemies. Who doesn't want to be Prime Minister? A person may speak of it, or may not. Therefore, everyone is against you, and you are against everyone. This entire life seventy, eighty years long will be wasted in a futile effort. Pleasure is not the goal of life and cannot be the goal.
The second word that must be understood is happiness. Happiness is psychological; pleasure is physiological. Happiness is slightly better, slightly more refined, slightly higher, but differs little from pleasure. One could say that pleasure is a lower form of happiness, and happiness is a somewhat higher form of pleasure. They are two sides of the same coin. Pleasure is somewhat primitive, animalistic; happiness is somewhat more cultured, somewhat more human—but it is the same game, played in the world of the mind. You do not care as much about physiological sensations; you care far more about psychological sensations. But at their core they do not differ; therefore Buddha did not speak of four words, he spoke only of two.
The third word is joy; joy is spiritual. It differs, completely differs from pleasure and happiness. It has nothing in common with other people; it belongs to the inner. It does not depend on circumstances: it is your own. It is not a tickle created by other things; it is a state of peace, silence, a meditative state. It is spiritual.
But Buddha did not speak of joy either, because there is one more thing beyond joy. He calls it bliss. Bliss is total. It is not physiological, not psychological and not spiritual. It knows no divisions; it is indivisible. It is total in one sense and transcendental in another. Buddha speaks only of two words. The first—pleasure; it includes happiness. The second—bliss; it includes joy.
Bliss means that you have reached the innermost core of your being. It belongs to the ultimate depth of your being, where there is no longer even an ego, where only silence reigns; you have disappeared. In joy there is a bit of you, but in bliss you are not there. The ego has dissolved; it is a state of non-being.
Buddha calls it nirvana. Nirvana means that you have ceased; you are simply an infinite emptiness, like the sky. And in that moment when you are this infinity, you are filled with stars, and a completely new life begins. You are born anew.
Pleasure is transient, it belongs to time; bliss is outside of time, timeless. Pleasure begins and ends; bliss remains forever. Pleasures come and go; bliss never comes, never goes—it is already there in the deepest core of your being. Pleasure must be torn from another; you become either a beggar or a thief. Bliss makes you a master. Bliss is not something that you invent, but something that you discover. Bliss is the holy of holies of your nature. It has been in it from the very beginning, only you did not look at it, you took it for granted. You do not look inside.
This is the only misfortune of man: he continues to look outward in search and exploration. Outside you will not find this, because it is not there.
Osho
There is bliss.
Abstain from the first to master the second..."(c)
Meditate on these sutras as deeply as possible, because they contain the most fundamental truths. These four words must be understood and reflected upon. The first is pleasure, the second is happiness, the third is joy, the fourth is bliss.
Pleasure belongs to the physical, the psychological. Pleasure is the most superficial thing in life; it is a tickle. The pleasure of sex, the pleasure of other senses, an obsession with food—all of this is rooted in the body. The body is your periphery; it is not your center. And to live on the periphery means to place yourself at the mercy of many random circumstances around you. A person who seeks pleasure is at the mercy of chance.
Just as waves in the ocean depend on the whims of the winds. When a strong wind blows, they exist; when there is no wind, neither do they. They have no independent existence; they are dependent, and everything that is dependent on another brings shackles.
Pleasure depends on another. If you love a woman, if this is your pleasure, then the woman will become your master. If you love a man, if this is your pleasure and you feel miserable, sad and fall into despair when he is gone, it means you have created slavery for yourself. You have created a prison; you no longer have freedom.
If you seek money and power, then you will depend on money and power. A person who continues to accumulate money, if for him pleasure is having more and more money, he will become more and more miserable—because the more he has, the more he wants, and the more he has, the more he fears losing it. It is a double-edged sword: the more he wants... that is the first edge of the sword. Therefore, he becomes increasingly miserable.
The more you demand, desire, the more you feel that something is missing, the more hollow and empty you seem to yourself. On the other hand—the other edge of the sword—the more you have, the more you fear it will be taken from you; it can be stolen. A bank can go bankrupt, the political situation in the country may change, the country may become communist. Your money depends on a thousand and one things. Money does not make you a master; it makes you a slave. Pleasure is peripheral; therefore, it necessarily depends on external circumstances. It is only a tickle.
If your pleasure is in food, what exactly brings you enjoyment? —simply the taste! For that moment when the food passes over the taste receptors of your tongue, you experience a sensation that you interpret as pleasure. This is your interpretation. Today it looks like pleasure, and tomorrow it may not look like pleasure. If you continue to eat the same food, the receptors on the tip of the tongue will lose sensitivity to it. Soon you will grow tired of it—this is exactly how people grow tired of everything.
One day you run after a woman or a man, and the next day you look for an excuse to get rid of him or her. The same person, nothing has changed! What happened in that time? You grew tired of the other because all the pleasure was in discovering something new. Now the other is no longer new; you have become acquainted with their territory. You are familiar with the other's body, the curves of the body, the sensation of the body. Now the mind craves something new.
The mind always craves something new. This is exactly how the mind always keeps you on the leash of the future. It makes you continue to hope, but never fulfills its promises—and cannot. It only knows how to create new hopes, new desires.
Just as leaves grow on a tree, desires and hopes grow in the mind. You wanted a new house, and you got it—but where is the pleasure? It arose for a moment when you reached the goal. Once you reached the goal, the mind is no longer interested in it;
it has already begun to weave the nets of a new desire. It has already begun to think of other houses that are larger. And so it is with everything.
Pleasure keeps you in a neurotic state, in eternal anxiety and disorder. So many desires—and each of them insatiable!—demand attention. You remain a victim of a crowd of mad desires—mad because they are unattainable—and they continue to pull you in different directions. You become a contradiction.
One desire pulls you left, another right, and simultaneously you feed both desires. Then you feel split, divided; you feel that you are being torn apart, you feel that you are falling to pieces. No one else is responsible for this. It is all because of this foolish pursuit of pleasure.
This is a complex phenomenon. You are not the only one seeking pleasure; millions like you seek the same pleasure. Hence so much struggle, Competitive spirit, violence, wars. Everyone becomes each other's enemy because they strive for the same goal and cannot achieve it; therefore, the struggle must be total. You must risk everything—for nothing, because when you achieve, you achieve nothing, and on this struggle you waste your entire life. A life that could have become a celebration becomes a long, contrived, meaningless struggle.
When you strive so much for pleasure, you cannot love, because a person who seeks pleasure uses another as a means. And to use another as a means is the most immoral action of all possible ones, because every being in itself is an end and cannot be used as a means. But in search of pleasure, you will have to use another as a means. You will become cunning because of this struggle. If you are not cunning, you will be deceived, and before others deceive you, you must deceive them.
Machiavelli advised seekers of pleasure: the best defense is offense. Never wait until another attacks you; by then it may be too late. But before he attacks you, attack him yourself! This is the best way of protection. And, whether knowing about Machiavelli or not, you follow this.
This is something very strange: people know about Christ, Buddha, Muhammad, Krishna, but no one follows them. People know little about Chanakya and Machiavelli, but they follow them—as if Chanakya and Machiavelli were very close to their hearts! You don't need to read them; you already follow them. Your entire society is built on the principles of Machiavelli; that is the whole political game. Before someone snatches something from you, snatch it from another. Always be on guard. Naturally, if you are always on guard, you will be tense, anxious, worried. Such is the struggle, and it continues constantly. You are one, and there are millions of enemies.
For example, if you want to become the Prime Minister of India, then all those millions of people who also want to be Prime Ministers are your enemies. Who doesn't want to be Prime Minister? A person may speak of it, or may not. Therefore, everyone is against you, and you are against everyone. This entire life seventy, eighty years long will be wasted in a futile effort. Pleasure is not the goal of life and cannot be the goal.
The second word that must be understood is happiness. Happiness is psychological; pleasure is physiological. Happiness is slightly better, slightly more refined, slightly higher, but differs little from pleasure. One could say that pleasure is a lower form of happiness, and happiness is a somewhat higher form of pleasure. They are two sides of the same coin. Pleasure is somewhat primitive, animalistic; happiness is somewhat more cultured, somewhat more human—but it is the same game, played in the world of the mind. You do not care as much about physiological sensations; you care far more about psychological sensations. But at their core they do not differ; therefore Buddha did not speak of four words, he spoke only of two.
The third word is joy; joy is spiritual. It differs, completely differs from pleasure and happiness. It has nothing in common with other people; it belongs to the inner. It does not depend on circumstances: it is your own. It is not a tickle created by other things; it is a state of peace, silence, a meditative state. It is spiritual.
But Buddha did not speak of joy either, because there is one more thing beyond joy. He calls it bliss. Bliss is total. It is not physiological, not psychological and not spiritual. It knows no divisions; it is indivisible. It is total in one sense and transcendental in another. Buddha speaks only of two words. The first—pleasure; it includes happiness. The second—bliss; it includes joy.
Bliss means that you have reached the innermost core of your being. It belongs to the ultimate depth of your being, where there is no longer even an ego, where only silence reigns; you have disappeared. In joy there is a bit of you, but in bliss you are not there. The ego has dissolved; it is a state of non-being.
Buddha calls it nirvana. Nirvana means that you have ceased; you are simply an infinite emptiness, like the sky. And in that moment when you are this infinity, you are filled with stars, and a completely new life begins. You are born anew.
Pleasure is transient, it belongs to time; bliss is outside of time, timeless. Pleasure begins and ends; bliss remains forever. Pleasures come and go; bliss never comes, never goes—it is already there in the deepest core of your being. Pleasure must be torn from another; you become either a beggar or a thief. Bliss makes you a master. Bliss is not something that you invent, but something that you discover. Bliss is the holy of holies of your nature. It has been in it from the very beginning, only you did not look at it, you took it for granted. You do not look inside.
This is the only misfortune of man: he continues to look outward in search and exploration. Outside you will not find this, because it is not there.
Osho