Try Not To Look So Ecstatic By: Osho

...the jealous will turn antagonistic, says OSHO

You are always choosing to be wrong, always choosing to be sad, depressed and miserable. There must be sound reasons for it, there always are. The way human beings are brought up, plays a very definite role in it. If you are unhappy, you gain something from it, you always do. If you are happy you always lose.

From the very beginning, an alert child starts seeing the difference.  Whenever he is unhappy, everybody is sympathetic, he gains sympathy. Everybody tries to be loving towards him, he gains love. And more than that, whenever he is unhappy, everybody is attentive towards him, he gains attention. Attention works like food for the ego. It’s a kind of alcoholic stimulant. It gives you energy; you feel you are somebody. Hence, the  need, the desire to get attention.

From the very beginning, the child learns the politics. The politics is: look miserable, and you get sympathy, then everybody is attentive. Look ill; you become important. A sick child becomes dictatorial; the whole family has to follow him — whatever he says is the rule.

When he is happy, nobody listens to him. When he is healthy, nobody cares about him. When he is perfect, nobody is attentive. From the very beginning, we start choosing the miserable, the sad, the pessimistic, the darker side of life. That’s one thing.

Everyone’s Jealous
A second thing related to it is: whenever you are happy, whenever you are joyful, whenever you feel ecstatic and blissful, everybody is jealous of you. Jealousy means that everybody is antagonistic, nobody is friendly; at that moment everybody is an enemy. So you have learnt not to be so ecstatic that people become inimical towards you — not to show your bliss, not to laugh.

Society has done a great job! Education, culture, and the culturing agencies, parents and teachers have made miserable creatures out of ‘ecstatic creators’. Every child is born ecstatic. Every child is born a god. And every man dies a madman.

Reclaim Your Childhood
Unless you recover, unless you reclaim your childhood, you will not be able to become the white clouds I am talking about. This is the whole work for you, the whole sadhana — how to regain childhood, how to reclaim it. If you can become children again then there is no misery.

I don’t mean that for a child there are no moments of misery — there are. But still there is no misery. Try to understand this.
A child can become miserable, he can be unhappy, intensely unhappy in a moment, but he is so total in that unhappiness, he is so one with that unhappiness that there is no division. The child separate from unhappiness is not there. The child is not looking at his unhappiness separate, divided. The child is unhappiness — he is so involved in it. When you become one with unhappiness, unhappiness is not unhappiness. If you become so one with it, even that has a beauty of its own.

So look at a child — an unspoilt child, I mean. If he is angry, then his whole energy becomes anger; nothing is left, there’s no holding back. He has moved and become anger; there is nobody manipulating and controlling it. There is no mind. The child has become anger. And then see the beauty, the flowering of anger. The child never looks ugly; even in anger he looks beautiful. He just looks more intense, more vital, more alive...a volcano ready to erupt. Such a small child, such a great energy, such an atomic being — with the whole universe to explode!

Silence Follows Anger
And after this anger, the child will be silent. He will be very peaceful. After this anger the child will relax. We may think it is very miserable to be in that anger but the child is not miserable — he has enjoyed it.

If you become one with anything you become blissful. If you separate yourself from anything, even if it is happiness, you will become miserable.

So this is the key. To be separate as an ego is the base of all misery; to be one, to be flowing, with whatsoever life brings to you, to be in it so intensely, so totally, that you are no more, you are lost, is blissful.

My Way: The Way of the White Clouds, Talk #3, courtesy Osho International Foundation,