To be blissful is the greatest courage

‘Osho talked to Swami Anand Mahavir – John, a doctor from England’

By Osho

From The Buddha Disease, Chapter 27

Thursday, 27 January 1977, pm, Chuang Tzu Auditorium

“Nothing else but courage is needed, and everything will happen on its own accord. We go on missing many things in life just because we lack courage. In fact, no effort is needed to achieve - just courage - and things start coming to you rather than you going to them...at least in the inner world it is so.

And to me, to be blissful is the greatest courage. To be miserable is very cowardly. In fact to be miserable, nothing is needed. Any coward can do it, any fool can do it. Everybody is capable of being miserable but to be blissful, great courage is needed - it is an uphill task.

Ordinarily we don't think so - we think, 'What is needed to be happy? Everybody wants to be happy.’ That is absolutely wrong. Very rarely does a person want to be happy - notwithstanding what they go on saying. Very rarely is a person ready to be happy - people have so much investment in their misery. They love to be unhappy...in fact they are happy in being unhappy.

There are many things to be understood - otherwise it is very difficult to get out of the rut of misery. The first thing - that nobody is holding you there; it is you who has decided to remain in that prison of misery. Nobody holds anybody. A man who is ready to get out of it, can get out of it right this very moment. Nobody else is responsible. If one is miserable, one is responsible, but a miserable person never accepts the responsibility - that is his way of remaining miserable. He says, 'Somebody else is making me miserable.'

If somebody else is making you miserable, naturally, what can you do? If you are making yourself miserable, something can be done...something can be done immediately. Then it is within your hands to be or not to be miserable. So people go on throwing the responsibility - sometimes on the wife, sometimes on the husband, sometimes on the family, sometimes on the conditioning, the childhood, the mother, the father...sometimes the society, the history, fate, god, but they always go on throwing. The names are different but the trick is the same.

And a man really becomes a man when he accepts total responsibility - he is responsible for whatsoever he is.

This is the first courage, the greatest courage. Very difficult to accept it, because the mind goes on saying, 'If you are responsible, why do you create it?' To avoid this we say that somebody else is responsible: 'What can I do? I am helpless...I am a victim! I am being tossed from here and there by greater forces than me and I cannot do anything. So at the most I can cry about being miserable and become more miserable by crying.' And everything grows - if you practise it, it grows. Then you go deeper and deeper...you sink in deeper and deeper.

Nobody, no other force, is doing anything to you. It is you and only you. This is the whole philosophy of karma - that it is your doing; 'karma' means doing. You have done it and you can undo it. And there is no need to wait, to delay.

Time is not needed - you can simply jump out of it!

But we have become habituated. We will feel very lonely. If we stop being miserable, we will lose our closest companion. It has become our shadow - it follows us everywhere. When nobody is there at least your misery is with you - one is married to it. And it is a long, long marriage; you have remained married to misery for many lives.

Now the time has come to divorce it - and sannyas means a declaration of the divorce. That I call the great courage - to divorce misery, to lose the oldest habit of the human mind, the longest companion.”

Rajneesh Foundation, Poona, India, 1979