---
section: Library
booktitle: "The Osho Upanishad"
booktype: "Discourses"
bookcode: "UPAN"
dategiven: "19 August 1986 pm"
place: " in"
chapternum: "Chapter #4"
chaptertitle: "Misery is the prison, nothingness is the door"
acode: "8608195"
shorttitle: "UPAN04"
audio: "Yes"
video: "Yes"
esttime: "106mins"
displaytitle: "The Osho Upanishad: Chapter #4"
---

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<p class="question">BELOVED OSHO,
WHY DON'T WE DROP OUR MISERIES, OUR IGNORANCE AND UNHAPPINESS? HOW CAN A MAN BE HAPPY AND BLISSFUL?</p>


It is one of the most fundamental questions that a man can ask.
It is also strange, because it should be easy to drop suffering, anguish, misery. It should not be difficult: you don't want to be miserable, so there must be some deep complication behind it. The complication is that from your very childhood you have not been allowed to be happy, to be blissful, to be joyous.


You have been forced to be serious, and seriousness implies sadness. You were forced to do things that you never wanted to do. You were helpless, weak, dependent on people; naturally you had to do what they were saying. You did those things unwillingly, miserably, in deep resistance. Against yourself, you have been forced to do so much that by and by one thing became clear to you: that anything that is against you is right, and anything that is not against you is bound to be wrong. And constantly, this whole upbringing filled you with sadness, which is not natural.


To be joyous is natural, just as to be healthy is natural. When you are healthy you don't go to the doctor to inquire, "Why am I healthy?" There is no need for any question about your health. But when you are sick, you immediately ask, "Why am I sick? What is the reason, the cause of my disease?"


It is perfectly right to ask why you are miserable. It is not right to ask why you are blissful. You have been brought up in an insane society where to be blissful without reason is thought to be madness. If you are simply smiling for no reason at all, people will think something is loose in your head -- why are you smiling? why are you looking so happy? And if you say "I don't know, I am just being happy," your answer will only strengthen their idea that something has gone wrong with you.


But if you are miserable nobody will ask why you are miserable. To be miserable is natural; everybody is. It is nothing special to you. You are not doing something unique.


Unconsciously this idea goes on settling in you, that misery is natural and blissfulness is unnatural. Blissfulness has to be proved. Misery needs no proof. Slowly it sinks deeper into you -- into your blood, into your bones, into your marrow -- although naturally it is against you. So you have been forced to be a schizophrenic; something that is against your nature has been forced on you. You have been distracted from yourself into something which you are not.


This creates the whole misery of humanity, that everybody is where he should not be, what he should not be. And because he cannot be where he needs to be -- where it is his birthright to be -- he is miserable. And you have been in this state of going away from yourself farther and farther; you have forgotten the way back home. So wherever you are, you think this is your home -- misery has become your home, anguish has become your nature. Suffering has been accepted as health, not as sickness.


And when somebody says, "Drop this miserable life, drop this suffering that you are carrying unnecessarily," a very significant question arises: "This is all that we have got! If we drop it we will be no one, we will lose our identity. At least right now I am somebody -- somebody miserable, somebody sad, somebody in suffering. If I drop all this then the question will be, what is my identity? Who am I? I don't know the way back home, and you have taken away the hypocrisy, the false home that was created by the society."
Nobody wants to stand naked in the street.


It is better to be miserable -- at least you have something to wear, although it is misery... but there is no harm, everybody else is wearing the same kind of clothes. For those who can afford it, their miseries are costly. Those who cannot afford it are doubly miserable -- they have to live in a poor kind of misery, nothing much to brag about.


So there are rich miserable people and poor miserable people. And the poor miserable people are trying their hardest to reach somehow to the status of rich miserable people. These are the only two types available.


The third type has been completely forgotten. The third is your reality, and it has no misery in it.


You are asking me why man cannot drop his misery; it is for the simple reason that that's all he has got. You want to make him even more poor? He is already poor. There are rich miserable people; he has a small, tiny misery. He cannot brag about it. And you are telling him to drop even this. Then he will be nobody; then he will be empty, a nothingness.


And all the cultures, all the societies, all the religions have committed a crime against humanity: they have created a fear of nothingnness, of emptiness.


The truth is that nothingness is the door to richness. Nothingness is the door to blissfulness -- and the door has to be nothing. The wall is there; you cannot enter a wall, you will simply hit your head, may have some broken ribs. Why can you not enter the wall? -- because the wall has no emptiness, it is solid, it objects. That's why we call things 'objects': they are objective, they don't allow you to pass through them, they prevent you.


A door has to be non-objective, it has to be emptiness. A door means there is nothing to prevent you. You can go in.


And because we have been conditioned that emptiness is something bad, nothingness is something bad, we are being prevented by the conditioning from dropping the misery, dropping the anguish, dropping all the suffering and just being nothing.


The moment you are nothing, you become a door -- a door to the divine, a door to yourself, a door that leads to your home, a door that connects you back to your intrinsic nature. And man's intrinsic nature is blissful.
Blissfulness is not something to be achieved.
It is already there; we are born with it.


We have not lost it, we have simply gone farther away, keeping our backs to ourselves.
It is just behind us; a small turn and a great revolution.


But there are fake religions all over the world which are telling you that you are miserable because in the past life you committed evil acts. All nonsense. Because why should existence wait for one life to punish you? There seems to be no need. In nature things happen immediately. You put your hand in the fire in this life and in the next life you will be burned? Strange! You will be burned immediately, herenow. Cause and effect are connected, there cannot be any distance.


But these fake religions go on consoling people: "Don't be worried. Just do good acts, worship more. Go to the temple or the church, and in the next life you will not be miserable." Nothing seems to be cash; everything is in the next life. And nobody comes back from the next life and says, "These people are telling absolute lies."
Religion is cash, it is not even a check.


Different religions have found different strategies, but the reason is the same. Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, religions born outside India say to people, "You are suffering because Adam and Eve committed a sin." The first couple, thousands of years back... and not a great sin -- you are committing it every day. They simply ate apples, and God has forbidden them to eat apples.


The question is not apples, the question is that they disobeyed. Thousands of years back somebody disobeyed God. And he was punished, he was thrown out of the Garden of Eden, thrown out of God's paradise. Why are we suffering? -- because they were our forefathers. But strange, nobody asked these idiots -- these Christians, Mohammedans, Jews, their great rabbis, popes and imams, "If that is the reason for our miseries, then why are our miseries different? Because the sin was one and single and the same, our miseries should be the same. But every man is suffering differently. His anxiety is different, his anguish is different, his problems are different -- how come this variety of miseries?"


Nobody has raised the question, and they don't have any answer if somebody asks it. If the whole of humanity were suffering the same misery, there would be some logical grounds to believe that there must be a singular cause, but it is not so.


The religions that were born in India have all taken another excuse: that you are suffering because of your past lives. I used to meet Jaina monks, Buddhist monks, and ask them, "I can understand that I am suffering because of my past life. But what about the first life? There must have been a first life, in the very beginning. Why did people suffer then? They had no past life. And if they did not suffer then the first generation of humanity lived in blissfulness; it is impossible that their children should suffer. Their children should have learned the blissfulness of their parents -- children imitate. Then how did misery enter in?"


And they always said, "You -- whenever you come you bring some embarrassing question. We don't know...first life? Nobody knows what happened, when it happened."


But I said, "Hypothetically there must have been a first life, or you have to accept another hypothesis -- that this vicious circle has been going on eternally. Always there was a past life, always there was a past life -- then you cannot get out of this vicious circle, because in the next life you will suffer from this life's acts. And then for seventy years you cannot remain a saint; even for twenty-four hours one cannot remain a saint. One needs holidays. Even your saints have holidays. And in the next life you will again commit a few evil acts...."


And what are evil acts? They are so simple it is impossible not to commit them. You see a beautiful woman; the scriptures say, "Close your eyes. Don't see her." But they forget completely that you close your eyes only because you have seen her! The evil act has been committed; otherwise, why are you closing your eyes?


You don't close your eyes seeing an ugly woman; no scripture says, "When you see an ugly woman close your eyes." Strange. You yourself close them, without any scriptures, without any teachers, without any religions. But when you see a beautiful woman you don't want to close your eyes, you really forget to blink -- and it is natural.


Not only that, the latest scientific experiments about this phenomenon have revealed strange things. I can give you a deck of cards in which there are beautiful women, ugly women, naked women, beautiful flowers -- different things on different cards. And I need not see the cards. You can go on looking at the cards, and when you come to a beautiful naked woman I can just watch your eyes and I can say, "Now you have come to a beautiful woman" -- because your eyes are windows. You want to absorb that beauty more, so your eyes become wider. That is a natural mechanism.


When you go outside in the sun your eyes become smaller, the window shrinks, because the sun is too much and there is no need to take that much light in. When you come home, slowly the eyes again open to their normal size. But when you see something beautiful, they become wider, wide open. It is not in your hands, it is not that you are doing it. Even a saint will have to do it because it is not a voluntary thing. It is non-voluntary, it happens on its own accord. It is biologically set up.


You have this word in English, 'respect'. People have destroyed its meaning. It does not mean 'honor' -- or it means honor in a very different way than you understand. 'Respect' means the desire to see again, re-spect -- spect means seeing. If it is honor, it is honor for beauty -- because you want to see it again. The woman has passed.... You find some excuse to see her again, as if somebody has called you or you have forgotten something, and you turn back.
These are sins.


But if to appreciate beauty is sin then all art is sin. Then all paintings are sin, all great music is sin, all great literature is sin, and all great poetry is sin. Why confine it to women? When you look at a sunset and you are filled with the beauty of it, you are committing a sin. Or when you see a roseflower and it overpowers you with its beauty, its delicateness, you are committing a sin.


These religious people have managed such simple things so that it is impossible to get out of the wheel of life. You will be committing sins, and you will be coming back to suffer the punishment.


To eat tastefully is a sin. In Jainism -- and Mahatma Gandhi has borrowed from Jainas because Gujarat, although it is Hindu its mind is ninety percent Jaina; Mahatma Gandhi has borrowed all five principles of the Jainas.


The first is aswad, to eat without taste. You are asking human beings to do inhuman things -- it is better not to eat, and commit suicide. Even taste is not allowed! And who will tell the child, "Don't drink the mother's milk with taste; otherwise, finished -- you have already arranged for your next life." He enjoys the mother's breast... in fact, he enjoys so much that his whole life he remembers it again and again.


The interest of men in women's breasts is not without any psychology. Why are all the painters, all the poets, all the sculptors making beautiful breasts? -- so beautiful that really that kind of breast doesn't exist.


I was very close to Khajuraho. I used to go there because it has the most beautiful sculpture in the whole world. And as far as breasts are concerned, Khajuraho is just at the very top; nobody anywhere in the world has been able to create such beautiful breasts. But seeing those breasts I said, "These breasts are not possible. If these breasts were there humanity would die."
The minister of education who was showing me around said, "Why?"


I said, "Just see the roundness of the breast -- the little child on this round breast... his nose will get closed, he will not be able to drink milk. Either he can drink milk or he can breathe, two alternatives are before him."


And nature has not created those breasts for the sculptors, but for that small child. It creates breasts in such a way that the child can breathe and drink milk too. Just a completely round breast, a full moon, will kill anybody -- not just the child but the child's father also! If you cannot breathe.... It is good in a sculpture.


But why is man so obsessed? In every magazine, in every poem... somehow the breasts seem to be the central theme of all art. The reason is that the child has enjoyed the taste, the warmth, the feeling that flows from the mother's breast -- which is invisible to us, which is now being explored by scientists.


They have tried on monkeys: one monkey is given every necessary ingredient that he needs for his physical growth; no ordinary monkey gets such balanced food. The other monkey gets just ordinary food, as monkeys can get. But the other monkey has the mother's breast, and the first monkey has just a mechanical breast. Whenever he wants to drink milk the breast is available but it is cold, the breast is just mechanical. There is no warmth, there is no human aura around it.


And the scientists have found repeatedly that the child who gets perfect nourishment dies -- just because he is not getting the mother's warmth, her body. And the child that is not getting perfect nourishment lives healthily, because he is getting the mother's warmth.


Somehow in the psychology of man, that childhood continues. All this art is just a remembrance of a past golden time when there were no worries, no responsibilities, and life was just love.


These Jaina principles make it impossible to live. No taste, no possessions.... I can understand, and I teach no possessiveness, but I cannot understand 'no possessions'. And there is a great difference between the two. You can live in a palace remembering that you are simply living in a caravanserai, it is not yours; tomorrow you will be gone, somebody else will become the possessor. One day you were not here, somebody else was the possessor.


My sannyasins have been looking for a beautiful house for me. Sixteen years ago they were also looking for a beautiful house, and I had chosen a house. Everything was settled, but there were some legal difficulties. The man had not all the necessary papers in his possession, so we had to wait. But the man died. His son was not interested in selling the house.
I moved to Poona.
Then I went to America.


And now when my friends started looking for a house, I remembered that house. The man with whom I had talked about the house, who was the owner, has died. His son, who was against selling it, has died -- now his son is in possession. But he has made many other houses around it, and destroyed the whole beauty of the place. He wants to sell all the other houses that he has made -- it had a big campus, a beautiful lawn and garden. And my whole interest was in the big campus, so thousands of people could sit there under the trees on the lawn. The main house is still there -- it was a beautiful house, but now it is surrounded by so many other houses it has lost its whole beauty. Its whole beauty was in those trees, the rocks, the lawn, the vast campus.


I inquired, "Who is the possessor of the house?" And when I came to know that it is now the third generation, I said, "Still people go on thinking that they possess things! They go on dying, new people go on becoming the owners."


You should live in the world, but not let the world live in you -- that's perfectly right. But to make it a point that you should not have any possessions creates insanity. Mahavira lived naked because he could not have clothes, it would be a possession. You are asking inhuman things. There is cold, there is old age, there is sickness.


He would not sleep on a mattress, just on the bare floor. He would not cut his hairs with scissors or shave his beard with razors because those are mechanical things, and he cannot possess anything. So he used to pull out his hairs: every year there was a festival time for the insane followers who would come to see the naked Mahavira pulling his hairs out. And it was thought to be a great religious ascetic discipline. But do you want the whole of humanity to do it?


The Jaina scriptures don't mention what he was doing with his nails. I have been looking very minutely into the Jaina scriptures to find out about the nails -- I am also a crazy man! Because what did he do with his nails? You cannot pull out your nails the way you pull out your hair. And if you don't cut your nails for eighty years, you will become almost like an animal. People cannot even come close to you, your nails will reach at least six feet. They will keep everybody away, particularly women -- a good device... nuclear weapons!


No, you cannot expect to get out of this vicious circle of life and death. If cause and effect are put at a distance -- in one life is the cause, in another life is the effect -- then it is absolutely impossible. But it is a good consolation for people, for their misery, that they had committed evil acts. What evil acts? I don't see people committing evil acts in such a proportion that the whole humanity should be miserable.


The reality is something totally different. It is not a question of evil acts, it is a question of your having been taken away from yourself, from your natural blissfulness. And no religion wants you to be so easily blissful; otherwise what will happen to their disciplines? What will happen to their great practices, ascetic practices, people torturing themselves in a thousand and one ways. People beat themselves until they fall unconscious, and that is thought to be a religious discipline.


If dropping the misery is as easy as I say it is, then all these fake religions lose their business. It is a question of their business. Blissfulness has to be made so difficult -- almost impossible -- that people can only hope for it in some future life, after long arduous journeys.


But I say to you on my authority: it has happened to me so easily. I have also lived many past lives and certainly I must have committed more evil acts than any of you -- because I don't consider them to be evil acts. Appreciation of beauty, appreciation of taste, appreciation of everything that makes life more liveable, more loveable, are not evil things to me.


I want you to become sensitive, aesthetically sensitive to all these things. They will make you more human, they will create more softness in you, more gratitude towards existence.


And it is not a theoretical question with me. I have just accepted nothingness as a door -- which I call meditation, which is nothing but another name for nothingness. And the moment nothingness happens suddenly you are standing face to face with yourself, all misery disappears.


The first thing you do is simply to laugh at yourself, at what an idiot you have been. That misery was never there; you were creating it with one hand and you were trying to destroy it with another hand -- and naturally you were in a split, in a schizophrenic condition.
It is absolutely easy, simple.
The most simple thing in existence is to be oneself.
It needs no effort; you are already it.


Just a remembrance... just getting out of all stupid ideas that the society has imposed on you. And that is as simple as a snake slipping out of its old skin and never even looking back. It is just an old skin.
If you understand it, it can happen this very moment.
Because this very moment you can see there is no misery, no anguish.


You are silent, standing on the door of nothing; just a step more inwards and you have found the greatest treasure that has been waiting for you for thousands of lives.
<p class="question">BELOVED OSHO,
IN THE MIND, IN THE PROCESS OF THINKING, THERE IS SO MUCH ENERGY. HOW CAN WE USE THAT ENERGY IN A CREATIVE AND CONSTRUCTIVE WAY?</p>


The question is very complex. It sounds simple, but it is not simple.
You are asking: The mind is full of energy, how to use this energy in a creative and constructive way?
Who is going to use this energy?


If mind itself is going to use this energy, it can never be creative and can never be constructive.


That is what is happening all over the world. That is what is happening in science. The whole misery of science is that mind is using its energy. But mind is a negative force; it cannot use anything creatively, it needs a master. Mind is a servant. Do you have a master?


So to me the question is... meditation brings the master in. It makes you fully aware and conscious that the mind is your instrument. Now, whatever you want to do with it you can do. And if you don't want to do anything with it, you can put it aside and you can remain in absolute silence.


Right now you are not the master -- even for five minutes. You cannot say to the mind, "Please, for five minutes, just for five minutes be silent." Those will be the five minutes when mind will be faster, rushing more than ever -- because it will have to show you who is the master.


There is a famous story in Tibet. A man wanted to learn the art of miracles, so he served a saint who was thought to be a knower of all the secrets. He served the saint day in, day out; he closed his business. The old saint told him again and again, "I don't know anything. You are unnecessarily wasting your business, and you are becoming a burden to me because whenever I look at you.... Twenty-four hours a day you are sitting here, on my head, and I don't know any miracles. What to do?"


The man said, "You cannot avoid me so easily. I have heard that you have been hiding those secrets. But if you are stubborn, I am also stubborn. I will die sitting here, but I will learn the secret."


Finally the saint said, "Listen. This is the mantra" -- it was not much, it was a simple mantra -- "Just repeat om, om, omkar and all the secrets of all the miracles will be available to you as you become more and more attuned with the mantra."


The man rushed towards his home. While he was going down the steps of the temple the saint said, "Wait! I have forgotten one thing. After taking the bath, when you are sitting to chant the mantra, remember not to let any monkey enter into your mind."


That man said, "You must be getting senile! In my whole life no monkey has ever entered into my mind. Don't be worried."


He said, "I am not worried. It is just to make you aware, so you don't come later on and tell me that a monkey disturbed everything."


The man said, "There is no fear about the monkeys. Everything has entered into this mind, but a monkey? I don't remember this at all, not even in a dream."


But as he started moving towards his house he was amazed; monkeys started appearing on the screen of his mind -- big monkeys, giggling. He said, "My God!" He tried to push them away, "Get out! Get lost! I don't have anything to do with monkeys, and particularly today!" But he was surprised that it was not one monkey, it was a vast line; they were coming from all sides.


He said, "My God, I had never thought that in my mind so many monkeys are hidden. But first let me take a bath." But it was so difficult to take a bath because continually he was shouting "Get out! Get lost!"


Finally his wife knocked on the door -- "What is the matter? Who is inside the bathroom? Are you alone?"
He said, "I am alone."
"But then why are you shouting so loudly, get out, get lost?"
He said, "About these monkeys...."


The woman said, "You have gone mad. What monkeys? There are no monkeys here; keep quiet."


He said, "Strange. This woman has never been so hard on me, but in a way she is right because there is nobody in the bathroom. But to say that they are in my head looks even worse."


He sat in his worshipping place, but the monkeys were inside. He closed his eyes, they were sitting all around him. He said, "I have never thought that monkeys are so interested in me. Why are you bothering me? A few are inside the mind, and if I close my mind, a few are sitting all around me. They push me from this side and from that side, and giggling! I am a silent man, and this is not gentlemanly behavior."


And again the wife looked into his worshipping place and she said, "With whom are you talking?"


He said, "My God, now I have to explain something which I do not understand myself. Just don't you disturb me tonight. Tomorrow morning I will go and I will see that old man."


The whole night he took showers many times, rubbed the soap as much as he could to clean himself, but there was no way. In fact, the bathroom was so full of monkeys that to make his way into the bathroom was difficult, to come out of the bathroom was difficult. And when he came back to his worshipping place they were sitting all over -- even in his place a big monkey was sitting chanting om, om, om.


That man said, "I cannot wait for morning." It was midnight. He rushed to the temple, woke up the old man and told him, "What kind of mantra have you given to me?"


He said, "I have told you, that was the condition. That's why for so many years I have not told it to anybody -- because that condition is unfulfillable. You simply drop this idea of miracles, and the monkeys will disappear."


The man said, "Just... I have come for that. I don't want any miracles, I don't want any secrets. Just please help me to get rid of these monkeys because they are sitting all over the place, and if I open my shop tomorrow they will be sitting all over the shop. I am a poor businessman. I got into the wrong business; this is not my business. You do your business but please, if you can help me...."


The saint said, "There is no problem. If you drop the idea of miracles those monkeys will disappear. They are the guardians of the miracles."


If you try even for five minutes to stop thinking, more thoughts will rush in than ever -- simply to show you that you are not the master. So first one has to get the mastery, and the way to become the master is not to say to the thoughts, "Stop." The way to become the master is to watch the whole thought process.


If the man had simply watched the monkeys, had allowed them to giggle, had allowed them to do whatsoever they were doing; if he had been simply a witness, those monkeys would have gone -- seeing that this man seemed to be absolutely indifferent, not interested at all.


Your thoughts have to understand one thing: that you are not interested in them. The moment you have made this point you have attained a tremendous victory. Just watch. Don't say anything to the thoughts. Don't judge. Don't condemn. Don't tell them to move. Let them do whatsoever they are doing, any gymnastics let them do; you simply watch, enjoy. It is just a beautiful film. And you will be surprised: just watching, a moment comes when thoughts are not there, there is nothing to watch.
This is the door I have been calling nothingness, emptiness.
From this door enters your real being, the master.


And that master is absolutely positive; in its hands everything turns into gold.


If Albert Einstein had been a meditator, the same mind would have produced atomic energy not to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki but to help the whole of humanity to raise its standard of living. Without meditation the mind is negative, it is bound to be in the service of death. With meditation the master is there, and the master is absolute positiveness. In its hands the same mind, the same energy, becomes creative, constructive, life affirmative.


So you cannot do anything directly with the mind. You will have to take a little roundabout way; first you have to bring the master in. The master is missing, and for centuries the servant has been thinking he is the master. Just let the master come in, and the servant immediately understands. Just the presence of the master and the servant falls at the feet of the master and waits for any order, for anything the master wants to be done -- he is ready.


The mind is a tremendously powerful instrument. No computer is as powerful as man's mind -- cannot be, because it is made by man's mind. Nothing can be, because they are all made by man's mind. A single man's mind has such immense capacity: in a small skull, such a small brain can contain all the information contained in all the libraries of the earth, and that information is not a small amount.


Just one library, the British library, has so many books that if we put those books in a line side by side they will go three times around the earth. And a bigger library exists in Moscow, a similar library exists in Harvard; and there are similar libraries in all the big universities of the world. But a single human mind can contain all the information contained in all these libraries. Scientists are agreed that we may not be able to make a computer comparable to the human mind which can be put in such a small space.


But the result of this immense gift to man has not been beneficial -- because the master is absent and the servant is running the show. The result is wars, violence, murders, rape. Man is living in a nightmare, and the only way out is to bring the master in. It is there, you just have to get hold of it. And watchfulness is the key: just watch the mind. The moment there are no thoughts, immediately you will be able to see yourself -- not as mind, but as something beyond, something transcendental to mind.


And once you are attuned with the transcendental then the mind is in your hands. It can be immensely creative. It can make this very earth paradise. There is no need for any paradise to be searched for above in the clouds, just as there is no need to search for any hell -- because hell we have created already. We are living in it.


I have heard that a great politician died. Naturally, he was afraid that he would be taken to hell. He knew his whole life: it was absolutely criminal and nothing else. It is impossible without crimes to succeed in getting political power. In going higher on the ladder of power, you have to crush, kill, destroy -- you have to do everything. But if you succeed then you are forgiven, nobody remembers that you have done anything wrong. And he was a successful politician. But as he was dying he was afraid; he remembered his whole past, and he was certain that "I am going to hell. Now nothing can help. Those political tricks will not be helpful here."


But when he opened his eyes he was in front of heaven. He could not believe it. He asked the angels who had brought him there, "There seems to be some mistake, some bureaucratic mistake. This is heaven and you have brought me here?"
"This is, certainly. And there is no mistake, you have earned it."


The man said, "What are you talking about? I have done everything wrong that can be done."


They said, "We know, but your whole life you lived in hell, and now to send you to hell again will not be justified. Moreover, our hell will look very old-fashioned. You have been living in a very ultra-modern hell, and we don't want to feel ashamed. Our hell is very ancient, our methods of torture are very ancient, and you have refined everything so well that in fact you will laugh -- 'Is this hell?' So the only way... even God was puzzled. You are three days late. You must have died three days ago, but it took three days for God to make the decision about where to take you. Finally we decided, 'It is better to take him to heaven, because hell he has lived enough.'"


People still go on thinking that hell is somewhere down underneath the earth -- and you are living in it, this is the beauty -- and heaven is somewhere above.


You can change this hell into heaven if your mind can be under the guidance of the master, of your self nature. And it is a simple process....


But don't try directly with the mind, otherwise you will be getting into trouble. One can even get into insanity. If you try to put your mind energy into creative directions -- you are not capable even of stopping it for one moment and you are trying to put it into a creative dimension -- you will go crazy. You will have a nervous breakdown.


Don't touch the mind. First just find out where the master is. It is a complicated mechanism. Let the master be there, and the mind functions as a servant so perfectly.


In the East we have done this. Gautam Buddha could have become Albert Einstein without any difficulty, he has a far greater genius. But his whole life was concerned with transforming people, with awareness, with compassion, with love, with blissfulness.
			

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