Living in Misery Is Easier Than Discovering Blissful Freedom

“…Love’s got a hold on me, baby, Feels like a ball and chain.
Now, love’s just draggin’ me down, baby,
Feels like a ball and chain.
I hope there’s someone out there who could tell me
Why the man I love wanna leave me in so much pain.
Yeah, maybe, maybe you could help me, come on, help me!…” Janis Joplin, Ball and Chain.

Is this love if it brings pain? But society wants us to be miserable.

“Misery needs no intelligence, no courage, no rebellion; you simply have to adjust yourself to society and you will be miserable, because the whole society is miserable.

If you want to be blissful you have to rebel against many things which create misery

“You have to be on guard not to fall a victim of all kinds of superstitions that surround everybody. They are ancient, very ancient, and we have accepted them almost as if they are truths. They are not. They are the cause of our misery.

But society wants you to be miserable.

“This has to be very clearly understood, that the society is interested in your being miserable. There are reasons why the society is interested in your being miserable: a miserable person is manageable; a miserable person is always in such a low state of energy that he can be enslaved. Misery functions almost like a spiritual castration.

“Bulls cannot be harnessed to bullock carts; first they have to be castrated. And have you seen the difference between a bull and an ox? There is a tremendous difference. the bull has grace, beauty, power, strength, and the ox is just poor. He was also born to be a bull but he has been cut from his very roots, his energy has been destroyed. Now it is possible to harness him to a cart.

“If you harness a bull to a cart you will be in danger; he will take you anywhere. You will not be able to manage him; it will be impossible to keep him on the road. And if he meets a beautiful cow on the road he will forget all about you and the cart! He is alive – the ox is dead. And the same has been done to man.

It is a very subtle strategy: from the very beginning the child is slowly, spiritually castrated, is made spiritually impotent.

“He is forced to be obedient to all kinds of stupidities. Things are imposed on him and he is helpless; he depends on the parents. He knows that he cannot exist without their support so he has to compromise.

“And slowly slowly he completely forgets that he has compromised too much. By the time he is able to stand on his own feet he has completely forgotten what freedom is, what rebellion is, what the beauty of being intelligent is – he has become a slave.

“Hitherto this society – and when I say ‘this society’ I mean all the societies of the world. I make no distinctions – Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, they are all alike. Different brands of castration of course, but the base is the same:

They have all done one thing, they have destroyed the spirit of man.

My Alternative to Ball and Chain, to Make You Alive

“My effort here is to make you alive once more, to call you forth from the grave. My sannyasins have to be rebellious, intelligent, only then can they be blissful. Risk everything to be blissful, because nothing is more precious than bliss. Let that be the only goal in life; everything else is secondary, insignificant.”

Osho Times International/ Courtesy Osho International Foundation/www.osho.com

Excerpted from Osho, The Golden Wind, Talk #12 (Unpublished)

To continue reading and see all available formats of this talk:
Osho, The Path Of The Mystic, Talk #1 – The Individual Versus the Society