Osho,
Why do I feel so much pain in letting go of the things that are
causing me misery?

“The things that are causing you misery must be giving you some pleasure too, otherwise the question would not arise. If they were pure misery you would have dropped them. But in life, nothing is pure; everything is mixed with its opposite. Everything carries its opposite in its womb.

What you call misery, analyze it, penetrate into it, and you will see that it has something which you would like to have.

“Maybe it is not yet real, maybe it is only a hope, maybe it is only a promise for tomorrow, but you will cling to the misery, you will cling to the pain, in the hope that tomorrow something that you have always desired and longed for is going to happen.

“You suffer misery in the hope of pleasure. If it is pure misery it is impossible to cling to it. Just watch, be more alert about your misery. For example, you are feeling jealous. It creates misery. But look around – there must be something positive in it. It also gives you some ego, some sense of your being separate from others, some sense of superiority.

Your jealousy at least pretends to be love. If you don’t feel jealous you will think maybe you don’t love anymore.

“And you are clinging to jealousy because you would like to cling to your love – at least your idea of love. If your woman or your man goes with somebody else and you don’t feel jealous at all, you will immediately become conscious that you no longer love. Otherwise, for centuries you have been told that lovers are jealous. Jealousy has become an intrinsic part of your love. Without jealousy your love dies, only with jealousy can your so-called love live. If you want your love you will have to accept your jealousy and the misery that is created by it.

“Your mind is very cunning and very clever in finding rationalizations. It will say, “It is natural to feel jealous.” And it appears natural because everybody else is doing the same. Your mind will say, “It is natural to feel hurt when your lover leaves you. Because you have loved so much, how can you avoid the hurt, the wound, when your lover leaves you?

“In fact, you are enjoying your wound too, in a very subtle and unconscious way. Your wound is giving you the idea that you are a great lover, that you loved so much, that you loved so deeply, that your love was so profound, that you are shattered because your lover has left you. Even if you are not shattered you will pretend to be shattered – you will believe in your own lie.

You will behave as if you are in great misery, you will cry and weep, and your tears may not be true at all, but just to console yourself that you are a great lover, you have to cry and weep.

“Just watch every kind of misery: either it has some pleasure in it which you are not ready to lose, or it has some hope in it which goes on dangling in front of you like a carrot. And it looks so close, just around the corner, and you have traveled so long and now the goal is so close, why drop it? You will find some rationalization in it, some hypocrisy in it.

“Just a few days ago a sannyasin wrote to me that her man has left her and she is not feeling miserable – what is wrong with her? “Why am I not feeling miserable? Am I too hard, rocklike? I don’t feel any misery,” she wrote to me. And she is miserable because she is not feeling misery! She was expecting to be shattered. “On the contrary,” she wrote, “I can confess that I am feeling happy – and that makes me very sad. What kind of love is this? I am feeling happy, unburdened; a great load has disappeared from my being.” She asked me, “Osho, is it normal? Am I all right or is something basically wrong with me?”

“Nothing is wrong with her, she is absolutely right. In fact, when lovers leave each other after a long time together – and all the misery that is bound to happen when you are together – it is a relief. But it is against the ego to confess that it is a relief. For a few days at least you will move with a long face, with tears flowing from your eyes, phony, but this is the idea that has prevailed in the world.

If somebody dies and you don’t feel sad you will start feeling that something is certainly wrong with you.

“How can you avoid sadness when somebody has died? – because we have been told it is natural, it is normal, and everybody wants to be natural and normal. It is not normal, it is only average. It is not natural, it is only a long, long cultivated habit; otherwise there is nothing to weep and cry about.

“Death destroys nothing. The body is dust and falls into dust, and the consciousness has two possibilities: if it still has desires then it will move into another womb, or if all the desires have disappeared then it will move into the womb of existence, into eternity. Nothing is destroyed. The body again becomes part of the earth, goes into rest, and the soul moves into the universal consciousness or moves into another body

To continue reading and see all available formats of this talk: The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha, Vol.5 Talk#2. The Heart Has No Question