Excitement

 

 

If one is happy with oneself, centered, there is no need to go anywhere because you cannot find any place better than your own inner being. All the restaurants, the movie houses, the casinos, are visited by very poor people, who have lost contact with themselves. They don’t know that they have a space within themselves which is the most beautiful and the most delicious.

 

Certainly anybody looking at me will think that this must be a boring life. I can live in my room for lives. I don’t see any point of going anywhere – because what you are seeking I have found, and I have found it within myself. And you will go on seeking everywhere in the world and you will not find it.

 

To you, certainly it will seem that if you were to live in one room you will feel bored; but as far as I am concerned, even the idea of going out has not arisen in me. I simply enjoy myself so deeply and so greatly that I cannot conceive that there can be any place which can make me more than what I am.

 

I have been around the world. I have been in so many houses and hotels... but it doesn’t matter, I am always myself wherever I am. And because I am blissful wherever I am, the place becomes blissful for me.

 

In Crete one Greek journalist was asking me – because he had seen me in Poona, he had seen me in Oregon, and now he was interviewing me in Crete – “Osho, how do you manage always to find a paradise?”

 

I said, “It is not a question of finding a paradise. It is a question of carrying it within yourself so wherever you are it is there.”

 

And if you don’t have it within you, you cannot find it anywhere else. There is only one place where it exists and it is within you. It has no concern with houses, no concern with places. And if you get bored, that simply means you were hoping to find it here and you have not found it so you are bored, so you are thinking to go somewhere else to find it. There you don’t find it so you again get bored, and life starts becoming more and more boring. As you become older it becomes sheer boredom because slowly you start realizing that paradise does not exist anywhere. And the miracle is: all this time you have been carrying it within yourself. You can go to the moon, but you will not go within yourself; you cannot believe it, “Within me and paradise? Impossible!”

 

You have been conditioned to hate yourself, to condemn yourself, to reject yourself: “Within me? And paradise?” So from the outset there is rejection. You never go in.

 

Just give it a little try. I am not preventing you – if you have found your paradise, you can still go to the restaurants, there is no harm; you can still go to the movie houses, you can still go to the casinos, there is no harm. But you will not feel bored anywhere.

 

-Osho, "The Transmission of the Lamp, #43, Q6"