Question :

‘Happiness is not being smart enough to know what to worry about.’ please comment.

 

 

This must have been said by a very unhappy man, and yet a very egoistic one. He cannot recognise the fact that unhappiness is created by being unintelligent. He is trying to save his ego. He is saying that the grapes are sour.

 

To be unhappy no intelligence is needed. Everybody is capable of being unhappy but happiness is very, very rare. Great talent is needed. Not only intellect, intelligence is needed. Only rarely does a Buddha, a Krishna, become happy. It is almost impossible to be happy.

 

So let us try to understand what unhappiness is. Unhappiness is the incapacity to understand life, the incapacity to understand oneself, the incapacity to create a harmony between you and the existence.

 

Unhappiness is a discord between you and reality; something is in conflict between you and existence. Happiness is when nothing is in conflict — when you are together, and you are together with existence also. When there is a harmony, when everything is flowing without any conflict, smooth, relaxed, then you are happy. Happiness is possible only with great understanding, an understanding like the peaks of the Himalayas. Less than that won’t do

 

Anybody is capable of being unhappy any moment, that’s how the whole world is so unhappy. To be happy you will have to create such a great understanding about you and about the existence in which you exist, that everything falls in line, in deep accord, in rhythm. And between your energy and the energy that surrounds you a dance happens and you start moving in step with life.

 

Happiness is when you disappear. Unhappiness is when you are too much. You are the discord, your absence will be the accord. Sometimes you have glimpses of happiness — when by some accident you are not there. Looking at nature, or looking at the stars, or holding the hand of your beloved, or making love…in some moments you are not there. If you are there, even there there will be no happiness. If you are making love to your beloved and it is really as you express it, a ‘making’, then there will be no happiness.

 

Love cannot be made. You can be in it or not in it, but there ii no way to make it. The English expression is ugly. To ‘make love’ is absurd. How can you make it? If the maker is there, the doer is there, the technician goes on existing. And if you are following some techniques from Masters and Johnson or Vatasyayana or some other source, and you are not lost in it, happiness will not happen. When you are lost you don’t know where you are going, you don’t know what you are doing, you are possessed by the whole, the part does not exist separate from the whole… then there is an orgasmic experience. That is what happiness is.

 

For happiness you will need tremendous intelligence. And I say INTELLIGENCE, not intellect, knowingly. Intellect you can get from the market, intellect you can get from the books, intellect you can get from the university. Intellect is transferable, intellect is mechanical, intellect is of the bio-computer you call mind. Intelligence is not of the mind, intelligence is of the no-mind — what Zen people call no-mind. Intelligence has nothing to do with information, knowledge; it has only one element and that element is of awareness.

 

If you are intelligent then your life will be of happiness. Why is intelligence needed? Because life in itself is meaningless. Meaning is not something sitting there and you have just to reach and possess it. Meaning has to be created. People come to me and they ask,’What is the meaning of life?’ As if life has any meaning. Life has no meaning — that is the beauty of life. That’s why it is freedom. You are free to create your own meaning and I am free to create my meaning. If life has a meaning then we will all be just slaves and that meaning will not be worth anything. Life is freedom. It does not impose any meaning on you; it simply gives you an opportunity to create your own meaning. The meaning has to be created. It is not like a thing that you can uncover, you will have to become your meaning, you will have to give a rebirth to yourself. That’s why I say much intelligence is needed. Only when you feel meaning in life will you be happy, not before it.

 

Life has no meaning in itself, you have to bring meaning into it. Life is just raw material, you have to create your meaning out of it. You have to create your God. God is not there waiting for you. You have to create it within your heart, within your innermost core of being. Only then will you be happy.

 

To create meaning you will have to be a creator. Painters paint, create paintings; poets write, create poetry; dancers create dance… but these are all just fragments. A religious person creates himself; the religious person is the greatest artist there is. All other artists are just finding substitutes and one day or other they will become frustrated. You have written many poems, then one day you realise,’What is the point? Why go on writing?’ You have painted, then one day suddenly you realise,’What is the point? For whom? For what?’ One day you will die and all will be left and will disappear. So what is the point?

 

Unless you feel a point of immortality in whatsoever you are doing you cannot be happy, and that point of immortality is felt only when you create immortality within yourself.

 

Gurdjieff used to say, and very rightly, that man is not born with a soul. All other religions say that man is born with a soul, but Gurdjieff’s saying is tremendously significant — man is not born with a soul. And unless you create it you will not have any soul, you will exist empty and you will die empty. You will have to create it, that’s why I say great intelligence is needed.

 

This statement must have been made by someone who was very unhappy and yet so egoistic that he could not or would not recognise the fact that it is he who is creating his unhappiness. So he says, ‘HAPPINESS IS NOT BEING SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW WHAT TO WORRY ABOUT.’ He is saying that to be happy one has to be ignorant, to be happy one has to be stupid. Then a Buddha is stupid, then a Jesus is stupid, then people who are in madhouses are the only intelligent people in the world.

 

But this man is trying to save his ego. To be intelligent is arduous, it will need tremendous effort on your part. You will have to destroy much that is rubbish within you, you will have to create almost a fire of consciousness so that what is useless is burned and only that which is pure gold is saved. Very few people are ready to go through that hardship, through that discipline which creates intelligence. People want short-cuts.

 

A man went to see his psychiatrist and said that every night he was visited by a ten-foot monster with two heads. And he was suffering tremendously, sleep was not possible, he was becoming more and more miserable and any day he could collapse. He had even thought about committing suicide.

 

‘Well, I think I might be able to cure you,’ said the psychiatrist,’but I am afraid it will be a lengthy process and it will cost you about three hundred dollars.’

 

‘Three hundred dollars?’ said the man.’Forget it! I will just go home and make friends with it.’

 

That’s how to be intelligent is so difficult and it costs so much. You have to put at stake whatsoever you have. It is a cross. In fact, you have to die to be intelligent because only when you are reborn will you be intelligent, not before it. And the cross has to be carried on one’s own shoulders, nobody else can carry your cross. You will have to carry your cross to your own Golgotha, there is no other way. Many times you will stumble on the road, many times you will be so tired and exhausted that you will have to rest. Many times you will think that people who have never desired intelligence, awareness, are blessed.’What have I chosen?’ Many times doubt and suspicion will arise in your mind.’Is there any goal or am I simply carrying a cross and wasting my life?’ Many times you would like to go back to the world, many will be the temptations. But if you can stick it, if you can remain on the path against all odds, one day intelligence flowers.

 

It is almost like a seed: the seed cannot know what is going to happen, the seed has never known the flower. And the seed cannot even believe that he has the potentiality to become a beautiful flower. Long is the journey, and it is always safer not to go on that journey because unknown is the path, nothing is guaranteed. Nothing can be guaranteed. Thousand and one are the hazards of the journey, many are the pitfalls — and the seed is secure, hidden inside a hard core. But the seed tries, it makes an effort, it drops the hard shell which is its security, it starts moving. Immediately the fight starts: the struggle with the soil, with the stones, with the rocks. And the seed was very hard and the sprout will be very, very soft and dangers will be many.-

 

There was no danger for the seed, the seed could have survived for millennia, but for the sprout many are the dangers. But the sprout starts: towards the unknown, towards the sun, towards the source of light, not knowing where, not knowing why. Great is the cross to be carried but a dream possesses the seed and the seed moves. One day…. And there is much competition: other trees are there, other plants are there, and he has to cross all of them because only then will the sun and the sky be available. And then, no one knows. But one day it flowers, it happens. The same is the path for man. It is arduous. Much courage will be needed.

 

It is said about Dr. Albert Schweitzer that he was playing host to several European visitors at the hospital in Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa.

 

‘This heat is unbearable,’ one of the visitors moaned.’What is the temperature?’

 

‘I don’t know,’ said Schweitzer.’I don’t have a thermometer here.’

 

‘No thermometer?’

 

‘No,’ replied the doctor. ‘If I knew how hot it was I don’t think I’d be able to endure it either.’

 

People remain unintelligent because if you know, if you start understanding, it will be almost impossible to endure the life that you are living. You are living in hell.

 

I have heard about a man, a very intellectual man, a philosopher, who died. He came naked before God and God opened the book of the life of the man. God went on to recount all the sins of the man written therein. The man had been guilty of practically all sins including cruelty, lack of charity, thievery, ingratitude, disloyalty, lust and lack of love. To all these charges the man answered, ‘Even so did I.’

 

Thereupon God closed the book of the life of the man and said, ‘Surely, I will send you to hell.’

 

The man said he could not do so because hell was where he had always lived.

 

So then God, feeling a little disturbed that he could not send this man to hell, feeling almost impotent, not knowing what to do…. Because he was right — how can you send a man to hell who has always lived in hell? So then God said he would send him to heaven — -just to save his ego.

 

And the man cried out,’Thou canst not!’

 

And God said, ‘Wherefore can I not send thee to heaven?’

 

And the man answered and said, ‘Because never, in no place, have I been able to imagine it.’

 

And there was silence in the House of Judgement.

 

How can you send a man to heaven who cannot even imagine it, who has never tasted it? How can you send a man to heaven who has not created it in his own soul? Impossible. He defeated God. Hell is not possible because he has lived there and there is no other hell. Heaven is not possible unless you create it. Unless you carry it within yourself you cannot find it anywhere.

 

It is said in all the religious books of the world that saints go to heaven, but it is a half-statement. They go to heaven because they live in heaven; they go to heaven because they have created their heaven. In fact, to be in heaven, you will have to have heaven within you — there is no other way.

 

To be intelligent is to create your own heaven, is to create your own happiness, otherwise there is none. If you create it, you have it. It is just like breathing: if you breathe you are alive, if you don’t breathe you are not alive. If you create happiness, you are happy; if you don’t create, you are unhappy. Unhappiness needs no creativity on your part. Unhappiness is a negative state, it need not be created. Happiness is not negative, it is a positive state, it has to be created. Absence can be there but the presence has to be created.

 

Remember it and don’t become victims of such quotes. In the West there are many foolish statements in circulation. These statements may appear to be very penetrating — they are not.

 

- Osho, “Dang Dang Doko Dang, #4, Q1”