Poor people are miserable, you can understand, but rich people are also miserable. Those who have are as much miserable as those who have not. Ill people are miserable, but healthy are also miserable. Misery seems to be somewhere else. Misery does not disappear by wealth, health, or anything of that sort. It continues like an undercurrent.

 

The misery exists in the demand for the more, and the human mind can always imagine for more. Can you imagine a situation in which you cannot imagine for more? Impossible. Even heaven can be improved upon. Nobody can imagine a situation in which imagination can stop and you cannot imagine more and a better situation. That means you will be miserable wherever you are. Even heaven won't be enough, so don't wait for heaven. If you go right now into heaven it won't be enough. You will be as miserable as here. maybe even mole because here, at least, you can hope -- that the heaven is there and one day or other you will enter into it. If you enter into it, even that hope is gone.

 

As you are, you can only be in hell, because the hell or the heaven are ways of looking at things. They are not physical spaces: they are attitudes how you look at things.

 

A lizard is in heaven and Leo Tolstoy is in hell. Even a man like Leo Tolstoy. He was world-famous, more fame you cannot imagine. His name is going to be in the history books. His books will be read forever and forever. He was a genius. But you cannot imagine more miserable a man. He was rich, one of the richest men in Russia. He belonged to the royal family; he was a prince, married to a very beautiful princess; but you cannot imagine more miserable a man, who was continuously thinking of suicide. He started thinking maybe it is because he is so rich, that's why he is miserable, so he started living like a poor man, like a peasant; but still the misery continued.

 

What was troubling him? He was a man of great imagination -- a novelist has to be. He was a man of tremendous imagination, so whatsoever was available was always less. More he could imagine, better he could imagine. That became his misery.

 

Remember this, that if you are expecting anything from life, you will not get anything. Don t expect and it is there in all its glory. Don't expect, don't ask, and it showers upon you in all its miraculousness. All its magic is there. Just wait a little while without thoughts... but that seems to be impossible.

 

Not that there are not moments when you are without thoughts. Patanjali says there are. All those who have entered into the inner space of man, they know there are gaps. But you are missing them somehow, because those gaps are in the present. You jump from one thought to another, and in between was the gap. In between was the heaven -- you jump from one hell to another.

 

In between is heaven, but in between you are not. From one thought to another thought you jump you are. Each thought feeds your ego, helps you to be, defines you, gives you a boundary, a shape, a form, an identity. You don't look in the gap between the two thoughts because to look into that gap is to look into your original face, which has no identity. To look into that gap is to look into eternity, where you are going to be lost.

 

You have become so afraid of looking into the gap that you have almost managed to forget them.

 

Between two thoughts there is a gap, but you don't see it. You see one thought, then you see another thought, then another thought.... Just watch a little. The thoughts are not overlapping. Each thought is separate. In between the two there must be a gap. There is a gap, and that interval is the door. From that door you will enter into existence again. From that door you have been expelled from the garden of Eden. From that door you will enter into the garden of Eden again, you will again become like a lizard sunning on a rock.

 

- Osho,  "Yoga - The Alpha and the Omega, Vol 7, #5"