Osho – Ordinarily the mind is always conscious of pain, never conscious of bliss. If you have a headache you are conscious of it. When you don’t have a headache you are not conscious of the well-being of the head. When the body hurts you are conscious of it, but when the body is perfectly healthy you are not conscious of the health.
This is the root cause of why we feel so miserable: our whole consciousness is focussed on pain. We only count the thorns – we never look at the flowers. Somehow we select the thorns and neglect the flowers. If we are wounded and continuously hurt, there is no surprise in it; it has to be so. For a certain biological reason it has happened: nature makes you aware of pain so that you can avoid it. It is a built-in system.
Otherwise, your hand may be burning and you may not be conscious; it will be difficult to survive. So nature has made it very essential and inevitable that you have to be conscious of the pain. But nature has no built-in mechanism to make you conscious of pleasure, joy, bliss. That has to be learned, that has to be worked out. That is an art.
From this moment start becoming aware of things which are not natural. For example, your body is feeling perfectly healthy: sit silently, become conscious of it. Enjoy the well-being. Nothing is wrong – enjoy it! Make a deliberate effort to be conscious of it. You have eaten well and the body is satisfied, contented; become conscious of it.
When you are hungry, nature makes you conscious, but nature has no system to make you conscious of when you are satiated; that has to be grown. Nature need not grow it because survival is all that nature wants; more than that is luxury. Bliss is luxury, the greatest luxury.
And this is my observation about why people are so miserable – they are not really as miserable as they look. They have many moments of great joy, but those moments pass by; they never become aware of them. Their memories remain full of pain and wounds. Their minds remain full of nightmares. Not that there are not beautiful dreams and poetic visions – they are also there, but nobody is there to take note of them. In twenty-four hours’ time thousands of things happen for which you would feel grateful to god, but you don’t take note!
That has to be started from this moment. And you will be surprised that bliss grows more and more every day, and, proportionately, pain and misery become less and less. And a moment comes when life is almost a celebration. Pain is only once in a while, and that pain is part of the game. One is not distracted by it, not disturbed by it. One accepts it.
If you enjoy the satiation that comes after you have eaten, naturally you know that when you are hungry there will be a little pain… and that is good. When you have slept a good night’s sleep and in the morning you are feeling so fresh and so alive, rejuvenated, naturally if one night you cannot sleep, there will be a little agony, but that is part of the game.
My own experience is that life consists of ninety-nine percent bliss and one percent pain. But
peoples’ lives consist of ninety-nine percent . pain and one percent of bliss; everything is upsidedown.
Source – Osho Book “Don’t Look Before You Leap”