Osho – Bliss is the greatest blessing in life. Without knowing bliss one lives in vain; in fact one does not live but only vegetates, one only dies. What we ordinarily call life is nothing but a gradual process of death. From the moment of birth we start dying. Every day, one day less; time goes on slipping out of one’s fingers like water. This is not life because it ends only in the graveyard.
You may go in any direction, you may do any kind of work, but every road leads to the grave. The proverb is that every road leads to Rome — I don’t know why, unless Rome is another name for the graveyard! Every road leads to the graveyard… and in fact, Rome is a graveyard, particularly the Vatican City. It is where Christ has really been crucified, it is where he is buried.
Our life is not worth calling life. Life starts only when you start moving in the dimension beyond death. That’s what meditation is for: a strategy, a device, a ladder, to go beyond death. And just a glimpse of the beyond is enough. Then you know only the body is going to die, not you, and only the body is born, not you. You were here before your birth and you will be here after your death. You are part of eternity.
When one experiences this, life becomes blissful, and in that blissfulness one feels that god has blessed one. Then naturally, spontaneously, gratitude arises. I call that gratitude prayer. All other prayers are pseudo. The real prayer arises only when you have experienced bliss and the blessing of it. Then naturally you have to be thankful, you have to bow down to existence. You feel what a gift has been given to you — and you had not asked for it, you don’t even deserve it. Nobody deserves it, nobody is worthy of it, but god gives out of his abundance.
Source – Osho Book “The Golden Wind”