Osho – Your anguish goes on deepening as you grow older.

Saint Kabir Sutra – “I LAUGH WHEN I HEAR THAT THE FISH IN THE WATER IS THIRSTY”.

Osho on Kabir Sutra – Life surrounds you with all its joys, with immense possibilities, opportunities. And you go on crying and weeping! Your anguish goes on deepening as you grow older. Children can laugh, but the older you become, the more the laughter disappears. And whenever you laugh, it is phony; it is just a painted laughter. It has no roots in your heart.

Why have people become so serious? They know they are missing something. They know that life is slipping out of their hands. They know that this should not be so, but it is so — they are miserable. And when someone attains, like Kabir, he is bound to laugh.

If a fish comes to you and says, “I am thirsty,” what will you do? Will you feel any sympathy for the fish? Will you feel any kind of empathy for the fish? You will simply laugh, and you will say, “If you are thirsty then you are simply stupid. There is no need to be thirsty! You are in the sea already. Why should you be thirsty?”

Man is in anguish, great anguish. We go on hiding it, because what is the point of bringing it to others? Nobody can help. We go on carrying dark nights in our beings, great turmoil, great pain, great wounds. We go on hiding! It is pointless to tell anybody; nobody can help. It is better not to talk about the wounds that you are carrying in your soul; it is better to forget about all those wounds.

That’s why intoxicants have been so important down the ages. There has never been a time when something or other was not used by man to forget the inner wounds, to forget this whole nonsense that we have made out of life. People go on talking against alcohol, against drugs, but they don’t understand the psychology behind it.Just talking against them is not going to prevent people. You can legalize, you can prohibit, but still intoxicants will be used.

Unless man becomes blissful, they cannot be prevented. If man lives in misery, he will need something or other to forget the misery. Otherwise, it will be too much! In fact, my own insight is this: if all the drugs and all the intoxicants could be simply removed from the world, man would immediately go mad. The whole world would be a madhouse.

People are somehow keeping themselves together. They can drink alcohol, and for a few hours they can forget the world and the misery that the world brings to them; they can forget their own selves. They can be lost into oblivion. They know perfectly well it is not going to change anything. But then nothing seems to change anything. At least for a few hours one can forget all about it.

Intoxicants will disappear from the world only when meditation has become a world-wide phenomenon, when each single individual has created some meditativeness in his being; when each single individual has become aware, “There is no need to be miserable. Misery is created by me. Life is not misery: life’s nature is bliss. It is my stupidity that I am creating misery out of it.”

Misery needs great efforts, bliss is natural — you cannot create bliss, you can only create misery. And if you don’t create misery, bliss comes of its own accord. Bliss comes effortlessly — you cannot practise it. But for misery you have to make great efforts — and you ARE making great efforts to remain miserable. You have invested much in your misery.

Source – Osho Book “The Fish in the Sea is Not Thirsty”