Osho – Pleasure is from the outside and bliss is from the inside. Pleasure depends on others. Bliss is independent. Pleasure inevitably brings bondage. Bondage is sbsolutely part of pleasure, because the source of pleasure becomes more important than you are, and the fear arises that today it is available, but what is going to happen tomorrow? So make sure that it remains yours tomorrow too — but then you have to bargain, you have to lose something, you have to pay for it. And then too it is never absolutely certain — hence fear, anxiety. And when there is fear and anxiety and bondage, what pleasure can you have?
It is all destroyed. So it remains only a hope, just a carrot hanging in front of you. As you move the carrot goes on moving. You never achieve it, it never becomes a reality. It is always a dream. But it keeps you occupied, keeps you so much occupied from the cradle to the grave that you don’t have any time left for the real search. You fail again and again, but the hope goes on living. After each failure it resurrects, it is again there.
Hope never dies. Even when we say ‘I am hopeless,’ it is not really true, because if one is really hopeless, if the hope has completely disappeared, then you cannot even feel hopelessness.
The feeling of hopelessness is possible only with the background of hope: you are still hoping but becoming desperate, seeing all the failures. You are becoming less and less certain, less and less do you see the possibility of its ever becoming a reality, but somewhere, in some corner of your unconscious, the seed of hope still lives. It will sprout again. That’s what they mean by the proverb that time heals; what it heals nobody asks. It simply heals the wounds that have been left by past hopes, it heals them so you can start hoping again, but it is the same game. It is moving in a circle.
The pleasure-seeker goes on seeking but he never arrives. To understand the utter futility of pleasure, the impossibility of its ever happening, becomes a revolution in your life. Then you move towards the inner from the outer. Then you move from dependence to independence. Then you start searching into your own nature, into your own interiority.
And one is simply in for a great surprise: the moment one turns in, the very turning in — a one hundred eighty degree turn it has to be — and one is dazzled, puzzled, that this is what one has been seeking maybe for millions of lives. It was within oneself and we have been seeking it everywhere else. If we could not find it, there is no wonder in it, because it was within us. The search was without and the real source was within.
Just a glimpse of it brings freedom, brings a new breeze. For the first time you feel alive, free, joyous, for no reason at all, simply joyous, because now the understanding dawns that joy is our self-nature.
Source – Osho Book “The Old Pond… Plop”