Investment in Unhappiness

Sadhana

Osho says: ' Happiness is a learned skill. Basically every child is born happy and blissful.'

"Happiness is a choice you make in each moment about how you experience that moment, not a state you one day achieve. " says Barbara DeAngelis the foremost American author on human relationships .
Happiness appears to be like the horizon, the more we chase it, the more it recedes further. But it is worth remembering that the horizon is an illusion and happiness is reality. It eludes human beings because the human mind is trained to be negative, miserable, competitive, ambitious, complaining. The seeds of unhappiness are sown in the very childhood.
You may not agree that happiness is our natural state of being. Every child is born happy and blissful. Look at an infant chuckling and playing with itself, it is in a complete bliss. But as it grows older, the people around it conditions it to be serious, miserable putting lot of pressure.
We are taught to be ambitious, to be competitive, and in order to achieve it we sacrifice happiness. When we spend our lives preparing for the future rather than enjoying the present, we end up postponing happiness. Ask yourself: is my present career best described as preparing for the future, figuring that one day I will be happy?
I have a Swedish friend here at the Osho Meditation Resort, Pune, called Sucheta. A middle aged lively, bubbly woman. We all suffer from arrogant auto riksha drivers. Pune is no exception. Here the auto-rikshaw drivers demand exhorbitant money from the western passangers. When everyone is freaking out about it, Sucheta pays them more than they ask for, and is chirping happy! She says, "I bought peace for ten rupees. This is my antidote to their greed."

But we let these opportunities slip away because we are never present in the moment.
Osho has made an insightful observation on human investment in unhappiness: " People have a morbid liking for illness and people have a morbid attachment with unhappiness. That's why you are always ready for unhappiness. No preparation is needed, everybody is ready to jump. Nobody comes to me and asks how to be unhappy. Nobody has been teaching you unhappiness. You know it by instinct.
"There must be some deep investment in it. They want to be happy, but they cling to unhappiness. When you are unhappy it is easy to condemn the whole world, it is easy to throw responsibility on everybody else. When you are unhappy you can manipulate others who are near you -- because you are unhappy, and they have a responsibility to make you happy. When you are unhappy you can demand attention: 'I am ill; I am unhappy'
"Everybody goes on playing the game of being unhappy. You want to be happy, but unless you cut the investment in unhappiness you cannot be happy. And happiness is not somebody else's responsibility towards you, remember. Nobody else can make you happy. It is your own growth, your own awareness, your own moving energy -- higher and higher -- that gives you bliss."

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