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Chapter 22 - What more do you want?
teaching you language and all other worldly ways. And making every effort that you forget completely your innocent days, your days of paradise.
Everybody forgets, but somewhere deep down in the unconscious, the experience of those days goes on echoing. It is this echoing of those experiences that sends you in search, because you cannot accept your miserable life -- full of anxiety and tension and psychological sickness
-- as the meaning of your being here. Vaguely, somewhere, you know that there have been golden moments also. You cannot exactly remember, but an undercurrent in your unconscious goes on creating a longing in you to find those lost moments again.
Religion is basically the search for childhood: the same innocence, the same joy in things, the same fearlessness... those magical eyes, that heart which was able to dance with the trees, the heart that was enchanted with the moon and the stars. That space in which existence was nothing but sheer glory, pure splendor...
Dhyan Amiyo, either accidentally or out of some experience from the past life, you were doing a method of meditation. And that's why, as the tension grew... there is a limit, and the next moment is going to be the moment of death. You became totally concentrated. And from the highest peak of your tension, suddenly comes relaxation. In that relaxation, you found yourself bubbling with happiness.
If you had continued to do that, your life would have been immensely rich. You would not have known sadness, unhappiness. You would not have known anger, jealousy. You would have known only love, silence, joy -- and for no reason at all. It is our natural state.
Tension is not our natural state. That's why, after a certain moment, tension has to disappear. For example, you can keep your hand open for as long as you want, it is its natural state. But if you make a fist, and the harder you make your fist, how long can you keep it? It is a state of tension. Soon you will find it is tiring, exhausting and in spite of you, your fist will open. There is a certain energy that is exhausted.
The open hand is relaxed; no energy is being spent. Tension is just like a fist -- too much energy is being spent. Soon, you will find yourself utterly exhausted and the tension will disappear. And in its wake, there will be deep relaxation.
This relaxation is the space in which happiness grows, and again I repeat: for no reason at all. It is not that you are happy because of something. You are simply happy.
Happiness is your nature.
Unhappiness is something nurtured, you have learned it. Every credit goes to you for all your misery, but for happiness, you cannot have any credit. It is natural. You were born happy.
You were happy in your mother's womb...
Sigmund Freud has a great insight; what he says comes very close to the truth. But he was only a thinker and not a meditator; that's why although he is very close to the truth, he misses the experience of truth himself.
It is his observation, objective observation, that the search for religion, the search for God, or the search for paradise is nothing but the search for the mother's womb -- because those nine months were sheer silence, utter joy, a peace that passeth understanding. And to us those are nine months, but to the child it is eternity, because the child knows no dates, no days, no weeks, no months, no calendar.
Each moment is so full of joy, and nine months... it is almost an eternity to the child.
Osho - The Hidden Splendor 221
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