Happiness means tremendous depth

Understand the very motivation of all ideas, thoughts, desires. It is a seed-like thing. Watch inside — why can’t you be here now? Why is it always that you are thinking of somewhere else? Why can’t you be happy as you are? Why are you thinking that tomorrow you will be happy? How can you be happy tomorrow if you are not happy today? Because tomorrow is going to be born out of this moment.

Today is a parent of tomorrow
If you are unhappy today, you will be more unhappy tomorrow. By that time you will have learned many more tricks to be unhappy. You are practising it, and you hope tomorrow to be happy? Then you are in a hopeless rut. You desire for tomorrow and you are continuously missing all that is here, and that is the only reality there is. If you can even for a single moment put aside desiring, then the projector stops, and the dreaming stops, and you are able to face reality.

Maturity happens when you start living without hope

Hope is childish. You become mature when you don’t project hope into the future. In fact, you are mature when you don’t have any future; you just live in the moment because that is the only reality there is. In the past, religion used to talk about the hereafter. Those were the childish, immature days of religion. Now religion talks about here now; religion has come of age.

The new religion of here now

Now another sort of religion is asserting itself all over the world, and this religion is about here-now. There is nowhere else to go and there is no other space and no other time to live, only this space and this time, here and now. Life has to become very intense in this moment. A man who lives in hope dissipates life. He spreads it too thin. Happiness means intensity, tremendous depth.

Drop hope and live intensely

When I say drop all hope, I mean be so intense in the moment that there is no need for the future. Then there is a turning, a transformation. The very quality of time changes for you it becomes eternal. What can you do with hope? In fact, what can you hope? You cannot hope for the new. You can only hope for the old, that which has happened before — maybe with a little modification here and there, a little more decorated.

But hope is nothing but past: you have lived something, you have experienced something, and you again and again hope for it. It is a repetition; it is circular.