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.

Real joy comes from within

Joy is not happiness, because happiness is always mixed with unhappiness. It is never found in purity, it is always polluted. It always has a long shadow of misery behind it. Just as day is followed by night, happiness is followed by unhappiness.

Joy is a state of transcendence

Then what is joy? Joy is a state of transcendence. One is neither happy nor unhappy, but utterly peaceful, quiet, in absolute equilibrium; so silent and so alive that his silence is a song, that his song is nothing but his silence. Joy is forever; happiness is momentary. Happiness is caused by the outside, hence can be taken away from the outside — you have to depend on others. And any dependence is ugly, any dependence is a bondage. Joy arises within, it has nothing to do with the outside. It is not caused by others, it is not caused at all.

Joy is the spontaneous flow of your own energy

If your energy is stagnant there is no joy. If your energy becomes a flow, a movement, a river, there is great joy — for no other reason, just because you become more fluid, more flowing, more alive. A song is born in your heart, a great ecstasy arises.

It is a surprise when it arises, because you cannot find any cause for it. It is the most mysterious experience in life: something uncaused, something beyond the law of cause and effect. It need not be caused because it is your intrinsic nature, you are born with it. It is you in your totality, flowing.

The flow is always towards the ocean

Whenever you are flowing, you are flowing towards the ocean. That is the joy: the dance of the river moving towards the ocean to meet the ultimate beloved. When your life is a stagnant pool you are simply dying. But when you are flowing, the ocean is coming closer every moment, and the closer the river comes, the more dance there is, the more ecstasy there is.

Your consciousness is a river

It is a continuity, an eternal continuity, an eternal flow. Buddha has never thought about you and your being as something static. In his vision, the word "being" is not right. According to him, being is nothing but becoming. He denies being; he accepts becoming, because being gives you a static idea of something inside you like a rock. Becoming gives you a totally different idea: like a river, like a lotus opening, like a sunrise. Something is constantly happening. You are not sitting there like a rock, you are growing.

Unselfish work

This world is not for cowards. do not try to fly. Look not for success or failure. Join yourself to the perfectly unselfish will and work on.Know that the mind whic h is born to succed joins itself to a determined will and perseveres.You have the right to work,but do not become so degenerate as to look for results. Work incessantly, but see something behind the work. Even good deeds can find a man in great bondage.Therefore be not bound by good deeds can find a man in great boundage.Therefore be nor bound by good deeds or by desire for fame.Those who know this secret pass beyond this round of birth and death and become immortal.