Everything has to be changed just to feel that you are alive. A hectic search for life.
Move from one wife to another, move from one job to another,
move from one neighborhood to another, move from one town to another.
Of course, life is a movement, but not from one place to another; it is a movement from one state to another.
It is a deep inward movement from one consciousness to another consciousness, to the higher realms of being.
Just the other night I was talking to a friend. He is a very educated man, cultured — has moved all over the world, has lived in the Soviet Union and the UK and the United States, has been to China, and this and that. Listening to him I felt he is completely dead! And then he asked me, 'What solution would you suggest? — because life has so many sufferings and miseries, so many injustices, so many things that hurt you. How to live life so that you don't feel hurt, so that life cannot create so many wounds in your being — what to do?'
So I told him there are two ways: one — which is easier but at a very great cost — one is to become dead, to become as insensitive as possible. … Because if you are insensitive, if you grow a thick skin around you, an armor, then you don't bother much, nobody can hurt you. Somebody insults you and you have such a thick skin that it never enters. There is injustice, but you simply never become aware of it.
This is the mechanism of your deadness. If you are more sensitive, you will be hurt more. Then every small thing will become a pain, a misery, and it will be impossible to live — and one has to live. There ARE problems, and there are millions of people — there is violence all around, there is misery all around. You pass through the street and beggars are there; you have to be insensitive otherwise it will become a misery, a heavy weight on you. Why these beggars? What have they done to suffer this? And somehow deep down you will feel: I am also responsible.
You have chosen not to suffer, so you are closed. You may not be suffering but your life is a boredom, because although you don't suffer as much as you will suffer if you are open, there is no blessing either. The door is closed — no morning, no sun, no moon enters, no sky enters, no fresh air, everything has gone stale. And in fear you are hiding there. It is not a house where you are living; you have already converted it into a grave. Your cities are graveyards, your houses are graves. Your whole way of life is that of a dead man.
Courage is needed to be open — courage to suffer, because blessing only becomes possible then.
OSHO
