Pain and pleasure go together like night and day, like birth and death…OSHO

Sannyas has to be a real break away. A loving surrender to the new....

Pain and pleasure go together like night and day, like birth and death...

You love a woman or you love a man, and when the woman is with you you are happy. Now, you would like to be happy whenever she is with you, but when she goes away you don't want the pain. If you are REALLY happy with a woman when she is with you, how can you avoid the pain of separation when she is gone and she is no longer there?

You will miss her, you will feel the absence. The absence is bound to become pain. If you really want that you should not have any pain, then you should start avoiding all pleasure.

Then when the woman is there don't feel happy; just remain sad, just remain unhappy — so that when she goes, there is no problem.

If somebody greets you and you feel happy, then when somebody insults you you will feel unhappy. This trick has been tried. This has been one of the most basic tricks that all of the so-called religious people have tried: if you want to avoid pain, avoid pleasure.

But then what is the point? If you want to avoid death, avoid life — but then what is the point of it all? You will be dead. Before death, you will be dead. If you want to be perfectly secure, enter into your grave and lie down there.

You will be perfectly secure. Don't breathe, because if you breathe there is danger… because there are all sorts of infections, particularly in Poona. Never breathe in Poona; you breathe infections. A million diseases exist all around you; how can you breathe?

the air is polluted. There is danger, so don't breathe, don't move… just don't live. Commit suicide; then there will be no pain. But then why are you searching for it? You want no pain and all pleasure. You demand something impossible: you want that two plus two should not be four. You want them to become five, or three, or anything, but never four. But they are four. Whatever you do, howsoever you deceive yourself and others, they will remain four.

Pain and pleasure go together like night and day, like birth and death, like love and hate. In a better world, with a more developed language, we will not use words like 'hate' and 'love', 'anger', 'compassion', 'day', 'night'.

We will make some words which will carry both together: 'lovehate' — one word; 'daynight' — one word, not two; 'birthdeath' — one word, not two; 'painpleasure' — one word, not two. The language creates an illusion.

In language pain is separate, pleasure is separate. If you want to look in the dictionary for 'pain', you have to look for 'pain'; 'pleasure' will be separate.

You want to look for 'pleasure', then you have to look for 'pleasure'. But in reality pain and pleasure are together, just as your right and left hands are together, just as two wings of a bird are together. The dictionary creates a great illusion; language is a very great source of illusions.

OSHO