A Ghost

My Identity

If you are simply smiling for no reason at all, people will think something is loose in your head – why are you smiling? Why are you looking so happy? And if you say “I don’t know, I am just being happy,” your answer will only strengthen their idea that something has gone wrong with you.

But if you are miserable nobody will ask why you are miserable. To be miserable is natural; everybody is. It is nothing special to you. You are not doing something unique.

Unconsciously this idea goes on settling in you, that misery is natural and blissfulness is unnatural.

Blissfulness has to be proved. Misery needs no proof. Slowly it sinks deeper into you – into your blood, into your bones, into your marrow – although naturally it is against you. So you have been forced to be a schizophrenic; something that is against your nature has been forced on you. You have been distracted from yourself into something which you are not.

This creates the whole misery of humanity, that everybody is where he should not be, what he should not be. And because he cannot be where he needs to be – where it is his birthright to be – he is miserable. And you have been in this state of going away from yourself farther and farther; you have forgotten the way back home. So wherever you are, you think this is your home – misery has become your home, anguish has become your nature. Suffering has been accepted as health, not as sickness.

And when somebody says, “Drop this miserable life, drop this suffering that you are carrying unnecessarily,” a very significant question arises: “This is all that we have got! If we drop it we will be no one, we will lose our identity. At least right now I am somebody – somebody miserable, somebody sad, somebody in suffering. If I drop all this then the question will be, what is my identity? Who am I? I don’t know the way back home, and you have taken away the hypocrisy, the false home that was created by society.”

Nobody wants to stand naked in the street.

It is better to be miserable – at least you have something to wear, although it is misery… but there is no harm, everybody else is wearing the same kind of clothes. For those who can afford it, their miseries are costly. Those who cannot afford it are doubly miserable – they have to live in a poor kind of misery, nothing much to brag about.

So there are rich miserable people and poor miserable people. And the poor miserable people are trying their hardest to reach somehow to the status of rich miserable people. These are the only two types available.

The third type has been completely forgotten. The third is your reality, and it has no misery in it.