LIVE IN JOY

Happiness is unbelievable. It seems that man cannot be
happy.
If you talk about your depression, sadness, misery,
everybody
believes it; it seems natural. If you talk about your
happiness
nobody believes you – it seems unnatural.
Sigmund Freud, after forty years of research into the
human mind
-- working with thousands of people, observing thousands of
disturbed minds -- came to the conclusion that happiness is a
fiction: man cannot be happy. At the most, we can make things a
little more comfortable, that’s all. At the most we can make
unhappiness a little less, that’s all, but happy? Man cannot be.

Looks very pessimistic… but looking at humanity, it seems to be
exactly the case; it seems to be a fact. Only human beings are
unhappy. Something deep down has gone wrong.
I say this to you on my own authority: Human beings can be happy,
more happy than the birds, more happy than the trees, more
happy than the stars – because human beings have something
which no tree, no bird, no star, has. They have consciousness.
But when you have consciousness, two alternatives are possible:
either you can become happy or you can become unhappy. Then it
is your choice. Trees are simply happy because they cannot be
unhappy. Their happiness is not their freedom; they have to be
happy. They don’t know how to be unhappy; there is no
alternative for them. The birds chirping in the trees are happy
not because they have chosen to be happy – they are simply
happy because they don’t know any other way to be. Their
happiness is unconscious; it is simply natural.
Human beings can be tremendously happy and tremendously
unhappy – and they are free to choose. This freedom is hazardous
, this freedom is very dangerous because you become responsible.
And something has happened with this freedom, something has
gone wrong. Man is somehow standing on his head.