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.

This sounds very pessimistic . . .  but if you look at humanity, it seems to be exactly the case, I say this to you on my own experience (no matter what you have been through). 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 that no tree, no bird, no star, has. They have CONSCIOUSNESS.

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 unhappiness is not their freedom; they have to be hppy. 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 toi be happy. 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. Humans are somehow standing on theirs heads.

            People are seeking meditation. Meditation is needed only because you have not chosen to be happy. If you have chosen to be happy there is no need for any meditation.

Meditation is medicinal: if you are ill then the medicine is needed. Once you have started choosing unhappiness, once you have decided that you will be happy, then no meditation is needed. Then meditation starts happening of its own accord. There are so many religions because so many people are unhappy. A happy person needs no religion; a happy person neds no temple, no church-because for a happy person the whole universe is a temple, the whole of existence is a church. Whatever you do has an intense splendor to it.

            Happiness happens when you fit with your life, when you fit so harmoniously that whatsoever you are doing is your joy. Then suddenly you will come to know that meditation follows you. If you love the work that you are doing, if you love the way that you are living, then you are meditative. Then nothing distracts you. When things distract you, that simply shows that you are not really interested in those things.

The teacher goes on telling small children “Pay attention to me! Be attentive!” They are attentive, but they are attentive to something else. A bird is singing with all its heart outside the school building – and the children are attentive to the bird. Nobody can say he is not attentive, nobody can say he is not meditative, nobody an say he is not in deep concentration – he is ! in fact, he has completely forgotten the teacher and the arithmetic that the teacher is doing on the board. The child is completely oblivious to all that, he is utterly possessed by the bird and its song. But the teacher says “Be attentive! What are you doing? Don’t be distracted!”  In fact, the teacher is distracting the child! The child is attentive – it is happening naturally. Listening to the bird he is happy. The teacher is distracting him, the teacher says, “You are not being attentive” – the teacher is simply lying! The child was attentive. The bird was more attentive to him, so what can he do? The teacher was not so attractive, the arithmetic had no appeal.

A real human being takes the courage to move with things that make him happy. If he remains poor he remains a poor; he has no complaint about it, he has no grudge. He says: ‘I have chosen my way – I have chosen the birds and the butterflies and the flowers. I cannot be rich that’s ok, that’s ok! I am rich because I am happy.”

• Wherever you see money, you are no longer yourself.
• Wherever you see power, prestige, you are no longer yourself.
• Wherever you see responsibility you are no longer yourself.

Immediately you forget everything – you forgot the intrinsic values of your life, your happiness, your joy, your delight. You always choose something from the outside and you bargain for it with something from the inside. You gain the without and you lose the within.

But what are you going to do? Even if you get the whole world at your feet and you have lost yourself, even if you have conquered all the riches of the world and you have lost you own inner treasure, what are you going to do with your riches? this is the misery.

If you can learn one thing, that one thing is to be alert, aware, about your own inner motives, about your own inner destiny. Never lose sight of it , otherwise you will be unhappy. And when you are unhappy, people will say: “meditate and you will become happy.” They say: “Pray and you will become happy; go the temple, be religious, be a Christian or a Hindu and you will be happy.” This is all non-sense. Be happy and meditation will follow.  Happiness is the basic condition.

Try to understand why you are unhappy. Many people come to me and say they are unhappy and they want me to give them some meditation. I say, first, the basic thing is to understand why you are so unhappy. I f you don’t remove those basic causes of your unhappiness, you can meditate but that is not going to help very much – because the basic causes will remain there.

Someone may have been a beautiful dancer and is sitting in an office, piling up files. “Give me some meditation to do “I can give it – but what is that meditation going to achieve? What is it supposed to do? They will remain the same person – accumulating money, competitive in the marketplace. The meditation may help in making them a little more relaxed, so that they can do this nonsense even better.

Hence, my approach is for those who are really daring, for the daredevils who are ready to change their very pattern of life, who are ready to stake everything- because in fact you don’t have anything to stake; only your unhappiness, your misery. But people cling even to that. 

Why did this idea arise in people’s minds that meditation brings happiness? In fact, wherever they found a happy person they always found a meditative mind. Whenever they found a beautiful, meditative milieu surrounding a person they always found the person was tremendously happy – vibrant with bliss, radiant. People thought happiness comes when you are meditative.

It is just the other way around: Meditation comes when you are happy. To be happy means a drastic change in your way of life – an abrupt change, a discontinuity with the past, you die to the old and you start afresh from ABC. You again start your life as you would have done if there had been no pattern enforced by your parents, by your society, by the state; as you would have done, must have done, if there had been nobody to distract you. But you were distracted.

You have to drop all those patterns/habits that have been forced on you, and you have to find your own inner flame.

The only responsibility you have is to be happy.

About Osho
Osho is a mystic who brings the timeless wisdom of the East to bear on the urgent questions facing men and women today. He speaks of the search for harmony and wholeness that lies at the core of all religious and spiritual traditions, illuminating the essence of Christianity, Hassidism, Buddhism, Sufism, Tantra, Tao, Yoga, and Zen.

Osho's vision is a new man. After his enlightenment in 1953, the evolution of that new man became his whole work. In 1963 he left the academic world where he had taught philosophy at the University of Jabalpur and began speaking to tens of thousands across India. He then focused intensely on developing practical tools for man's transformation. Modern man, he said, is so burdened with traditions of the past and anxieties of modern-day living, that he must go through a deep cleansing process before he can begin to discover the thought-free relaxed state of meditation.

In 1974, a commune was established around him in Poona, India, and a trickle of visitors from the West soon became a flood. Today this commune has become the largest spiritual-growth center in the world. Each year it attracts thousands of international visitors to its meditation, therapy, bodywork and creative programs.

In the course of his work, Osho speaks on virtually every aspect of the development of human consciousness. His talks cover a staggering range from the meaning of life and death to the struggles of power and politics; from the challenges of love and creativity to the significance of science and education.

Osho, who was born in India in 1931 and left his body in 1990, belongs to no tradition. He says, "My message is not a doctrine, not a philosophy. My message is a certain alchemy, a science of transformation."

Scientific information on Brain waves and happiness: You and Your Brain waves