Sympathizing With Happiness, Not Misery

A blissful person is holy

"Look into your misery and you will find certain fundamental things are there. One: it gives you respect. People feel more friendly towards you, more sympathetic. You will have more friends if you are miserable. This is a very strange world, something is fundamentally wrong with it. It should not be so, the happy person should have more friends. But become happy and people become jealous of you, they are no more friendly. They feel cheated; you have something that is not available to them. Why are you happy? So we have learned down the ages a subtle mechanism: to repress happiness and to express misery. It has become our second nature.

More attention for happy people

Meditators have to drop this whole mechanism. You have to learn how to be happy and to respect happy people. And you have to learn to pay more attention to happy people, remember. This is a great service to humanity.

Don't sympathize too much with people who are miserable. If somebody is miserable, help, but don't sympathize. Don't give him the idea that misery is something worthwhile. Let him know perfectly well that you are helping him, but "This is not out of respect, this is simply because you are miserable." And you are not doing anything but trying to bring the man out of his misery, because misery is ugly. Let the person feel that the misery is ugly, that to be miserable is not something virtuous, that "You are not doing a great service to humanity."

Three qualities of godliness:
truth, consciousness, bliss

Be happy, respect happiness, and help people to understand that happiness is the goal of life. The Eastern mystics have said godliness has three qualities. He is sat: he is truth, being. He is chit: consciousness, awareness. And, ultimately, the highest peak is anand: bliss. Wherever bliss is, godliness is. Whenever you see a blissful person, respect him, he is holy. And wherever you feel a gathering which is blissful, festive, think of it as a sacred place.

Learning the language of health

We have to learn a totally new language, only then this old rotten humanity can be changed. We have to learn the language of health, wholeness, happiness. It is going to be difficult because our investments are great."

Osho, excerpted from The Book of Wisdom #20

---

No time to meditate?

Subscribe Meditation Seconds

---

Misery and suffering are not to be sympathized with, suggests Osho in this quote on relating. A happy person is a holy person. Help misery to dissolve but don't sympathize. Learn to put more attention to happy people.