Osho – Mind is misery and cannot be otherwise, because mind lives in desires, ambitions, it is always hankering for the more — and that hankering cannot be satisfied. It always goes on jumping ahead of you, wherever you would be, the mind will be asking for more. It is always ahead of you. The distance between you and the mind always remains the same. You have this much money, the distance is there. You can have that much money, the dame distance is there.

Mind is just like the horizon: it looks you can reach, it seems just few miles away, but by the time you have reached there it has gone ahead of you. it is moving with you. The distance remains constant, not even a single inch less. The beggar is in the same misery as the emperor, because the distance is the same.

And it is the distance that creates the misery because it is always frustration, always a wound. It hurts that “I have not been able to fulfil myself,” but nobody has ever been able to fulfil through the mind. Mind’s very texture consists of unfulfilment. Hence the people who teach peace of mind are doing simply something very absurd. Nothing like that has ever existed. It cannot exist. Peace of mind is a contradiction in terms.

One very famous Jewish thinker, Joshua Liebman has written a book. The title is PEACE OF MIND. It is a well-known book but from the very beginning it is absurd. Peace of mind is almost equivalent to saying “healthy disease”. Either you are healthy or you are not healthy, but one cannot be healthily sick. It is impossible.

Mind is sick. It is very sickness. One can get out of the mind, and that is what meditation is. Meditation is not peace of mind, it is transcendence of mind, and that distinction has to be remembered. Because the Christian priests, the Jewish rabbis, the Mohammedan priests, the Hindu priests, they all talk about peace of mind, and this is not the way the awakened ones have said.

The awakened ones are all agreed about one thing, that you have to go beyond mind, only then there is peace. In mind there is no peace. Mind is the turmoil, the noise. It is the very hell, but it can be transcended. Because we are not our mind, we are something totally different, so we can step over it, we can go beyond it, we can use it as a stepping stone, as a ladder.

The hell of the mind can become a ladder to the heaven of meditation-and that’s my whole work here: to use the mind in such a way that you can go beyond it. And once you have tasted even a single moment of that beyondness, of that transcendence, then everything becomes clear. Then one knows why there has been misery: it was the cause that was causing it.

The moment you are no more on the mind suddenly there is bliss. Not that you have to seek for it — it is already there — just we are so much engrossed in the mind that we cannot look at our own centre. At the centre there is absolute bliss and nothing else. It is waiting for us. All that is needed is a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. Right now our back is towards our centre and our face is toward the world — this is the state of mind.

Just the opposite is the state of meditation: when your back is towards the world and your face is towards your centre, suddenly you become aware of something that has always been there. You have not lost it even for a single moment. It is your very nature to be blissful. Meditation gives you only that which you have had always. It simply makes you aware of your reality. It does not bring anything new in. It simply reveals you the treasure that is lying there ignored and neglected, and you are running all over the world for it. You will not find it anywhere else because it is within you.

Mind is misery, meditation is bliss. Mind is misery because it takes you away from your nature and meditation is bliss because it brings you back to your nature, it brings you back home.

Source – Osho Book “Nirvana now or never”