What I see is: people go on thinking that they want to be happy, but what can they do? — they are being forced to be miserable.
This is absolutely absurd. Nobody is forcing anybody — nobody can force anybody — to be miserable.
A man who knows how to be happy becomes happy in any sort of situation.
You cannot give him any situation in which he will not find something to be happy about.
And there are persons who have learnt the trick of being unhappy. You cannot give them any situation in which they will not find something to be unhappy about.
Whatsoever you want to find, you will find. Life goes on supplying all sorts of things to you.
You choose!
I have heard……….
Two men were imprisoned. It was a full-moon night; both were standing near the window of their dark cell. The full moon was there. One was looking at the moon, and it was the rainy season — must have been like these days — and there was much water and mud just in front of the window. Dirty, and it was smelling and stinking.
One man continued to look at the moon, the other continued to look at the mud. And the man who was looking at the mud, of course, was feeling very miserable. And the man who was looking at the moon was aflame, aglow; his face was reflecting the moon; his eyes were full of beauty. He had completely forgotten that he was imprisoned.
BOTH are standing at the same window, but they are choosing different things. There are people: if you take them to a rosebush they will count the thorns; they are great calculators — their mathematics is always right.
And when they have counted thousands of thorns, it is simply logical that they will not be able to see the one roseflower. In fact, their inner world will say, "How is it possible? — amidst so many thorns, how is a roseflower possible? It must be a deception, it must be illusory. Or even if it is possible, it is worthless."
Then there are people who have never known the thorns of a rosebush — they look at the rose. And looking at the rose, feeling the rose, the beauty of it, celebrating the moment, they come to feel that even thorns are not so thornlike. "How can they be when they are growing on the same rosebush as the roseflower?"
When their mind is focused on the roseflower, they start looking at thorns also in a different way: they start thinking that thorns are there to protect the roseflower. They are no longer ugly, they are no longer irrelevant; they are no longer anti — a positive attitude arises.
It is up to you to make whatsoever you want out of your life. An enlightened consciousness makes even death beautiful. An unenlightened consciousness makes even life ugly. For an enlightened consciousness, only beauty exists — only beauty; only bliss exists — only bliss.
So the question is not how to change ugliness into beauty, how to change pain into pleasure, how to change misery into happiness. No. The question is how to change the unconscious into conscious, the unenlightened attitude into the enlightened attitude — how to change your inner world of being, how to attain to life-affirmative values and drop life-negative values.
OSHO