“Life can find you only in one way; only in one way can it find you, and that is your inner flowering – as it wanted you to be.

     “Unless you find your spontaneity, unless you find your element, you cannot be happy. And if you cannot be happy, you cannot be meditative.

     “Why did the idea that meditation brings happiness arise in people’s minds? In fact, wherever they found a happy person they always found a meditative mind; both things got associated. Whenever they found the beautiful meditative milieu surrounding a man, they always found he was tremendously happy, vibrant with bliss, radiant. They became associated. They thought, “Happiness comes when you are meditative.” It is just the other way round: meditation comes when you are happy.

     “But to be happy is difficult and to learn meditation is easy. To be happy means a drastic change in your way of life, an abrupt change because there is no time to lose. A sudden change, a sudden clash of thunder, a discontinuity. That’s what I mean by sannyas: a discontinuity with the past.

     “A sudden clash of thunder, and you die to the old and you start afresh, from ABC. You are born again. You start your life again as you would have done if there had been no enforced pattern 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 that have been forced on you, and you have to find your own inner flame.

     “Don’t be too concerned about money because that is the greatest distraction against happiness. And the irony of ironies is that people think they will be happy when they have money. Money has nothing to do with happiness. If you are happy and you have money, you can use it for happiness. If you are unhappy and you have money, you will use that money for more unhappiness because money is simply a neutral force.” Osho