“Life is a mystery, and the first mysterious thing about life is you can be alive and you may not have life at all. Just being born is not enough to have life. To be born is just an opportunity. You can use it to have life, and you can miss it also. Then you will live a dead life. It will only apparently look like life, but deep down there will be no alive current in you.

      “Life has to be attained; one has to work for it. It is like a seed in you: it needs much effort, soil, the right soil, care, love, awareness. Only then does the seed sprout, only then is there the possibility someday the tree will bear fruit, someday it will flower. Unless you reach the state of flowering, you are alive just in name, but you have missed the opportunity. Unless life becomes a celebration, it is not life at all.

      “Ecstasy, nirvana, enlightenment, whatever you want to call it – that is the flowering. If you remain miserable, you are not alive. The very misery shows you have missed the step. The very misery is an indication life is struggling within to explode, but the cocoon is too hard. The shell of the seed is not allowing it to come out; the ego is too strong and the doors are closed. Misery is nothing but this struggle of life to explode into millions of colors, into millions of rainbows, into millions of flowers, into millions of songs.

      “Misery is a negative state. In fact, misery is only the absence of ecstasy. This has to be understood deeply, otherwise you will start fighting with misery, and nobody can fight with an absence. It is just like darkness: you cannot fight with darkness. If you fight, you are simply being stupid. You can light a candle and the darkness disappears, but you cannot fight with the darkness. With what will you fight? “Darkness is not existential, it is not there. It is not something you can throw out, kill, or beat out. You cannot do anything to darkness. If you do something, your own energies will be dissipated and darkness will remain there just the same, unaffected. If you want to do something with darkness, you have to do something with light, not with darkness at all. You have to light a candle, and suddenly there is no darkness.

      “Misery is like darkness; it is nothing existential. And if you start fighting with misery, you can go on fighting with it but more misery will be created. It is just an indication, a natural indication to your being that life is still struggling to be born. The candle is not yet lit, hence the misery. The absence of ecstasy is misery, and something can be done for ecstasy, but nothing can be done with misery. You are miserable and you go on trying to solve it. Here, on this point, the path of a religious and an irreligious man divide, they separate. The irreligious man starts fighting the misery, trying to create situations in which he will not be miserable, starts pushing the misery somewhere out of his eyes, out of his vision. The religious man starts seeking ecstasy, starts seeking the blissfulness, starts seeking sat-chit-anand – or you may call it God. The irreligious person fights with the absence, the religious person tries to bring the existential: the presence of light, of bliss.” Osho