"Look at people's faces, or at your own face in a mirror, and you will feel you are the most bored, and it seems impossible that there can be someone else who is more bored than you. The whole life seems to be a long boredom – dry, dreary, meaningless; somehow you are carrying it as a burden.

"Why has this happened? Life is not meant to be a boredom. Life is not meant to be a suffering. Life is a festival, a celebration, a peak of joy – but that is only in poetry, in dreams, in philosophies. Sometimes a Buddha, a Krishna, appears to be in a deep celebration, but they look like exceptions. Really, unbelievable; not real, just ideal. It seems they never happen. They are our wish-fulfillments, myths, dreams and hopes, but not realities. The reality seems to be our face – bored, in anguish, and with suffering impressed on it – and the whole life is just a 'carrying on anyhow.'

"Why has this happened? And this must not be the basic reality of life, this cannot be, because this happens only to man. The trees, the stars, the animals, the birdsnowhere else does it happen. Except for man, no one is bored. And even if sometimes pain happens, it is momentary; it never becomes an anguish. It never becomes a constant obsession; it is not always on the mind. It is a momentary thing, an accident; it is not carried over.

"Animals can be in pain, but they are not in suffering. Pain looks like an accident; they get over it. They don't carry it. It doesn't become a wound. It is forgotten and forgiven. It goes into the past; it never becomes a part of the future. When pain becomes a constant thing, a wound, not an accident but a reality, essential, as if you cannot exist without it, then it becomes a problem – and that problem has arisen only for the human mind.

"Trees are not in suffering. There seems to be no anguish. Not that death doesn't occur to them; death occurs, but it is not a problem. Not that painful experiences are not there; they are there, but they don't become life itself."