"Unless you see it, you can go on trying to enjoy, but you will never enjoy. Those investments in misery have to be dropped. And from the very childhood everybody learns that misery pays. If you are miserable the parents are more loving. If you are ill the parents are more caring. If you are happy, healthy, nobody cares – you don't get attention. And attention is food for the ego; without the attention the ego cannot live – it is its very breath. Just as the body needs oxygen, the ego needs attention.

"Whenever you are healthy, happy, the parents don't pay any attention to you; there is no need. But when you are ill, miserable, crying, weeping, the whole family becomes attentive to your needs, as if you have created a kind of emergency. They drop all their work: the mother runs from the kitchen, the father drops his newspaper, and everybody is focused on you. It gives you great ego-fulfillment. And slowly, slowly you learn the way of the ego: remain miserable and people will pay attention to you, remain miserable and they will sympathize with you. And whenever you are enjoying, nobody sympathizes with you. That's why people pay so much respect to ascetic people. Somebody is fasting and people say, 'Look, what a great saint!' He is simply being miserable. If you are feasting, nobody is going to sympathize with you, but fast, and people sympathize.

"If you are in love with a woman, who is going to sympathize with you? On the contrary, people will be jealous. You are a competitor. They wanted the same woman themselves. You are an enemy. Renounce sex, become celibate, move to a cave, and people will come from faraway places to pay their respects – 'Here is a great ascetic' – and you are simply being miserable…but misery pays. Misery can make you a mahatma.

"That has been the whole history of humanity: misery has always paid, you have respected miserable people. And if the misery is self-inflicted, of course, you gain more respect; it is voluntary. Mahatma Gandhi became such a great name in the world because he was voluntarily miserable, inflicting misery upon himself."