Everybody seeks, searches for bliss, and almost everybody succeeds in finding just the opposite. I say “almost” because a few people have to be left out of the account – a Buddha, a Zarathustra, a Lao Tzu, an Atisha. But they are so few and far between; they are exceptions, they only prove the rule. So I say almost everybody who searches for bliss finds misery and suffering. People try to enter into heaven, and by the time they have arrived suddenly they recognize the fact that it is hell.
There must be a great misunderstanding somewhere. The misunderstanding is that those who seek pleasure will find sorrow – because pleasure is only a camouflage; it is sorrow hiding itself behind a curtain. It is a mask – tears hiding behind smiles, thorns waiting for you behind flowers. Those who see it, and everybody can see it because it is obvious…so, everybody comes to experience it again and again. But man is the animal who never learns.
Aristotle has defined man as a rational being. That is sheer nonsense! Man is the most irrational being you can find anywhere. Man can be rational, but is not. It is not the definition of man as he is, it is the definition of man as he should be. A Buddha, yes; a Mohammed, yes – they are rational beings, rational in the sense that they live intelligently, they live wisely, they use each single opportunity to grow, to mature, to be. But as far as millions of human beings are concerned, ninety-nine point nine percent of people, they are not rational beings at all, they are utterly irrational.
Their first irrationality is that they pass through the same experience again and again, yet they learn nothing, they remain the same. How many times have you been angry, and what have you learned from it? How many times have you been jealous, and what experience have you gained from it? You go on moving through experiences without in any way being affected by them. You remain un-grownup; your way of life is very irrational, unintelligent.
The intelligent person will be able to see easily that, seeking pleasure, all that is found is sorrow. And what are those pleasures in fact? Very spurious ones. Somebody wants to make a big house, and how much trouble he takes and how much suffering he goes through and how many anxieties and how many nervous breakdowns…
They say that if you are really a successful person you are bound to have a heart attack somewhere between forty-two and forty-eight. If you don’t have a heart attack before you are fifty your life is wasted, you are a failure; you have not tried to succeed, you have not been ambitious enough. Ambitious people are bound to have heart attacks; the more ambitious will have nervous breakdowns.
If you don’t need the psychiatrist, that simply means you have not used your mind in the ways of ambition. And the whole society is geared towards ambition, the whole educational system produces only ambitious minds. That means potential patients for the psychotherapist. It seems as if there is a conspiracy – that the whole educational system only creates people for doctors, for priests, for psychotherapists.