According to Osho, if you can’t live without misery it’s because misery sustains your ego: it defines you, is familiar, and can be possessed and controlled. Bliss can’t be possessed; it dissolves the controller—when thinking stops, the ‘I’ vanishes. You cling to suffering because of hidden investments (attention, sympathy). Freedom comes only by risking ego-death—letting go of control and allowing bliss to possess you.
We hold onto pain because it proves we’re a ‘somebody,’ but real joy comes when we stop clinging and let that somebody fade.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Why can I not live without misery?
You are miserable because you have decided to be miserable -- maybe the decision is unconscious. And you have to be conscious about the decision, only then can it be dropped. Because nothing can be dropped from the unconscious. The unconscious is a great preserver, it preserves everything. Once you make anything unconscious it will be preserved for ever and ever unless you make it conscious again and throw it. Your unconscious is a basement where you never go, and you always go on throwing things in the basement. Whenever you are miserable you repress it. Your eyes may be full of tears but you try to smile -- you throw those tears into the unconscious. You may be boiling with anger but you go on repressing the anger, the sexuality, the greed. You go on throwing all this into the basement, and there all these things are creating a…
Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHY DO I CLING TO MY MISERY? WHY CAN I NOT DROP IT? All the stones on your path can become stepping stones. They need not hinder you, you just have to know that they are steps. Look into your suffering, find out that good and bad are all together there. You cannot separate them, so the question of dropping does not arise. You have to use them together -- not as opposites, but as complementaries. And that is possible. Even poison can be used as medicine -- it is used. In fact, on most of the medicines you will find written: POISON -- in red letters. Poison is to kill, but by understanding it you can use it to save somebody who is dying. But if you are foolish, even nectar will kill you; you may drink too much of it.
Bliss is simple, misery is complex. Bliss is natural, misery is unnatural. To main the unnatural you have to put all your energy into it -- to be natural you need not put any energy into it. But millions of people are miserable, and it is very rare to find a person who is not. So what has happened? It is simple. To understand it is of immense significance. It is only through misery that the ego can exist, because you have to make an effort and you have to be constantly into it, creating it, maintaining it. Then the ego can remain. And if one loves the ego, then misery is necessary to keep the ego alive. In a state of bliss ego disappears because there is nothing left to do and ego can exist only as a doer.
When life itself is so fulfilling, overflowing, so blissful, then what is that which makes a man miserable?
So an egoist remains miserable, because to be happy one has to be happy with that which one has. You cannot be happy with that which you don't have; you can only be unhappy with that. You can be happy only with that which you have. How can you be happy with that which you don't have? And ego is always interested only in that which you don't have. You have ten thousand rupees -- ego is no more interested in it. It is interested in twenty thousand. By the time you have twenty thousand, it is no more interested in it. It is interested only in thirty thousand. And so on, so forth... it goes on. The ego only gives you goals, but whenever those goals arrive, it does not allow you to celebrate. One becomes more and more miserable! As life passes, we go on gathering misery, we…
Osho, I once read somewhere that when buddha was asked by a disciple to describe life briefly, the buddha replied 'misery'. Is this true?
What is misery? Misery is feeling separate from existence, feeling isolated from existence, feeling alienated from existence -- that is misery. And what is bliss? Feeling one with existence, orgasmically one with existence, organically one with existence. Having an ego is misery, and becoming egolessness is bliss. Both alternatives are open. The choice is yours. Zareen, listening to Buddha's answer that life is misery, don't settle there. His answer is to unsettle you. His answer is to shock you. His answer is to wake you up to the fact that your life is misery. But people are really cunning, very cunning; they listen only to that which they want to listen to. People are so cunning that listening to the statement that life is misery, they say, ''Then nothing can be done. If life is misery, then I have to live a miserable life, then this is all there is…