Finding Quality in Life*

Very often people make the mistake of remembering only what is negative and forgetting everything that is positive. The basic mistake that people make is that they remember all that is worthless, negative, and they forget all that has any real value. Rarely will you remember the moment when you were full of love; you will rarely remember those moments when your body felt totally alive. You rarely remember those moments when you felt silent. But you will always remember the moments when you were angry and upset, the moments when you were insulted and when you took revenge on somebody. You will always remember the times when you were hurt but rarely the times which were nourishing to you. And it is very important for you to remember these nourishing moments.

To remember them continually will help you in two ways: Most importantly, remembering these moments will create a possibility for them to happen again. If someone constantly remembers the negative things, it is extremely likely that he will go through the same kind of experiences again. If someone constantly remembers sad things it is very likely that he will be sad again, because he will develop an inclination towards these things and these incidents will keep repeating in his life. All these feelings become stored inside you, and it becomes more and more easy for these emotions to repeat themselves again and again.

Try to observe in yourself the kind of emotions that you have a tendency to remember. We all have memories. What kind of experiences do you tend to remember? And remember also that whatever memories you have of the past, you are planting these as seeds for the future and you will reap the same experiences in the future. Your memories of the past pave the way for the future.

Consciously forget everything that is worthless – it does not have any value! And if you do remember such things, then stop yourself and ask those memories to go away. They are of no use to you. Forget all the thorns and remember the flowers. There may be many thorns, but there are also flowers around. If you remember the flowers the thorns in your life will disappear and your life will be filled with flowers. If you remember the thorns, it is possible that the flowers in your life will disappear and you will be left with only the thorns.

What we become depends on what memories we nourish because what we remember becomes part of us. When we think of something all the time, this thought brings about a change in us and it becomes our whole life. Hence, remember everything that you think is good and pure, whatever you think is important. And in life…nobody’s life is so miserable that there have been no moments of peace, happiness, beauty, love. And if remembering these moments gives you some strength, then it is possible that even when you are surrounded by darkness, the light inside you will be so strong that you will not see this darkness. It is possible that there may be sorrow all around you but you are carrying this experience of love, of beauty, of silence within you, so you don’t see all the sorrow. It is possible that in spite of being surrounded by thorns, a person may feel that he is surrounded by flowers. But the opposite of this is also possible – it all depends on you.

It depends on the individual to what heights he wants to reach. It depends on us whether we live in heaven or in hell. Heaven and hell are not geographical places, they are subjective, psychological states. Most of you are in hell many times in a day and many times you are in heaven. But most of you are in hell for the major part of the day, and some of you even forget the way back to heaven.

But there are also people who are in heaven for twenty-four hours a day. There are people on this same planet who are living in heaven. You too can be one of them. There is nothing to stop you. Just understand some basic, scientific principles.

* excerpt from OSHO. The Path of Meditation