Contentment is containment

If you become pure life, it is very beautiful. If you become a life which is intense but enslaved to certain things, then you will be in a state where if good things happen you will laugh, if bad things happen you will cry. That is a deep state of enslavement to the situations in which you exist. The very nature of life is such that no one can control or manage the situations around them 100 per cent the way they want. So, if you remain in this state of enslavement, naturally you will have a dose of misery and a dose of joy. It depends on where you are placed and how life is.

Once life is like this, you fear misery. Even if misery is not there on a daily basis, you fear what will happen to you all the time. When you live in fear, can you also claim to be joyful? There may be moments when you forgot your fear, but as long as it is there, there is no question of joy. Every step that you take in your life is only half a step. It will never be a full step about anything.

Please see, people cannot do anything with abandon. They cannot sing with abandon, they cannot dance with abandon, they cannot work with abandon, they cannot run with abandon. There is no sense of freedom or abandon in them because fear rules everything. This is what you call contentment. The only reason people are asking for contentment is because they are scared of life.

Contentment means containment. Why would anybody want to contain his life? People teach philosophies of containment because they are afraid of life. They believe that you could overdo life. You cannot overdo life, you can only underdo it. Can you live or die too much? You can only live and die. If you have lived a life of contentment, that means you did not live, you contained your life. Does it mean to say I must be unbridled in greed?

That is not the point. The reason why the idea of greed and contentment has come into your mind is only because there is no strong experience of life. Greed has become a possibility in one's life only because somehow, their experience of life is not enough. They think their life will become fulfilled by accumulating things. What you call as greed is in pursuit of more life.

When you are stingy in your greediness, that is when you become just greedy. If you become absolutely greedy, then you become spiritual because what you call spirituality is you are not willing to settle for anything. You are not willing to settle for a piece of creation. You are looking for unlimited expansion and that is spirituality. You are seeking the infinite, that is spirituality. That is greed, isn't it? Greed unbounded.