In youth, everyone is in a flood, and then the whole outlook is tinged and coloured by the ego. Then you walk, then you talk, behave, relate, but everything is tinged, coloured, by the ego. Much misery of course happens because you are thinking yourself to be that which you are not, and you are believing in the shadow. Soon the flood will recede, the autumn is not going to be forever. You will become old, torrents will not fall into you, streams will become dry, banks will appear, summer will come, and this vast looking Yellow River will become just a tiny stream. You may become just a dry bed of sand and nothing else.
It happens in old age. Then one feels very irritated, cheated -- as if existence has been cheating you. Nobody has cheated you, you simply magnified yourself foolishly. Your own ego created the whole problem -- now you feel cheated. You cannot find a man who is old and yet happy. If you can find one, live with him -- he is a wise man. You can find happy young men, that is nothing. If you can find a happy old man, that is something. When the summer has come and the autumn flood is no more and an old man is happy, then he has known something else: he has found some eternal source.
When you are young, you have a dance in your feet -- that is nothing, it is just the flood. When you are old and everything has been taken back, nobody even remembers you, nobody bothers about you; you are simply neglected, out of the way, thrown away like rubbish, garbage, and you are still happy....
Buddha has said that when you find an old man as happy as a youth, there is something there -- bow down to him, listen and learn from him. In India, it was the tradition that whenever we found an old man happy, dancing, we would make him a master. He would move to the forest, he would create a small university around him -- A GURUKUL, a household of the master -- and disciples would start pouring in from all over the country.
In India we have never made a young man a teacher. Only an old man can be a teacher, and that is right. Exceptions may happen, but generally it is right. Only an old man can be a teacher, one who has lived through all seasons of life, who is seasoned and still happy and blissful. To be in flood and happy is nothing special, it is ordinary, but to be happy and ecstatic when the stream is almost dry, when only sands are left, when one's whole body is just a ruin.... To be alive at the peak of life and to dance is nothing. But when death comes near and you go dancing to meet it, then it is something. Then the rare has happened, the extraordinary has entered into the world of the ordinary, then the Divine has penetrated.
If you are happy because you are young you will not be happy for long, soon your happiness will be shattered. And if you can become aware before it is shattered, it is good. This is the beauty: if you can become sad while you are young, you will be happy when you become old. Otherwise you will become sad because now this is just a flood. If you look at it, it is not you; it is the thousand torrents falling into you that is giving you the impression that you are vast. Soon that which is given to you will be taken, and if you can be happy when everything is taken only then is your happiness unshakeable. Then your happiness has become bliss. This is the difference between happiness and bliss.
Every old man, all old persons start looking backwards. Old people always go into memories, the days when they were something, somebody, the days when they were loved and respected and honoured. They go on again and again. Just listen to old men and you feel they are very boring. Why do you feel they are boring? Why do you feel irritated? Because they go on repeating the same story of the old days. Always they start in the good old days. Why the good? Why aren't the days good now? No old man can believe that the days are good now -- they were always in the past, the golden past, the good old days when things were like this and that. This is not a question of things, or economic situations or political situations -- nothing. They were young and everything was good. They were flooded. It happened that a chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States went to visit Paris after he was retired. He had been once before, thirty years before. His old wife was also with him. Looking at Paris for two or three days, he became very sad and he said: We were waiting for this, to come and see Paris, but nothing looks like it was before. The wife laughed and said: Everything is as it was before, only we are not young. Paris remains the same.
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