Hardship is never in the body, you must understand this. Hardship is in your mind
Something is hard because you are doing something that you don't want to do
There is no such thing as hardship for the body. Suppose you have to carry 50
kilograms on your head and walk every day to your office, let's say that's your
job, 10 miles If you become fit enough for that and if
you and your colleagues, everybody walking with 50 kilograms on your head
and walking, you will walk, it will not be hard. It's just that you see somebody
else driving a car and going away. Now it becomes hard
Very hard. That too somebody you do not like. When you try to create
comfort, everybody seeks hardship. For example, after the world War II, United
States of America must have spent.. i do not know the numbers, but must have spent
at least two hundred billion dollars to build the highways. Mm? I don't know the
number, it could be in that range, length and breadth of the country. But today you
see, people are spending over a billion dollars to buy off-road vehicles.
Every seventh or eighth vehicle probably at least one in ten vehicles is an SUV
They may not go off-road, many of them, but somewhere, they want to go and there are
whole lot of other really rough off-road vehicles which people are doing which is
very hard. So comfort is not what you are seeking. What you are seeking is a deeper
experience of life, always. You can seek this either consciously or unconsciously
Right now in a given society, if somebody sets it up that having this kind of
an automobile is the best experience, now you are aspiring for that. In another
society, if somebody says walking up the mountain is the greatest experience that
you can have, everybody wants to walk up the mountain. Yes or No? You are looking for a
bigger experience. Living better does not mean more things. Living better just
means that your experience of life has evolved into something more pleasant and
fantastic. No? No.. just a little longer car, little bigger house, this has become
living better unfortunately. If you don't change this, your life is
anyway gone, you will destroy the life of future generations because your idea of
living better is bloody eating up the planet. Is it? There will be nothing left.
If your experience of life does not become more beautiful
what is the use of all the beautification that you are doing to
yourself from outside and around you? What is the use of building huge mega
cities and comfort and this and that when people are miserable. I mean what's
the point? It doesn't serve any purpose
Now everybody wants to go back to nature. Very expensive vacations they are having
Safari in Africa you know, so this is because we have set a wrong precedent
and it's in the hands of this generation to turn that precedent around and bring
it to a sensible level. Otherwise, the planet cannot sustain more than another
one or two or three generation