Understand one thing: if there is sadness in his life, a man contracts, he closes. He wants no one to see him, no one to meet him; he wants no one, not even his friends or companions, to come near him. He wants to sit in aloneness somewhere, to confine himself in some cave, with all the doors and windows closed. A sad man wants to close himself from all sides. Sadness is a constriction, a narrowing.

When you are sad you don’t want anyone to talk to you, to speak to you. Even if someone expresses his sympathy it feels like a disturbance. When you are really sad even words of sympathy are nothing but an irritation. A loved one has died and you are surrounded by clouds of sorrow. When someone comes to console you, to offer you encouragement, it all sounds empty, meaningless. When he talks comfortingly of the soul being immortal, that there is no need to be sad, that no one really dies, and so on, he feels like an enemy. Sorrow wants to close in on itself from all sides like a seed. It wants to shrink.

Bliss is exactly the opposite. Just as one shrinks in sorrow, one expands in bliss. When bliss happens, a person wants to expand far and wide – to the farthest reaches of the winds, to the very ends of the skies – so that he can share what he has received. It is like when a flower blooms – its fragrance reaches far and wide. And when a lamp is lit, rays of light spread all around. In the same way, when the phenomenon of bliss happens it begins to share itself. If your bliss remains confined within you, then understand that it was not bliss, because the very nature of bliss is sharing, expanding.

That is why we have given the ultimate name to existence: brahman. Brahman means that which keeps on expanding. The word brahman has the same root as expansion and growth. It means that which goes on expanding, without limit. There is no point of limitation, it goes on expanding.

Only now, in this century, have the astronomers and physicists been able to say that the universe is an expanding reality. Before that, there was no such idea in the West. The theory was that no matter how big the universe might be, it had boundaries, limits; it was not expanding indefinitely. But with Einstein, a new theory has come into being, and this theory is very significant because it comes very close to the concept of brahman.

Einstein has said that this universe is boundless, that it is forever expanding. Just as your chest expands when you inhale, in the same way the universe is also expanding. There seems to be no end to its expansion – and it goes on expanding at a tremendous speed.

But this theory is a very ancient theory in India. We have given the ultimate truth the name brahman. Brahman means that which goes on expanding, infinitely expanding – that which has no boundary, which has no point where its expansion stops. And we have called the intrinsic nature of brahman, bliss. So bliss is an ever-expanding phenomenon. Bliss is brahman.

And the day bliss happens in your life, you won’t be miserly. Only sad people are miserly. Try to understand this. It is so in all dimensions.