That’s why I said I don’t want the contented man. That is false, pseudo, sick, retarded, believing in lies.

I teach contentment. And the basic principle of contentment is to drop your ego. Don’t think for a single moment, “To be or not to be.” Just not to be is the rule. What have you gained by trying to be? Just for a change try not to be, and you will be amazed. The moment you are not, there is contentment, there is silence, there is beauty, there is bliss.

Meditation is only a methodology to make you aware that your only disease is your ego, and your only health is egolessness.

The discontented man is suffering from his ego. He is comparing his ego with others. Somebody is more beautiful than you, somebody is stronger than you. Somebody is richer than you, somebody is more powerful than you. All around there are people who have something which you don’t have. You have to complete against the whole world – by any means, right or wrong, but you have to reach the top.

Sometimes I think of Edmund Hillary standing on the highest mountain, the Himalayan peak, Everest. There is not even space for two persons to stand together. And whenever I think of it, I think of poor Edmund Hillary. He must have looked silly. Now what to do? You have reached the top of the world, but what now? Jump and commit suicide.

Whatever you can attain, you will remain discontented.

Napoleon Bonaparte was not a very tall man, he was only five feet five inches. But I don’t see any problem. I am five feet five inches. I have tried to figure out why he was puzzled; I am not puzzled. Even if I were seven feet, my feet would touch the ground. At five-five they still touch the ground, so what is the problem? But Napoleon was very much disturbed, because his soldiers were taller than him, his bodyguards were taller than him. That was giving him a continuous feeling of inferiority.

One day it happened, he was trying to put a nail in the wall to hang a picture. His hand was not reaching to the right spot, and his bodyguard said, “Sir, you need not bother about it, I can do it – I am higher than you.”

Napoleon Bonaparte imprisoned that guard, and told him, “You used wrong language. You are taller than me, but not higher than me!” That poor guard had unconsciously used a word that touched a deep wound in Bonaparte. Bonaparte had everything, but discontent was there.

There are ordinarily two types of people in the world: the discontented and the repressed discontented. I need the third type of man to evolve: the man who has no ego; hence, he cannot be discontented.

Contentment is not something to be practiced. When discontent disappears, you find contentment has always been your nature.