People are living... not really living, just mechanically moving, victims of blind forces. When sex takes possession of you, you are not your own master. Or when greed takes possession, or anger, or jealousy, you are not your own master. You are being dragged. And it is very strange that you allow it to happen -- you don't feel insulted or humiliated! Each of your instincts makes you a slave. You not only tolerate this slavery; on the contrary, you enjoy it. On the contrary, you think this is what life is supposed to be. This is not life that you are living. It is biology, it is physiology, it is chemistry, but it is not life. To live under the influence of instincts is not to live at all.
Life begins only when you rise above your instincts. And the way to rise is: REFLECT, WATCH, and you will immediately know: NOTHING BINDS YOU. YOU ARE FREE. You are a master. In your watchfulness, slowly slowly, passions disappear, because a watchful person cannot be hot.
Desires are always leading you into the future. Desire means future; it can only happen tomorrow. So you go on looking at the tomorrow, and meanwhile the time is passing. And the tomorrow never comes; it can't come, in the very nature of things. So your whole life is just a waiting for nothing -- waiting for Godot! And Godot never comes. In fact, nobody knows who this Godot is.
But we go on waiting for something to happen some day, and we know that it has not happened to anybody. It didn't happen to your father, to your father's father. It has not happened to your neighbors. You can look around people's faces: it has not happened. You don't see the glow, you don't see in their eyes contentment, you don't see joy. You see only a desperate effort to achieve something which they are not really aware of, what exactly it is and whether it is possible or not. But they go on running in hot pursuit -- and they go on destroying their life.
"Grandma, how long have you and grandpa been married?" asked the romantic young granddaughter.
"Forty-nine years," replied the old lady.
"Ah, what a beautiful life you must have had," sighed the girl. "And I will bet you never even thought of a divorce."
"Well," said grandma, "divorce, no -- murder, yes!"
Just ask the old people what they have attained, what they have been doing. And if they are true and authentic, if they are sincere, they will tell you nothing but that "Life has been a tale told by an idiot, full of fury and noise, signifying nothing. And now comes death, and all is finished." But to a meditator, death is not the end but the beginning of a new life.
Buddha says: THIS IS YOUR LAST BODY. If you have quietened the mind, if you have become free from desire and passion: THIS IS YOUR LAST BODY. Now you will be born into a bodiless existence. Now you will be part of the invisible life, the eternal life which knows no birth, no death.
The body is a limitation, the body confines you. You are unlimited consciousness, but your body forces you into a small, dark hole. You live in a dark hole, in a dark cave. Of course, it is going to be miserable. You are vast and somehow you have been forced to live in a small space. Nobody has done it to you; you yourself go on doing it. Each time you die, you die with desires. Those desires bring you back into new wombs. Those desires give you another body.
If you can die without desires, then there is no longer any birth. When there is no birth there is no old age, no death. And when there is no birth there is no time. You go beyond time. You live in eternity, you become divine. That's what Buddha means by godliness -- BHAGAVATA.