Be choiceless, because if you choose, you become narrow. Life is infinite expanding energy. If a meditator chooses the life of a monk and escapes from the world, he will be poorer for that – because the world has many things to give to you. It is a tremendously beautiful device of existence – to help you grow, to give you challenges, to give you new adventures; to give you opportunities to test yourself, your awareness, your being.
If you escape from the world, you will be escaping from all these opportunities. Sitting in a cave in the Himalayas you will be very poor – you will not have richness of experience. And by and by you will become stupid. You will become silent – that's true – because there will be nothing to distract you. But that silence is of the Himalayas, it is not yours.
When silence happens in the marketplace, then it is yours – now nobody can take it away. You can remain anywhere; whatsoever the situation, your silence will remain there as a deep substratum to your being. It is inner.
Be in the world and yet be beyond it – so that you can have the experiences of both the worldly and the other-worldly. When both are possible, why choose? Make life as big as possible. Don't narrow it down. The earth is beautiful – as much as the sky.
Society is not interested in your bliss; society is interested in its own efficiency. Society is not bothered about whether you are ecstatic or not. Society wants you to be efficient mechanisms, robots. Do the work that society wants you to do, and then society is finished with you. What you do with your own being is none of its business. In fact, society doesn’t want you to do anything on your own because that can become a distraction from efficiency.
A man who is very happy cannot be so efficient. He is so bubbling with happiness that efficiency seems trivial. What does it matter whether you earn one thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars a month? If his needs are fulfilled, a happy man doesn't bother. He is not obsessed with money. His work is a need he has to fulfil. He enjoys it, but he is not obsessed with it.
Only unhappy people are perfectionists; only unhappy people are obsessed with their work – because that is the only way they can avoid facing themselves. They are continuously working late hours; they will go on working until they fall asleep. Why? They are afraid: if they stop work then what to do? Then they are left to themselves and they cannot face themselves.
Society is, of course, interested in specialists. And specialists become inhuman, because they know too much about too little. Their whole vision becomes narrow.
The specialist never sees the tree; he can only see the leaf. The whole is lost in the part. The specialist goes on dividing, and by and by those divisions, those demarcations, take on too much importance. A specialist becomes inhuman.
Society is not interested in your happiness, in your joy. The individual has totally different interests from society, because society has no soul. And if you become too much a part of society, it will also reduce your soul to a non-entity. Don't be a slave. Follow society to the point you feel is needed, but always remain master of your own destiny.