Love and Happiness: Spread Happiness To Connect Effectively

By Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev

You deal with people and situations effectively only when you are happy. Otherwise, in your unhappiness, it won't matter what good intentions you have, you will only spread misery in the world. Being happy or unhappy is actually your choice.

People have chosen to be unhappy because they think that by being unhappy they will get something. Once you are unhappy, whatever you get, what does it matter? If you are happy, if you don't get anything, what does it matter? This is not a philosophy; this is your true nature.

By nature you want to be happy. Every creature wants to be happy. Everything that you are doing, every single act you are performing is in pursuit of happiness in some way.

Why would you want to serve people? Serving people gives you happiness; that is why. Somebody wants to wear good clothes; somebody wants to make a lot of money, because that gives them happiness.

Whatever every human being is doing on this planet, it does not matter what, even if he is giving away his life to somebody, he is doing it because it gives him happiness. So happiness is the fundamental goal of life. Why do you want to go to heaven? Only because you've been told that if you go to heaven, you will be happy.

After doing all that you are doing, if happiness is not happening, somewhere you have missed the ABCs of life, the fundamentals. When you were a child, you were simply happy.

Without doing anything, you were happy. Then somewhere along the way, you lost this. Why did you lose it? You got deeply identified with many things around you, your body, your mind.

What you call your mind is actually just the stuff you have picked up from social situations around you. The kind of mind you have depends on the kind of society you have been exposed to. Everything in your mind right now is something you picked up from outside. You got so identified with it, now it is causing you misery.

This body is not yours; you have picked it up from the earth. You were born with a tiny body, which your parents gave you. After that, you ate plants and animals and grew. You borrowed it from the earth; it is not yours. For a while you have to use it, so enjoy it and go. But you have become so deeply identified with it, you think this is you. No wonder you suffer.

The basis of all this misery is, you have established yourself in untruth. You are deeply identified with that which you are not. Hence the suffering.

The whole process of spirituality is only to de-identify with that which you are not. When you don't know what you really are, can you search for it? If you search, only your imagination will run wild. If you start thinking, "Who am I?" somebody will tell you that you are God's child.

Somebody else will tell you that you are the devil's child. Somebody might tell you something else, endless beliefs... So, the only thing that you can do is, whatever you are not, start discounting that. When everything is discounted there is something, which cannot be discounted. When you arrive at that, you will see, there is no reason for misery in this world.

(The writer will conduct a one-week residential Wholeness Programme at the Yoga Centre, Coimbatore, May 30-June 6. Call 33448011. Visit www. ishafoundation.org)

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See also: Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul)