LET US DISCOVER

Dear Brothers and Sisters, 

Instead of starting with the miseries of human being, we will learn today, through some of the lines taken from the last few posts, the tree of human life in terms of happiness, starting from Man as God to Man as man!!

THE GRAND TRUTH

Let us go through few lines from the last week’s posts, which converge on one single truth

I QUOTE

“you were always He, though you did not know it so far". - Swami

"You are that Joy. You are the image of happiness. God is the one who is always happy, and you are the image of God". - Swami Satchitananda

"Are as many as waves on the sleepless sea. Oh, Heaven is within you". - Swami Rama Tirtha

"The reality is within your own dwelling. The truth is here”. - Swami

THUS, INSTEAD OF STARTING WITH OUR CHAOTIC STATE AT PRESENT, WE HAVE STARTED WITH THE 1^ST STEP AS THE LAST REALIZATION- “YOU ARE ALWAYS HE, YOU ARE THAT JOY, YOU ARE THE IMAGE OF HAPPINESS”

FACT 1

WE, THOUGH ARE VERILY HE, THE GOD, ARE UNABLE TO EXIST 24/7 AS SAI. I WOULD HOPE THAT THERE CAN BE NO CONTRADICTION TO THIS FACT IN HUMAN LIFE, EXCEPT FOR REALIZED MASTERS

FACT 2

This fact is subtle and often not realized by we human. we are the image of happiness, god himself as per the grand truth above but we are unable to exist as that God 24/7 as per fact 1.

so, what happens????? like we observe in the world around us, though a man can act in various ways, project so many different images of himself as per the need of the hour, the real nature /chracter of the man always remains in tact and on close observations, no matter how he acts, what he does, one can make out the real nature of that man. Similarly, though man is not able to exist as god, the source of happiness, still, in every act, in every walk of his life, he is always in search of that true happiness because, THAT TRUE HAPPINESS IS REAL NATURE.

WE ARE UNAWARE OF THE TRUTH IS THAT HE IS GOD AND GOD IS LOVE/ TRUE HAPPINESS BUT AT SUBTLEST LEVEL, THIS TRUTH IS ALWAYS THERE WITHIN AND HENCE, THIS VERY TRUTH PROPELS MAN TO SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS IN EACH AND EVERY ACT HE DOES, EACH AND EVERY PURSUIT IN HIS LIFE

FACT 3

“……Kabir compares human beings to fish who complain about being thirsty, without realising that they can drink the water they're swimming in.”

(From Swami’s saying, posted on 10.12.2016)

Our search for happiness, our own nature, has thus begun, unfortunately not within, but in the world around us.

Lo and behold, every other human is in search of the same search of real happiness. Since one can search only a treasure which he thinks as not with him already, we are all imperfect, inherently unhappy, searching for happiness outside!

In the process, we are hitting/ facing/encountering each other, searching for that real happiness in each other whereas all of us have started this search ever since we became conscious of ourselves in our child hood, because we firmly believed that we are already not THAT TRUE HAPPINESS/ LOVE/ GOD- THE GRAND TRUTH!!

Let us take the above Grand truth and 3 facts for today, think on the same in our evening walk/ in our relaxed hour during the day, come  face to face with these facts which are often hidden not because they are secretive in nature but because- WE HAVE BEEN SPENDING OUR LIFE IN DISCOVERING/ SEEING/ KNOWING WHAT IS OUTSIDE US AND HAVE MISSED IN DISCOVERING THE ABOVE FACTS WHICH ARE WITHIN US AND NOT EVEN THE ALLMIGHTY BUT IT IS WE WHO CAN KNOW THESE FACTS AS EASILY AS WE CAN SEE OUR FACE IN THE MIRROR.

Will continue with further facts tomorrow

Love

Seeking Happiness

"As I was coming to the Hall, many devotees greeted me with the words, "Happy Birthday"! They should wish for "happy birthdays" for those who are not happy. I do not need your birthday greetings. The Divine is perennially in bliss (nithyaanandam). Swami is always happy. Swami does not need your happiness. You be happy. Happiness is union with God. If you want to be happy, join God. Then you can be happy." - Sai Baba Be Happy! Happiness is actually natural to human beings. Since our beings consist of consciousness-energy, the nature of which is well-being, happiness is our nature. We don’t need good fortune or any new circumstances to be happy, and we don’t need material goods, fun activities or success or power. It’s possible for us just to be happy, without any reason at all, because happiness is just there, inside us, in the same way that the sky and the air are outside us. In one of his most famous poems the Indian mystic Kabir compares human beings to fish who complain about being thirsty, without realising that they can drink the water they're swimming in. 'You wander restlessly from forest to forest,' he tells us, 'while the reality is within your own dwelling. The truth is here! 'Many of us spend our lives looking for happiness from external things, and all the time, while we go to the ends of the earth in search of it, it’s nearer to us than anything else: in our own being. Once we turn our attention in the opposite direction, however, and begin to change ourselves rather than our circumstances, we realise that it was always with us, and always will be.

Dear Brothers and sisters,

In the last few articles, we have seen/ read all about HAPPINESS, as expressed/ given by various masters and today, we have also read and literally seen what is happiness all about, while seeing our SAI above.

Tomorrow, I shall try and summarise the essence of all previous posts on happiness, culminating with today’s post where dear lord says all about Seeking happiness, 

Once we are clear about what we have learnt in the entire week’s posts on this one subject, we will be better placed to proceed to the next step.

Love

Happiness Within

My own Self in the form of ladies and gentlemen,

Let us examine this evening where happiness resides, whether happiness lives in the palace or the cottage, whether happiness dwells in the charms of women or in things that gold and silver can buy. Where is the native home of happiness? Happiness has also a history of its own. These are great travelling days; steam and electricity have annihilated time and space, great travelling days these are, and everybody writes an account of his travels. Happiness also travels. Let us have something of the travels of happiness.

We start with the first glimpse of happiness that a child has in his infancy. All the happiness in this world is for the child located in the skirt of the mother, or in the bosom of the dear mother. 

A year passes and the happiness of the child changes its centre; it moves on to something else. The residence of happiness now becomes the toys, the beautiful toys, pollies and dollies. In the second state, the child does not like the mother so much as he likes his own toys. Sometimes the child quarrels with the dear, dear mother, for the sake of toys, for the sake of dollies.

A few months or years more and no more is his happiness in the pollies and dollies; it has shifted its centre again, it is no longer located in these things. In the third stage, when the child grows up to be a boy, happiness is located for him in books, especially in story books. 

The schoolboy enters the college, and in college life, his happiness is found in something else, say, in scientific books or philosophical works or the like. He reads them for sometime, but his happiness has travelled from books to the longing of seeking honours in the university; his desire is to reach the residence of his happiness, the headquarters of his joy. 

The student comes out of the university with flying colours. He gets a lucrative post and the happiness of this young man is centred in money, in riches. Now the one dream of his life is to accumulate riches, to be rich. He wants to become a big man, to amass a large fortune. When he gets some wealth after working in the office for a few years, his happiness passes on into something else. What is that? Need that be told? It is woman.

Now the young man wants to have a wife, and for the sake of a wife, he is ready to spend away his riches. The mother’s skirt no longer gives him any happiness; the toys have no charm for him; the story-books are cast aside, and they are read only on those occasions when they are expected to give him some insight into the nature of that dream of his life—the woman. He is all a sacrifice for the sake of his wife. Hard-earned riches are cast to the winds for the sake of petty whims of what is now the headquarters of his happiness. 

The young man lives for sometime with the woman, and lo! the happiness is sighted a little yonder. The pleasure he could derive from the thought of his wife in the beginning, he no longer gets now. Taking the case of an ordinary youth, an ordinary youth of India, the happiness of the youth now passes from the woman on to the coming child. Now a child becomes the dream of his life. 

In the expectation of the child, concentrates all the happiness of the youth. The child is the sixth stage in his travel of happiness, in the march of joy. The youth is then blessed with a child. His joy knows no bounds; he is full of spirits, he springs up to his feet; he is elated; he is, as it were, raised above the earth many feet; he does not walk, he swims in the air, so to speak. His soul is full of happiness when he gets a child. The intensest happiness is when he sees the face of his child. The happiness of an ordinary man has reached its zenith. After that, the youth begins to decline in spirits, the child becomes a grown-up boy and the charm is lost.

Let us now examine whether happiness really dwells in objects like these—the mother’s skirt, dollies and pollies, books, riches, woman, child, or any object and anything of this world at all. Before proceeding further, let us liken the travelling happiness to the travelling Sun-light. Sunshine also travels from place to place. It is at one time shining over India, and at another time on Europe. It travels on. When shades of the evening fall, see how rapidly the Sunshine shifts away from place to place. 

There is a beautiful story about a woman in India. She lost her needle in her house. She was too poor to afford a light in her house, so she went out of the house and was searching it in the streets. A gentleman inquired from her what she was doing. She said that she was searching for her needle? The gentleman asked, "Where did you lose the needle?" She said, "In the house." He said, "How unreasonable it is to search in the street a thing which was lost in the house!" She said that she could not afford a light in the house and there was a lantern in the street. She could not hunt in the house, she had to do something, so she must hunt in the street.

This is exactly the way with the people. You have the Heaven within you; and yet you are searching pleasures in the objects in the streets, searching that thing outside, outside in the objects of the senses. How strange!

Conclusion

Realize the Heaven within you, and all at once all the desires are fulfilled, all the misery and suffering is put an end to.

Lo! the trees of the wood are my next of kin.

And the rocks alive with what beats in me.

The clay is my flesh, and the fox my skin.

I am fierce with the gadfly and sweet with the bee.

The flower is naught but the bloom of my love.

And the waters run down in the tune I dream.

The Sun is my flower, up hung above.

I cannot die, though forever death

Weave back and fro in the warp of me.

I was never born, yet my births of breath

Are as many as waves on the sleepless sea. Oh, Heaven is within you, seek Happiness not in the objects of sense; realize that Happiness is within yourself.

Om! Om!! Om!!! 

Swami Rama Tirtha