The moment we were born as human beings, somehow our lives got complicated, since then. If we had come here like any other creature on this planet, life would have been very simple – eating, sleeping, reproducing, and dying finally. Now we have to do all these things, but after doing all those things, we found somehow it’s not enough. Somehow where you are right now, wherever you may be, is not enough. You want to be little more than what you are right now, isn’t it? Isn’t it so? If you know only money, maybe you are thinking of a little more money. If you know only pleasure, maybe a little more pleasure. Power may be a little more power. Whatever may be, whatever your currency may be, everybody is desiring to be little more than what they are or have right now.
The process of desiring more and more is continuously going on. So this longing for well-being, because ultimately everything that you are doing is in search of your well-being, whether you are going to work or you are going to the bar or you are going to the temple or you are getting married or you are having children, you are studying in university – everything is fundamentally for ensuring your well being. Isn’t it so? Yes?
Different people may have different ideas about well-being. Somebody may think, that if they can eat twice a day, that’s well-being. For somebody else, that may not be well-being. But every human being is consciously or unconsciously, constantly and continuously in search of his well-being, So what is well-being? When do you really feel well in your life? When you are very happy, you are well, even if you are physically ill, you are still well, even if you are medically diagnosed as ill, you are very happy right now, you are feeling well, isn’t it? So fundamentally well being means a certain level of joyfulness, certain exuberance in life.
What is happiness? We can say happiness is in terms of life, your life energies are happening in a more exuberant way than normally happens. Depression means, your life energies have become very low and stale. Happiness means your life energies are exuberant. There are many ways of describing happiness but only those who are happy, know what it means to be happy.
There is nobody who has not been happy. Everybody has been happy but the problem is they are not able to maintain it, that’s all, isn’t it so? In the last 24 hours, how many moments of joy have you known or felt? One, two, three, how many? Maybe you can count on your fingers . Many people have nothing to count . When you were 5 years of age , a child, how many moments of joy did you know in twenty-four hours? Lots of them , he was having, that was the time when somebody had to make you un-happy but now somebody has to make you happy , the scene is changed? The whole equation has gotten reversed somehow. All this effort of life, everything that you did, education, career, family, children, money, whatever you did –everything was done in pursuit of happiness and nothing else ?
Everything that humanity has done on this planet is in pursuit of happiness, in the last 100 years , we have done too much on this planet. With the use of science and technology we have changed the very face of this planet. Today, we have the kind of comforts and conveniences that no other generations could ever even imagine. Yes ! What Royal people could not afford , hundred years ago, today average citizen have all those luxuries and yes, even kings could not afford this .But are we happier with all these comforts? We are definitely the most comfortable generation ever on this planet, physically, but are we also the most joyful generation? So it has not worked. Science and technology has brought enormous amount of comfort and convenience to our lives. Things that we could not imagine just twenty five years ago are just a living reality today. But are we anymore joyful ? No. And all these comforts and conveniences have not come easily. They have come at tremendous cost to every other life on this planet. Yes? Every creature from plant to animal to everything-including human beings have paid an enormous price to create these comforts and conveniences and even then we are not happy. What is the point ? We are literally making a bone-fire of this planet. If you are ecstatic then its fine , burn the planet, its all right. But we are still not happy . I think its time to really look-back at it, and I believe this is the right time my dear fellow human?
Why are we burning up if we are not even happy? Now the problem is that you are in pursuit of happiness. Its even enshrined in our constitution here-in pursuit of happiness. But what does pursuit of happiness mean? You want to do so many things to be happy. Yes? It doesn’t matter where the stimulus was , Where did you get happy , inside or outside? Inside, Yes. Did you ever experience happiness out here? Such a thing has never happened, because the seat of human experience is within you, not outside of you. People are talking about inner happiness and outer happiness but there exist no such division between inner and outer things. Happiness and every human experience has always been internal and never been external in real life. So happiness is internal mechanism but the button to trigger it or stimulate it lies outside in the world somewhere, somewhere else, in somebody else’s hands.
Now I want to make you aware that some amount of inner handling is needed, which has not been taught to us since our birth. When I say inner, I am not talking about your body or mind, because your body and mind come from outside, See when you were a child, your body was so small and now it became so big. How? How? With the food that you ate and drinks that you took without break ..hahaha? Come on tell me. So what you call my body actually is a heap of food that you ate, nothing else. Or in another way, I can say that it’s a small piece of this planet, Yes. This is just a piece of the planet. Right now you have gathered it this way and made it this way. See all these countless people who existed on this planet before you and me, where are they now? Have you ever applied your mind that way? All were soon converted into top soil. I and you will also soon become a part of topsoil unless somebody buries you real deep fearing that you may rise from the dead. So your body is something that you accumulated from outside, Yes?
What you call my mind is a huge heap of impressions that you have gathered from outside, do you agree with me ? All the content of your mind is huge heap of impressions. So between these two, this huge heap of impressions and heap of food that you gathered from outside , if you have to gather so much , there must be something more to gather . Always, there is a fire inside to gather more and more. So your experience of life remains limited to just this – your body, your mind and your emotions. What you call as my emotions is just the juicy part of your thought. Thought is dry and straight, emotion is juicy and without that you would feel too dry and thirsty. So to quench that thirst , you make a certain part of your thought emotion. The way you think is the way you feel, I believe that you will agree with me. Right now if you think that some particular person is a wonderful person, you will have sweet emotions towards that person and about someone else you think that he is a horrible person, your feelings towards him would be horrible. So you can’t think someone is a horrible person and have sweet emotions towards that person. And similarly you can’t think that someone is wonderful person and have ugly emotions towards that person. The way you think, the way you feel. People think that they are different simply because the emotion has a certain amount of drag time. Emotion is more fluid so it has drag time as such you can’t gather it immediately but in case of thought, you can gather it immediately and re-direct it in your own way. But you can’t gather emotions immediately as it spills all over the place and takes certain amount of time to gather it. So your thought, your emotions, your body, everything has been gathered from outside. So what you gain from outside, you can gain, you can lose at any time. And it will be lost either in the course of life or in the process of death, it will be lost. And when you constantly live with something, that’s going to be lost and that can be lost any moment, then its natural and obvious that you will live a very unstable and insecure life.
Just see how much of your life is structured around your security and almost whatever you do is about your security . Please carefully examine – your education, your career, your family , your children , your emotions , everything is centered around your security , do you agree with me? I think yes you do agree. When you are constantly thinking about your security ,when you are constantly concerned about your security, you will never be able to walk full stride of your life, every step will only be a half a step. In such a situation you cannot let yourself go completely into the process of life . Your mind will always be occupied with the thought or question that,” what will happen to me, what will happen to me” . Till the time this question or problem is not taken care of, you will never realize the full potential of who you are and you will never find full expression either to your body or to your intelligence or to anything. Only when you come to this state of mind that “nothing can happen to me , whatever, whichever way life is, this is the way I will be”, unless this is brought within you , you can not take full steps in your life.
So the spiritual process means, bringing another dimension, which is beyond the physical existence into your living experience, so that this problem of security and insecurity is gone. It’s because you are so totally lost in your instinct of survival, you think everything is within the range of this but it is not so. See if you don’t mess with your mind right now to be peaceful and joyful is natural. Do you have to go and conquer the world to be joyful? Can you just watch the sun setting and be joyful? Can you close your eyes and be joyful? Can you think about something and be joyful? And not think about anything and still be joyful? No..? So being joyful is not happening because of any particular act in the world. People might have gotten there by doing many things, that’s different issue. Let me tell a short story of a pheasant and a bull . This is like, on a certain day , a bull and a pheasant were grazing upon the field. The bull was grazing upon the grass and the pheasant , the bird was picking the ticks of the bull as they are in some kind of partnership . There was a huge tree at the edge of the field . The pheasant looked up at the tree and very nostalgically said , “ Oh, alas! There was a time when I could fly to the topmost branch of the tree, but now I do not have enough strength in my wings even to fly the first branch of the tree. The bull very non-chalantly said, “ oh that’s no problem . If you want to get to the top of the tree, everyday you take a certain dose of my dung”. Everyday , eat some of my dung and within a fortnight you will get there. After eating the bull dung , on the very first day , he reached the first branch of the tree and within a fortnight , he did reach the top most branch of the tree. So he went and sat on the topmost branch of the tree and just started watching and enjoying the scenery. There was an old farmer sitting down in the verandah of his house and was rocking on his rocking chair, saw a fat old pheasant sitting on the topmost branch of the tree. He pulled out his shotgun and shot the bird off the tree. So moral of the story is that many times even bullshit can get you to the top but never lets you stay there forever.
In so many ways you are trying to bullshit yourself into joyfulness. You have even reached there at the top but never stayed there. You can just do this just by running on the beach, by dancing, by singing, by drinking alcohol, by taking drug, by doing so many things. It all gets you there for a moment, but never lets you stay there forever or for longer. The more you don’t get to stay there, the more and more desperate you are becoming with life.
Now I am talking about joyfulness, what it is? There are numerous ways to look at this. One simple way is, lets say right now you lost your peace. If you lose your peace, what happens with your life? First, you go home today and yell at somebody at your home, your wife/husband, your children, your parents or whoever is there. If it continues tomorrow morning, you pick a quarrel with your neighbor. If it continues, then go to your office and yell at your boss.The moment you yell at your boss, everybody would know that you need an urgent medical help. So they took you to the doctor. Initially the doctor tries to talk to you but you don’t budge so the last option with him is to throw a pill into you. This pill is what? Just a little bit of chemicals. If you throw this pill into you , you do become peaceful. May be not forever but for a short period of time, you do become peaceful. So just a little bit of chemical can bring peace to you in other words peace is a certain kind of chemistry. If peace is chemistry, isn’t turmoil another kind of chemistry? Yes? Isn’t joy a kind of chemistry and misery is of another kind? Agony another kind and ecstasy another kind . Every human experience has a chemical basis to it.
Now I am talking about creating the right kind of chemistry within you. Where to be peaceful and blissful is just natural to you. You just create the right kind of chemistry. Now this is the way you are. This is not something that you pursue outside. We have engineered the world today in many ways so that it functions better for us? Do you agree with me? Engineering fundamentally means to create a situation the way we want it. We have striven hard to create external situation the way we want but your inner situations are not the way we want it ,whats the point now? We are sitting with a kind of climate that we want outside , but the inner climate is not good. This will not work for better and it doesn’t matter where you are. You are sitting in a palace or in heaven , but your inner situation is not good. Now it doesn’t matter , people are willing to go to heaven. Why? It is because they have made a hell out of themselves obviously . OK, how do you know that this not heaven? How do you know ? How do you know that you are not already in heaven and making hell out of yourself? Because the misery that you have experienced has happened only in your mind not outside somewhere else. Where is the manufacturing unit for all the human miseries that are happening on this planet, is it in California or Bangalore? Dear friend it is in your mind only and not outside. The mind which could have a ladder to the divine , this mind could have been a source of ecstasy but this mind has become a source of misery for most people-tension, anxiety , depression, why ? Because you just don’t know how to handle it. You just don’t know how to handle it . This is a miracle which has gone wrong. You could use this to create anything you want. This moment if you want you can make yourself absolutely ecstatic with the same mind .With the same mind this moment you can become depressed and totally lost. Both ways its possible and it only depends on you. So why has it gone wrong? This is simply because without understanding the nature of this body, without understanding the nature of this mind, without understanding the nature of how this one can exist within itself, we are just trying to live by accident . We are just hoping that everything will be okay.
They have been telling you for thousands of years, “don’t worry god will take care of you , everything will be okay, everything will be okay..” Look at the world and tell me what people are going through….how peaceful you are-happens to you only to the extent that you understand and only to the extent you handle it. To what extent you are capable of handling it, only to that extent, only to that depth , you will know life, otherwise, you will not know anything beyond that. For example , the mind, how we are handling it-lets look at this. See , the nature of mind is- anything and everything your five senses come in touch with, your mind collects. Most of the impressions that you have gathered in your mind are unconscious .Every waking moment and every sleeping moment of your life, whatever comes in touch with five sense perceptions is recorded. Every sound every smell , every touch, every sight that you have gathered is all there in your mind. Some of them you are able to pull back and use much of it, you are not able to pull it back but its functioning. It is creating impacts on you in so many different ways, all these impressions. So this mass of impressions that come in you have no discretion about what to take in and what not to take in.
Whosoever comes your way will stuff something into your head and go. You cant stop it .If you say, I don’t like this person, you can not stop input from that person. Actually you will take in more from that person than anybody else. . So Your mind in one way is just society’s garbage bin . You can take garbage bin- whatever the content of the garbage bin, you can take it and make it wonderful manure for yourself or you can live in the garbage bin and struggle eternally. This is the choice you have. Everything that you come in touch with, goes inside, but you have the discretionary powers to what to use and what not to use. That is there but that discretion has been lost in lot of human beings. That’s why they have become compulsive human beings. Just see how much of your life is compulsive, how much of your life is conscious, please look at this. Carefully observe yourself and see- how much of you is happening consciously, how much of you is happening compulsively, you will that large part of you is happening compulsively. When you are happening compulsively, you will not happen the way you want yourself. There is only one problem with your life- life is not happening the way you think it should happen. That is the only problem. Is there any other problem? This is the only problem. In the same breath you claim that you believe in god, if you believe in god , it is not happening your way, it must be happening in his way. You must be even more happy ,its happening your god’s way but that’s not the reality. So the world is not happening in your way , this is the problem. Nobody in the world is happening your way. Nobody around you will happen hundred percent your way. Nobody happens your way, its okay, but there is one person who must happen your way. If this one person doesn’t happen your way, you will become a tragedy, that’s the tragedy of humanity today, with you, with me.
The world is not happening your way, that is not the problem, you are not happening your way , that is the big problem. So , if the things start happening your way , you have begun to understand the world, that you have to engineer it so that it happens your way.. Now if you engineer your car properly , if you turn it here, you want it to go here, it goes right there , its not the good car. Otherwise you do it here, it goes and turns there. You know there were cars like that before? But now such cars are not there because of better engineering. The same way ,no inner engineering have been done for you, just by accident you are trying to happen. So, what you gather is not the problem, your ability to use it appropriately is the big problem. Is this not true that all the shit we have gathered in our head is best you collected it because if you don’t know , you will walk into it every day. If you know all this , you can see that you don’t walk into those things.Look, being free of something and being ignorant of something is very different. You are ignorant of the ways of the world, you will bump into it today or tomorrow. You know all the crooked ways of the world but you don’t give into that. You are consciously not there in it that is the different thing, so sufferings are not conscious. If you are suffering in some way, that means that part of you has become unconscious. Nobody consciously creates sufferings for himself, does he? If different levels of sufferings are happening, that simply means different levels of unconsciousness exists within you. What is conscious within you that part of you, you will keep it the way you want it.. Whatever is conscious within you those parts of you, you will keep it the way you want it.. Whatever is unconscious, those parts of you, you were not able to keep the way you want it. So all that you have to do with your life is make more and more of you conscious. If you strive to make this whole thing absolutely conscious, this will 100 percent the way you want it. This one piece of life will happen exactly the way you want it.
I have absolute confidence in you that you will make yourself into an absolutely blissful human being, an exuberant human being……
H S Rana