When will you be happy? You think that you will be happy when happiness will come to you. Or when the government will issue happiness index guidelines. Or happiness will come when your start-up will become a unicorn. Or when you will be employed in a data corporation. Or when you will become a business tycoon owning a fleet of jets. Or when you will take oath of Ministership or Prime Ministership. It means that you think you are not happy and you wish to be happy.
If you look at yourself, you are poorer by your wishes. To be happy, you have to perform for your wishes. On this earth, we are performing and doing it in continuity. We are performing to collect things and information that we think will make us happy. It looks simple. But have you ever asked yourself if you could be happy without this pre-condition?
In fact, you are happy. Happiness is your intrinsic state of being. But you want to be happy and want to perform. Happiness is your own being. It is your own happiness that makes you happy. And by performing for wishes no one has ever attained happiness.
Being in the happiness of your being is what you have in hand. When you say you will be happy you decided that you need happiness to be happy. That is when your mind takes over and you become a ghost, zombie takes over. You are not you. That is what you do when you perform to get things. You create a trap and get trapped. Your mind says happiness comes from performance. Money, fame, and power are performance parameters.
Man runs like a machine. In fact, man is an organic machine. You think there is some godly sacredness in the machine that runs on red blood fluid and machines that run on oily lubricants are lesser godly. Man is performing like machines and living a machine-like existence. Man has, in fact, become a machine. Look at a machine, it performs whatever that it is ought to perform. So is a man who performs whatever he is ought to perform by society running after money, fame, and power.
Essentially man is an organic machine. You are designed like a machine: legs for mobility, eyes for vision, and ears for a sense of hearing. An auxiliary power unit heart that pumps blood in hydraulically from top to bottom of nerves. Combustion of oxygen in cell oxidisation to create energy. Mind to create memories for performance. Man is the most critical machine that nature has created organically. Everything on this planet and universe is godly. Man is not an exception. But man thinks himself to be holier than others.
Trees, animals, and birds are there. All are happy in the happiness of their being. Singing, dancing, enjoying, and rejoicing in the essence of happiness. But man is not happy as he wants to be happy. Only happiness one has in hand is right now as there is no happiness of the future.
A beautiful story by Khalil Gibran on happiness. A man wanted to be happy. He was expecting that happiness would come but it did not. He prayed to God. He hoped and desired but nothing came. So he became dejected and thought that everyone gets happiness but he would not get it. Gradually, all his hopes and desires for happiness died. Suddenly happiness arrived and he became extremely happy. So he went to top of his house and asked people to see that happiness has arrived but instead, people bolted their doors and shut windows. No one paid any attention. Happiness faded and gradually died.
This man must have been a machine. You can’t make a machine happy or unhappy. In expectation of happiness, man has invented unhappiness. Unhappiness is an invention that defines happiness. Both are mere words of memories that correlate you with that state of your being when you were happy and when you will be happy.
You have linked yourself with the past inextricably so the future is reflected as a shadow of past memories. You are a bagful of memories. Mind has collected memories, history. When you wish to repeat your past memories in future that becomes desire.
You are living in your past memories and not in present. Religion is always new. Sun is always new, it does not get old. Every day a new sun throws new rays on the breast of the earth. You think the sun always rises at six past some minutes so there is no newness. This grand event of the sun showering its warmth of new light on the new earth is not a memory. It does not repeat itself as a dead memory and it happens in its newness.
Life is flowing in the newness of life every moment. Don’t create memories out of it. Water comes gushing every moment, new water comes after new drops are formed by the new ice created by new vapour. But you think water is repeatedly flowing as a memory. It means that you have built dams of memories between the newness of life. To stop the flow of newness of life and make life machinelike.
Every moment is new. Trees are rejoicing in tree-ness of being. Flowers are happening in the flower-ness of being. Birds are chirping in the birdie-ness of being. No one is building dams to reverse the flow of life. But man is not being in the being-ness of his being. Not being in the happiness of his being. Man is creating memories that create rat race, diseases, and wars.
Machine-man keeps creating memories. Memories are catalogued into beautiful names like history, culture, principles, society, humanity, and religions. Man is burying himself beneath a huge stockpile of memories.
Beneath the debris of memories, man has become neurotic and morbid. That has bred psychological and physical diseases in man. All diseases are memories. Man is neither able to see anything, nor think that he is new and blissful. You keep collecting knowledge to be buried under that knowledge so that others call you knowledgeable. This web of memories make knowledge.
You turn living religion a fresh breeze into dead memories and then you keep repeating words like parrots every day. Don’t be machine or ghostlike. Ghost is a shadow of life. Don’t live like a dead machine. Your body is the shadow of your being. Shadow of embodiment is formed when light is shed on it. If the light fades away, shadow is formed no more. Life is a flowing newness. Flow with it, be the life. Don’t just click pictures of life to live in past memories. Be the picture. Live the picture.
‘The author is a spiritual teacher and he can be contacted at arunavalokitta@gmail.com