A reflection on happiness, meditation and the importance of following one's destiny.
I admit that I am neither a great connoisseur, nor a great fan of spiritual teacher and this is one of the reasons why you will not find many articles on spirituality in the blog, even if I consider it an essential part of a path of personal growth.
Today I will make an exception.
A few days ago, a dear friend of mine shared a writing by Osho, a charismatic leader and Indian spiritual master: the first lines had the usual smell of those chain letters and I was about to give up reading. I decided to go ahead anyway without prejudices and… it was worth it. I hope these words generate the same motivation in you:
Many people come to me, say they are unhappy, and ask me to give them a meditation. I answer them: first of all, it is essential to understand why you are unhappy. And if you don't root out the causes of your unhappiness, I can give you, yes, a meditation, but that won't help you much - because the underlying causes remain.
The man who could have been a very good and splendid dancer sits in an office, amidst the paperwork. It leaves no room for dance. The man could have enjoyed dancing under the stars, but instead he does nothing but accumulate a bank account. And he says he is unhappy: "Give me a meditation". I can give it to you! - but what will meditation do? What does he expect me to do to him? He will remain the same man: who accumulates money, who competes on the market. Meditation will make him a little more relaxed to do these nonsense actions a little better.
This is why so many people in the West practice transcendental meditation. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi says, “It will make you more efficient at work, it will help you be more successful. If you are a seller, you will become a more successful seller. It will give you efficiency. " And Westerners are crazy about efficiency. They would give everything in exchange for efficiency. This is why it attracts so much.
Sure, it can help you. It can relax you a little, it's a tranquilizer. Constantly repeating a mantra, constantly repeating a certain word, changes the chemistry of the brain. It's a tranquilizer! A soothing sound. It helps you to release stress, so tomorrow, on the market place you will be more efficient, more skilled in competition - but it doesn't change you. It is not a transformation.
You can repeat a mantra, you can practice a meditation; it may help you a little here and there - but it can only help you stay as you are.
Conversely, my message is only for those who truly love the challenge, for the brave ready to change the pattern of their life, who are ready to risk everything - for in fact you have nothing to lose but your misery, your misery. But people get attached to that too.
I have heard:
in a remote military training camp, a platoon had just returned to base after a day's marching under the scorching sun. "That life!" a rookie exclaimed. "Miles away from any town, with a sergeant who thinks he's Attila the Barbarian, no women, no hangover, no license and, plus, my boots are two sizes smaller." "You don't want to blame this, mate," his partner said. "Why don't you get a couple more?" "I don't even think about it" was the reply "Taking them off has been the only pleasure I have so far!"
What else do you have to risk? Only your unhappiness. The only pleasure you have is talking about it. Look at the people talking about their unhappiness - how happy they become! They pay for it: they go to psychoanalysts to talk about their unhappiness - they pay for it! Someone who listens to them carefully… and they go into raptures.
People keep talking about their unhappiness… over and over and over. And they exaggerate it, color it, make it look bigger. They make it appear bigger than it is. Because?
You have nothing to risk. But people cling to the known, the familiar. Unhappiness is all they have known - this is their life. There is nothing to lose, yet one is so afraid of losing it.
For me, happiness comes first, joy comes first. The attitude to celebrate comes first. A positive philosophy towards life comes first.
Rejoice! If you can't enjoy your work, changes. Do not wait! Because all the time spent waiting… it's like I'm waiting for Godot. Godot will never come. Wait and you will waste your life!
For whom, what are you waiting for? If you understand that you are miserable within a certain pattern of life, all the old traditions say: you are wrong. I say: the model is wrong. Try to understand this difference.
You are not wrong! It is the way you learned to live that is wrong. The motivations that you have learned and accepted as yours are not yours. They don't fulfill your destiny. I am against your sprout, I am against your element ... Remember: no one can decide for you. All their commandments, all their orders, all their morals, are there to kill you. You have to decide for yourself. You have to take your life into your own hands. Otherwise, life keeps knocking on your door and you are never there - you are always somewhere else.
If your destiny is to become a dancer, life will knock on that door, because life is convinced that you must be a dancer right now. Knock there, but you are not there - you are a bank employee. And how can life be expected to find you?
God reaches you only if you fulfill your destiny; he only knows that address - but he never finds you there, you are somewhere else, hidden behind someone else's mask, in someone else's costume, under someone else's name.
How can you expect God to find you? Keep looking for you. He knows your name, but you have forgotten that name. He knows your address, but you've never lived there. You allowed the world to distract you.
God can only find you if you decide to fulfill your destiny. Until you find your spontaneity, until you find your element, you can't be happy. And if you can't be happy, you can't be meditative.
Why do people in the West believe that meditation brings happiness? In fact, whenever they have found a happy person, they have always found a meditative mind - the two are associated. Whenever they found a halo of meditation surrounding a person, they always found that he was tremendously happy - vibrant with bliss, radiant. They are two things associated. Here's why they thought: Happiness comes when you are meditative. It is exactly the opposite: meditation comes when you are happy. But being happy is difficult, while learning a meditation technique is easy.
Being happy means a drastic change in your way of life, a sudden change - because there is no time to waste. A sudden change - a sudden rumble of thunder - a discontinuity.
This is what I mean by sannyas: a break from the past. A sudden rumble of thunder. You restart your life as if there was no model imposed by your parents, by society, by the state. You have to let go of all those patterns that have been imposed on you, and you have to find your inner flame.
