TRUE HAPPINESS

 
     There is a difference between happiness and pleasure. When the hedonists spoke of happiness they really meant pleasure, that is a feeling of temporary and superficial happiness caused by some circumstance or event. The inevitable concomitant of this is suffering, for if anything causes pleasure its absence or opposite causes suffering; moreover, the vicissitudes of life are such that the two alternate so that whoever is subject to the one is to the other also. Therefore there is no security in pleasure but a constant, if submerged, anxiety. To be thus subject to pleasure and pain, joy and misery, is not real happiness; it is not security but bondage, not serenity but turmoil. There can be no finality in it, since it is dependent on outer conditions and as evanescent as they are.

    True happiness is something very different from this. After saying that it is what every man seeks, Bhagavan goes on to say that it is man’s real nature. In other words, happiness does not need to be caused by anything but is the natural state of man when nothing intervenes to over-cloud it. To some extent we all know this, for if a man is in sound health and the weather is fine and he has no griefs or worries, he experiences a natural sense of well-being and happiness. However, this is only a dim shadow of true happiness. It is due to the absence of outer impediments and is shattered when they arise, whereas true happiness is Self-awareness and cannot be broken by any storms in the outer world. It is the experience that is over-clouded by man’s ignorant assumption of the reality of things and events and is re-discovered by his turning inwards to the Self. This explains the paradox why saints are always in a state of happiness although they may suffer persecution or martyrdom. All that they undergo belongs to a shadow-world and does not affect the reality of their constant experience. It is of this experience behind the stream of events that Bhagavan said: “You can acquire, or rather you yourself are, the highest happiness.” It is similar to Christ’s saying that the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.

Source: Be Still, It Is The Wind That Sings by Arthur Osborne

Posted by Swami Sadasivananda at 9/23/2009 6:37 PM
Categories: Teaching of Ramana Maharshi on Happiness

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