Live Carefree and Happy
The ancient scriptures say that God only is and that all else is illusion superimposed on the reality of God. The power that projects the many people and the universe and invests them with independent empirical reality, whereas in truth God is their reality, is called ignorance or maya. It owes its continued existence to lack of inquiry. This ignorance comes into existence as mind, and within the mind illusions are born and dance about as the world and its contents. Baba tells us, “All the names and forms that fill up this universe and constitute its nature are but creations of the mind. Therefore, the mind has to be calmed in order to see the truth. The everflickering waves of the lake have to be stilled so that you can see the bottom clearly.”
It is said that this ignorance is inscrutable because it cannot be explained; yet it exists. The scriptures then go on to say [the following]: that the wise know that ignorance is not inscrutable because, in fact, it does not exist at all, that upon inquiry as to the truth of oneself, ignorance will disappear, that in fact there is God only, and that for this reason man should live carefree and happy regardless of all else.
The scriptures are in writing. The men who said them are long dead. Who can know what errors may have arisen from word to ear and from thought to the written word. For this reason, for lack of deep faith in the truth of the scriptures, men read and hear them but do not put them into practice. But now we must awaken from long habit and realize that Baba, the Lord incarnate, who is living today, says from His own reality, “It is my experience that I am in every heart.” He tells us the eternal truth of man, nature, and God directly and not from hearsay or books.
We can go to where He is and with our own faculty of hearing listen to Him declare from His own universality that God only exists, that all else is appearance and we can know this for ourselves and we can, starting from this instant, live carefree and happy. Moreover, out of His love for us, Baba is spending every moment in loving service to us and in teaching the truth so that we may be free of ignorance and be happy. Grant us the good sense to have at least provisional faith in what the living Avatar, the living embodiment of divine wisdom, is saying to us.
Acknowledging that many wise people may indeed be doing exactly as Baba says, yet why is even the least of us not at once living carefree and happy when we hear the truth from Baba? Baba tells us that our present lack of happiness and of a heart overflowing with divine love is due to the confusion that accompanies desire.
Through habit, perhaps agelong habit, we look upon the objects, situations, and experiences of the world as being real in themselves. The mind will always attend to that which it takes to be real. Happiness and misery are experiences that the mind takes to be very real, and these experiences arise from contact with the world. Desire for more is aroused by the experience of happiness, and desire to avoid misery is aroused by the experience of misery. Sri Sathya Sai points out to us that neither the happiness nor the miseries that follow in the wake of desire are lasting and thereby neither is real.
When asked, then, how to kill desire, His response is that it is not possible, that desire is an expression of the universal energy by which we move and have our being, but the confusion that now accompanies desire can be eliminated by turning every desire away from worldly objects and directing it to God. Desire to have God Himself from whom all blessings and all prosperities flow. Why scramble in the dust for coins when we can have the treasury itself?
Baba teaches us that as soon as a desire arises, turn it to God, then confusion will end and we can live carefree and happy. When desire is allowed to turn away from God and to fasten itself upon objects, ideas, conditions, or experiences, it becomes attached and reluctant to let go. To illustrate this unhappy attachment, we are referred to the way monkeys are captured. Food is placed in a container that has a narrow neck, barely large enough to pass the open palm of the monkey. The monkey closes its paw around the food at the bottom of the vessel, but the narrow neck of the vessel will not allow the monkey to pull out its closed fist that is grasping the food. Thereby, the monkey is caught by its attachment to the object of its desire. Was the monkey to abandon its attachment to the food, its fist would open and it would regain its freedom.
In our human way, we are suffering the same fate. Whenever there are unhappy or anxious moments, if we can separate ourselves from our feelings long enough to take a close look at the situation, we will see that invariably some attachment is involved. Once identified, the attachment can be abandoned by the power of our intelligence and our will, and that particular source of discontent will no longer trail after us.
Now, live carefree and happy! That is the divine advice. Baba assures us that without doubt it is possible to live in the world fulfilling all our duties and at the same time remain happy and unaffected by events. The following illustration is given: suppose there is an actress taking the role of a poor person, but she is in fact a wealthy lady with a happy family and vast estates. She plays her role and suffers with such deep feeling that members of the audience find themselves in tears. Despite her wonderful art in portraying suffering and misery, has she even for a moment truly forgotten that she is a wealthy, happy person? She plays her role to the full, but always knows deep in her mind that she is wealthy and happy, and that when the play is over she will remove her costume and makeup and rejoin her family. Baba again and again likens us to actors in a play. He says that the individual self is the role; the reality is God.
If we are unhappy now, if we believe our role and forget that we are the majesty of divinity, it is of our own choosing; no outside power is forcing us to be inwardly unhappy. Try it now; at this moment be happy and carefree. Happiness will be felt, even if briefly. But that moment of happiness is the proof of itself. Baba says that happiness is one of the essential factors of enlightenment. Take happiness as a spiritual practice. Feel happy and continue to feel happy regardless of conditions and events. Happiness, joy, they are other words for love. Be happy, be joyful, and be loving at all times; that is the way to God, declares Baba.
~J. S. Hislop
Source: Sanathana Sarathi, May 1986
