Pay attention within to interiorise divine presence in the heart

Who wants unhappiness? Do we invite unhappiness? No one does. We are predisposed to want happiness all the time, so we overuse our senses – physical as well as emotional – in order to saturate ourselves with happiness. Eventually, in order to make ourselves happier, we need more and more stimuli coming from within as well as outside. It’s overuse of our senses, internal as well as physical.

What happens with pain, misery, sadness? Nobody wants them. If at all they come our way, we ignore them – as if ignoring them will make them go away! Since we don’t use them, whatever little miseries may come our way become really highlighted. Happiness is made dull by overuse, whereas sadness becomes extremely sharp through underuse. It cuts you like a razor. The more you avoid it, the more every little bit of sadness or unhappiness will drive you crazy.

With expectations also, when we have greater expectations from our loved ones, it creates this dullness and sharpness phenomenon at an emotional level. It’s not that I advocate inviting unhappiness, but if it comes your way, don’t discard it. When your senses perceive sadness etc., undergo the whole process and be thankful to God. Neither sadness nor happiness is going to last forever. Can you hold air in your fist? You can’t. It is just momentary. It’s the same thing with this emotional rollercoaster. That’s why it’s good to pay attention within, to your inner Deity, the divine presence within your heart. Even if you don’t believe in God, that’s all right too. The main focus is to interiorise in such a way that you set your mind on that fulcrum, making it balanced. Only in the balanced state will you be able to enjoy life.

Start accepting things in life in such a way that they don’t dull you or sharpen you. If sadness comes, get used to it, and don’t avoid it. Otherwise, even a little bit of inconvenience can become a big pain, and that is why the wisdom of Babuji Maharaj (as Ram Chandra, Shahjahanpur, is referred to) is to take miseries as blessings. It’s very difficult to take miseries as blessings until you understand the reason behind it.

Happiness, in my view, gets blunt through overuse, while sorrow generally remains sharp. When we were growing up, we didn’t have many toys and they were shared by everybody in the family, even neighbours. Today, children have rooms full of toys, thus making happiness blunt from the very beginning.

We don’t want our children to even face any unhappiness or hardship in life, but what we don’t realise is that we are actually spoiling them in the process. Later on we complain that the children are spoilt. One after the other, there are too many excitements – too many exciting pens, toys and notebooks. There is so much wastage. It becomes a tendency. The mind becomes so free to waste things in life; and then it will apply it to time management also.

Similar things happen in the field of medicine. A person can start with a dose of medicine, say a 5mg sleeping pill, but it may no longer work after a few months and the person will have to double the dose. Our system gets used to stimuli too quickly, demanding incremental doses of happiness, and loves to discard even the smallest episode of inconvenience!