A Ghost

One night, under the starry sky, the circle was quiet and members seemed pensive. 

Badger broke the silence and said, “You know, I can’t visualize myself expiring completely.”

Raven said, “A ghost.”

Badger said, “Even ghosts are not impermanent, though, are they?”

Raven said, “Take care of your miseries now, and they won’t abide.”

Be Happy

Group was quiet, not silent. So the question from Badger was he cannot be Empty.

Zen Master gave him the hint “A Ghost.” Which he could not understand so he gave one more hint: take care of your miseries. We all are familiar with our miseries.

What is this attachment to misery?

There are reasons. Just look into your misery, watch, and you will be able to find what the reasons are. Then look into those moments when once in a while you allow yourself the joy of being in joy, and then see what differences are there. These will be the few things….

When you are miserable you are a conformist.

Society loves it, people respect you, you have great respectability, you can even become a saint; hence your saints are all miserable. The misery is written large on their faces, in their eyes. Because they are miserable they are against all joy. They condemn all joy as hedonism; they condemn every possibility of joy as sin. They are miserable, and they would like to see the whole world miserable. In fact only in a miserable world can they be thought to be saints. In a happy world they would have to be hospitalized, mentally treated. They are pathological.

Look into your misery and you will find certain fundamental things are there. One: it gives you respect. People feel more friendly towards you, more sympathetic. You will have more friends if you are miserable.

This is a very strange world, something is fundamentally wrong with it. It should not be so; the happy person should have more friends. But become happy and people become jealous of you, they are no longer friendly. They feel cheated; you have something that is not available to them. Why are you happy? So we have learned down the ages a subtle mechanism: to repress happiness and to express misery. It has become our second nature.

Seekers have to drop this whole mechanism. You have to learn how to be happy, and you have to learn to respect happy people and you have to learn to pay more attention to happy people, remember. This is a great service to humanity.

Learning from the story A Ghost: Be Happy

Experience Learning

Don’t sympathize too much with people who are miserable.

If somebody is miserable, help, but don’t sympathize. Don’t give him the idea that misery is something worthwhile. Let him know perfectly well that you are helping him, but “This is not out of respect, this is simply because you are miserable.” And you are not doing anything but trying to bring the man out of his misery, because misery is ugly. Let the person feel that the misery is ugly, that to be miserable is not something virtuous, that “You are not doing a great service to humanity.”

Be happy, respect happiness, and help people to understand that happiness is the goal of life – Sat-Chit-Anand.

The Eastern mystics have said the divine has three qualities. It is sat: it is truth, being. It is chit: consciousness, awareness. And, ultimately, the highest peak is anand: bliss. Wherever bliss is, the divine is.

Whenever you see a blissful person, respect him, he is holy.

And wherever you feel a gathering which is blissful, festive, think of it as a sacred place.

We have to learn a totally new language, only then can this old rotten humanity be changed. We have to learn the language of health, wholeness, happiness.

It is going to be difficult because our investments are great.

That is why it is so difficult to be happy and so easy to be miserable.

Misery is the prison, nothingness is the door

It is one of the most fundamental questions that a man can ask – WHY DON’T WE DROP OUR MISERIES, OUR IGNORANCE AND UNHAPPINESS? HOW CAN A MAN BE HAPPY AND BLISSFUL?

It is also strange, because it should be easy to drop suffering, anguish, misery. It should not be difficult: you don’t want to be miserable, so there must be some deep complication behind it. The complication is that from your very childhood you have not been allowed to be happy, to be blissful, to be joyous.

You have been forced to be serious, and seriousness implies sadness. You were forced to do things that you never wanted to do. You were helpless, weak, dependent on people; naturally you had to do what they were saying. You did those things unwillingly, miserably, in deep resistance. Against yourself, you have been forced to do so much that by and by one thing became clear to you: that anything that is against you is right, and anything that is not against you is bound to be wrong. And constantly, this whole upbringing filled you with sadness, which is not natural.

To be joyous is natural, just as to be healthy is natural. When you are healthy you don’t go to the doctor to inquire, “Why am I healthy?” There is no need for any question about your health. But when you are sick, you immediately ask, “Why am I sick? What is the reason, the cause of my disease?”

It is perfectly right to ask why you are miserable. It is not right to ask why you are blissful. You have been brought up in an insane society where to be blissful without reason is thought to be madness.