Internal happiness and Vairagya
Param Pujya Premmurti Dr Narendra Kumarji.
Sadhan March 2022
Pages 13 and 15
The happiness and sorrow that we experience in any situation relate to our mind’s perception of that situation, rather than the situation itself. If we want happiness, we have to fix the state of our mind so that irrespective of what is transpiring in our lives, the mind always perceives happiness. Gurumaharaj has instructed us as follows “Get yourself in a state of mind where internal happiness always prevails”. Let us try to figure out as to what exactly we need to do for this to happen.
Out of the many pathways described by Maharishi Patanjali for yoga or union there is one which he describes as “vishoka vaa jyotimaya”. Quit focusing on sorrow, and focus instead on divine light. To practice this in our lives, we must first understand what sorrow is. Sorrow is a state of perpetual and deep unhappiness borne out of an event that gives us immense grief. For example, when a person loses their father or son, the thought of this significant loss dominates their thinking all the time, and keeps them in a state of perpetual unhappiness or sorrow.
Let us now examine what we can do to keep sorrow at bay in our lives. In one of his discourses, Lord Buddha says that whatever is very dear to us in our lives becomes a source of both fear and sorrow in our lives. The things that are dear to us are things that we consider our own, such as our son, house, family, etc. In this way, whatever we believe is ours becomes dear to us. Why do things dear to us become a source of fear and sorrow in our lives? The answer is that as we look around in the world, we see people constantly losing things and people dear to them. There is no guarantee that whatever is dear to us today will remain with us tomorrow, and this apprehension of losing what is dear to us becomes a source of perpetual fear. The same things that we consider our own, that are dear to us, become a source of sorrow in our lives when we lose them, or when we fear losing them. If we want to rid ourselves of this sorrow, there is only one thing we have to do. We just have to give up the idea that the things dear to us are ours, and start thinking of them as belonging to someone else, like the Guru or God. If we consider all that is dear to us as belonging to the Guru or God, we will not feel the sorrow of losing them. There is no pain in paying back a bank loan because we know that we are only returning the money that the bank had loaned to us. Similarly, consider whatever you think belongs to you and is dear to you like your house, property, family etc as belonging only to HIM.
Take good care of everything, considering yourself only as a manager and not an owner. In this way, neither will you fear losing it, nor will you experience sorrow if you do lose it, because when you lose it, you will know that you did not lose it but the owner just requested back what was theirs all along. Developing this state of mind lets us circumvent sorrow and remain internally happy in life. The other name for this state of mind is vairagya. Wearing simple clothes, renouncing everything, and withdrawing from the world is not vairagya. Just like the flower lotus, whose petals remain unaffected and impervious to water even as it stands surrounded by it, Vairgya is a mindset where even as we discharge all our worldly responsibilities and remain a part of the world around us, we remain detached internally. Such a mindset allows us to live a life that is full of internal happiness.