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  Opinion   Oped  14 Jul 2018  Mystic Mantra: Your fundamental responsibility

Mystic Mantra: Your fundamental responsibility

The writer is an internationally renowned spiritual leader, a visionary, humanitarian, author, poet and speaker. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org.
Published : Jul 14, 2018, 12:48 am IST
Updated : Jul 14, 2018, 12:48 am IST

The first and most fundamental responsibility for every person is to become a joyous human being.

The whole process of yoga is to make your interiority absolutely in your control. (Representational image)
 The whole process of yoga is to make your interiority absolutely in your control. (Representational image)

The first and most fundamental responsibility for every person is to become a joyous human being. Because no matter what you are pursuing in life, whether business, money, family or spirituality, it is just an attempt to be happy. You have always understood that to be happy means you must be able to do what you want to do, what you want to achieve in the outside world. Being happy and peaceful is considered the ultimate aspect of a successful life, but it is really the most fundamental aspect of life.

In many ways people’s happiness is dependent on the external situation. When you are dependent on external situations, you will never know true joy in your life, because you will never have absolute control over the outside. When you seek happiness through your action, you are always enslaved to the external. When you are enslaved, you will always be in some level of suffering. It does not matter what a person has, he will still long to have something else all the time. Until a man finds the inner basis of happiness, he will always live as a beggar.

Whatever you understand or experience as happiness, or love, or peace in your life has a certain inner basis. Today if you lose your mental peace your doctor will give you a pill. These chemicals enter your system and make you peaceful, maybe for just a little while. Or in other words, what you call as peace is a certain kind of chemistry within you. Similarly what you call as joy, love, suffering or fear is the chemistry within you. Every human experience has an inner chemical basis.

The whole process of yoga is to make your interiority absolutely in your control. It is a possibility to move from a state of external enslavement to inner completeness, which is the state of unboundedness. If your inner nature is unbounded, your life is also unbounded. You can either sit with your eyes closed or you can perform action — both ways your life is complete. This is a state of true happiness.

First we need to know that the basis of our misery is that we have established ourselves in untruth. Somewhere along the way we have gotten identified with things around us. We have got identified with our body and mind.

Spirituality is simply the process of disidentifying with what we are not, to shed the layers of conditioning so that we know what we are NOT. When that is completed, we arrive at something that cannot be discounted. This discovery will be the recognition of divinity, and we will see that there is no reason for misery in the world.

Tags: spirituality, yoga