Joy Without Any Reason

 

Photo Credit: Everyday Power

Joy Without Any Reason

A few things about being initiated by a living Master…. It is an initiation into the formless. It is not an initiation into some rigid form, it is not giving one a certain discipline - on the contrary it is an initiation into freedom, into a formless creative chaos.

Each moment one has to respond to life, not out of a certain pattern. The pattern comes from the past, and if the pattern predominates, the past predominates, and to be guided by the past is to be guided by death. The past is dead.

To respond in the moment without any pattern, just out of spontaneity - whatsoever the feeling of the moment decides, to act just like that - is what is call ‘creative chaos’… a characterless consciousness, a present without past, a freedom unhindered by any discipline. This very process of relaxing into freedom is what brings a person to reality. The more we are, the less the reality is; the less we are, the more the reality.

We are a kind of resistance - what we call the ego, the personality, is nothing but a kind of resistance to reality. It is a kind of frozenness; it is a kind of fear and greed. It is a kind of private idiocy - that we would like to live our own life. It is against the universal and the total, hence it brings misery.

Initiation means – ‘now I will live in the universal. I will not have any private opinion of life - I will let the whole decide; I will not pretend the part is the whole. I will no more be decisive on my own. I will allow the decision to arise in my consciousness and take possession of me.’

To live that way is to live the life of an initiate (sanyasi). It is utterly beautiful, utterly blessed, but great courage is needed because we don’t have a guide, we don’t have a particular form; we cannot depend on the past. One has to move from the unknown to the unknown and one never knows what is going to happen next moment, where one is going to land. There is no security in it, no safety in it; it is pure adventure.

A person who becomes courageous enough to live in the present starts creating a future without even thinking about it. And a person who is not courageous and goes on thinking about consequences, pros and cons - what will happen if he/she does this and what will happen if he/she does that - goes on missing the present. And naturally he/she goes on missing the future too, because if we don’t sow the seeds now there is not going to be any tomorrow.

Tomorrow again we will be thinking about another tomorrow because when tomorrow comes it comes as today. We become accustomed to the habit of thinking always of the tomorrow and the tomorrow never comes. So, only this moment is, and to live in this moment as if it is absolute — no past, no future — is what initiation is all about.

When joy is without any reason it is divine; when it has some reason, it is ordinary, it is just worldly. We won a lottery and are feeling happy; a friend has come to see us and we are feeling happy - but our feeling happy is dependent on causes. Those causes will disappear soon and then we will become unhappy.

So, the same causes that create happiness will create unhappiness, and one goes on moving in this vicious circle. The search is to find a joy which is without cause. One simply is joyful for no reason at all… one is joyful because one is.