Misery needs Effort, Bliss is Natural

 

Photo Credit: Pinterest

Misery needs Effort, Bliss is Natural

Sant Kabir – “I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.” Life surrounds us with joys, immense possibilities, opportunities, and yet we go on crying, feeling miserable. All we need to do is look at nature and all the possibilities of joy open out to us. Everything is happening so naturally, so beautifully, then why is it so difficult for us to tune in with nature?

As we grow older, our pain, our anguish keeps growing as we keep on remembering bad incidents thereby continuously poisoning the core within ourselves. Children can laugh, but as we grow older, the laughter starts disappearing – our laugh becomes artificial, forced – it is not from the heart!

Why have people become so serious? They know they are missing something. They know that life is slipping out of their hands. They know that this should not be so, but it is so - they are miserable. And when someone attains to the highest glory, like Kabir, he is bound to laugh.

If a fish comes and says, “I am thirsty,” what will we do? Will we feel any sympathy for the fish? Will we feel any kind of empathy for the fish? We will simply laugh, and say, “If you are thirsty then you are simply stupid. There is no need to be thirsty! You are in the sea already. Why should you be thirsty?”

Humans are in anguish, great anguish. We go on hiding it, because what is the point of bringing it to others? Nobody can help. We go on carrying dark nights in our beings, great turmoil, great pain, great wounds. We go on hiding! It is pointless to tell anybody; nobody can help. It is better not to talk about the wounds that we are carrying in our soul; it is better to forget about all those wounds.

That’s why intoxicants have been so important down the ages. There has never been a time when something or the other was not used by people to forget the inner wounds, to forget this whole nonsense that we have made out of life. People go on talking against alcohol, against drugs, but they don’t understand the psychology behind it. Just talking against them is not going to prevent people. You can legalise, you can prohibit, but still intoxicants will be used.

Unless people become blissful, they cannot be prevented. If we live in misery, we will need something or other to forget the misery. Otherwise, it will be too much! In fact, if all the drugs and all the intoxicants could be simply removed from the world, humans would go mad immediately. The whole world would be a madhouse.

People are somehow keeping themselves together. They can drink alcohol, and for a few hours they can forget the world and the misery that the world brings to them; they can forget their own selves. They can be lost into oblivion. They know perfectly well it is not going to change anything. But then nothing seems to change anything. At least for a few hours one can forget all about it.

Intoxicants will disappear from the world only when meditation has become a world-wide phenomenon, when each single individual has created some meditativeness in his/her own being; when each single individual has become aware, “There is no need to be miserable. Misery is created by me. Life is not misery: life’s nature is bliss. It is my stupidity that I am creating misery out of it.”

Misery needs great efforts, bliss is natural - we cannot create bliss, we can only create misery. And if we don’t create misery, bliss comes of its own accord. Bliss comes effortlessly - we cannot practise it.