Om! Your nature is happiness ~ Nityananda Atman

Your nature is happiness

 (Quotes of Sri Ramana Maharshi and Swami Sivananda)

You are looking for freedom, eternal life and happiness. This happens because you are already free, eternal existence, consciousness and bliss. This is your real nature. You are ‘That’ here and now. But you have to realize it. The attachment to body, mind and sense objects screen your radial immortal Self which nature is pure awareness and bliss. Maya or ignorance puts a veil that hides, your eternal existence and projects this external world.

·         ‘The thought ‘I am the body’ is ignorance. That the body is not apart from the Self is knowledge.‘

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

You see this external world as the only reality. You think that you are the body in which thoughts and emotions come and go and make you suffer. You have a little or not at all control on them. Your attention is always driven to the external objects that seem very solid and real. You enjoy through senses and mind their qualities. Pleasure and pain is the result of it. Mind likes certain objects and dislikes others due imagination. Your mind tries to get the pleasurable objects and to avoid the painful ones. In this way you are caught in the play of your mind.

You have forgotten your origin, your real Self or awareness. Your divine nature is always with you. In reality your body, mind, sense objects, the whole world, everything exist in the ocean of pure awareness. You cannot experience any object without the presence of awareness. Awareness enables you to entertain good or evil thoughts, to do good or evil deeds. It is your constant companion silent witness of everything you do, enjoy and know. Because your mind is so engrossed to enjoy illusory sense objects makes you to forget your essence.

·     ‘One’s own reality, which shines within everyone as the heart, is itself the ocean of unalloyed bliss.’  ‘Bliss is a state of unbroken happiness’.

·         ‘The bliss of the Self is always with you and you will find it for yourself if you would seek it earnestly.’

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

 Forgetting your divine Self, you try to find eternal peace, happiness and contentment in illusory, impermanent, limited objects. How is it possible to find unconditioned happiness in conditioned objects or situations? Did you ever see any human being, to be real happy because of wealth, money, women etc? Instead of it, many sages having nothing, lived a life of fullness, peacefulness and happiness because they have lived in constant communion with their essence within.

You try the impossible. You try to find immortal qualities in mortal things. Maya puts a veil and you cannot experience the ever present Atman or awareness within. So you are wandering in the thick forest of sense pleasures which give you a little enjoyment and much pain.

·         ‘Ignorance draws a veil over the pure bliss. Direct your attempts only towards removing the ignorance.’

 ~  Sri Ramana Maharshi

Radiant immortal Self, child of light, remember always that sensual pleasures can never give you eternal peace, contentment and happiness. They are finite, limited and beyond all, illusory products of senses and mind. Pleasure is just an imagination of the mind. It is only a titillation of the nervous system. When the body, senses or mind are tired sense objects cannot give you any pleasure at all.

Pleasures are the womb of your pains and miseries. But you never noticed this or maybe you do not like to notice it. You prefer to pass through many pains for some trifling moments of pleasure. You enjoy only for a while, some kind of satisfaction and happiness. But always after the enjoyment you are in the same condition as before, you feel discontent, uneasy and incomplete.  For one more time you didn’t find the permanent happiness, you thought, you could get from the object you wanted so much.

·         ‘Perfect peace is of the Self. Peace is your natural state.’

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

It is very important to know this. That even the happiness and contentment that you feel after the enjoyment of any object, derives from your own Self within, from your essence, the very core of your existence. You may think that happiness comes from the object, but this is not the truth. Your mind is so indentified with the enjoyment of your favorite object and makes impossible to realize what exactly happens in these moments of enjoyment.

What really happens is this: The time the mind gets his favorite object stops its oscillation. It becomes calm and introverted. It rests for the time being in its center (Consciousnesses). In this way mind enjoys a reflection of happiness that derives from your inner Self (Being). But because of inadvertence you think that happiness derives from the enjoyment of the object. So you want to repeat this enjoyment to feel again happy and content.

~ Swami Sivananda

“Really, there is no pleasure in objects. Atman gives a push to the mind and sets it in motion. A Vritti or thought-wave arises in the mind on account of the force of a Vasana (desire). The mind is agitated and runs towards the particular object. The agitation will not subside till the mind gets the desired object. It will constantly think of the object. It will scheme and plan various methods to achieve the desired object. It will be ever restless. It will be ever assuming the shape of the object. As soon as the object is obtained and enjoyed, the particular Vritti (thought) that was causing agitation in the mind gets dissolved. Vritti-Laya (thought dissolving) takes place. When Vritti-Laya takes place, you get peace and Ananda (bliss, happiness) from the Svarupa or Atman within only and not from the object outside. Ignorant persons attribute their pleasures to external objects. That is a serious blunder, indeed.’

~ Swami Sivananda

Probably until now you have not noticed this trick of the mind. You have not noticed that the happiness you feel nothing has to do with the enjoyment of the object. The impure mind hides the fact that happiness comes from within, from your heart. Because of this delusion you want to repeat again and again the same experiences considering that happiness comes from them.

·    What happiness can you get from things extraneous to yourself?  When you get it, how long will last?

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

Through repetition desires and attachments for sense pleasures become stronger. By repetition desires intensify and take the form of intense craving and addiction to pleasures. Thus increases your ‘ego’ sense, the attachment to the body and this physical reality and the forgetfulness of your real nature. Desires make thicker the veil that clouds your essence and make stronger your attachment to the body. All these make your bondage in the wheel of pain and sorrow more tight.

·         The body-consciousness is the wrong ‘I’. Give up this body-consciousness.'

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

Because of ignorance (of your real Self) and the sense ‘I am the body’ (that you are the mind-body complex) you see the world real and independent from consciousness. So you think that your happiness depends on external things and conditions. You are looking for happiness outside of you. You are looking for happiness in wealth, possessions, knowledge, food, comfort, money, women or men and the enjoyment of the sense objects generally. Because of it desires, attachments and negative habits are developed. Desires and attachments are the womb of anger, anxiety, depression, jealousy, greed, pride, fear, hatred, violence, self-image, etc. which are the source of pain and suffering. In reality all the above negative qualities are modifications of the desire itself.

The core of ego is lust, which becomes desire and the sense 'the body is Me'. Then take place more modifications of lust such as like-dislike, attraction-repulsion,anger, fear, depression, impatient, uneasiness, greed, etc, the list is huge.

Desire, ‘Iness’ and pain-body are one and the same thing - the so called ‘ego’, which apparently appears as three different things; the core of them is lust.

Due to the modification of desire into ‘Iness’, desiring appears as ‘I desire’ and wanting as ‘I want’. Thus desire deludes us making believe that what desire wants is our conscious choice.

·         ' Rebirth is due to vasanas which are binding. But they are destroyed in the one of Self-realization.’

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

·         ' The bondage of Vasana is the real bondage. The annihilation of Vasana is liberation or Moksha. ' 

~ Swami Sivananda

A vicious circle is formed. You get little trifling pleasure coupled with manifold pain. And this goes on in eternity. This is the wheel of samsara; the wheel of pleasure and pain, death and birth. If you want to get out of this illusory mind-made matrix, you have to seek the gate of exit. You have to trace back the source of ego and the whole world.

·         ‘The very purpose of self-enquiry is to focus the entire mind at its source (the heart).

·         ‘There must be untiring effort to go inward all the time until the self is realized.’

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

You have to turn your attention inside towards your heart. The heart is the center of your existence. It is the source of your ego, mind and body. From the heart also emerge this mysterious world of sense objects. In the depth of your heart you will experience the great silence and peace of your own existence.

·         The point to be grasped is this, the Heart means the core of one’s Being.’

·         The whole cosmos is contained in one pinhole in the Heart.’

 ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

Theory cannot do much. You must be practical 100%. You have to practice intensively with faith and steady determination to detect and root out all vicious qualities of the mind. At the same time you must enquire in you and discern the Self from the non self. Exercise your discrimination again and again until will flash in you that you are the substratum of body and mind, that you are pure awareness in which body and mind appear. Continue your efforts until all desires, attachments, all samskaras and vasanas and the sense ‘I am the body’ will perish in Toto.

 ·         “The force of impressions is tremendous. Unless all the impressions are thoroughly burnt through entry into the state of the pure Nirvikalpa Samadhi, it is not safe for one to stay a long time in one’s native place. He will still be in the danger zone.”

~ Swami Sivananda

·         ‘No one success without effort and the successful few own their victory to perseverance.’

·         ‘Effort must be made to eradicate the vasanas. Jnana can only remain unshaken after all the vasanas are rooted out.’ 
·         The Ego must, die, must vanish along with the inherent vasanas’.

~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

Then with a mind free of all egoic contents, of rajas, tamas and vasanas you will rest permanent in your own natural state of self-awareness. You will play and dance with life. None object or happening cannot harm you anymore. In all circumstances you will rejoice the bliss of your true nature. You will be an embodiment of peace and harmony on earth. All your desires and goals will be fulfilled.

 ·         When Brahman is realised by means of Nirvikalpa Samadhi, then the heart’s knot viz., Avidya (ignorance), Kama (desire) and Karma (action), is destroyed.

                                                                       ~ Swami Sivananda

·         When through practice we are constantly in that free from thought state (nirvikalpa Samadhi) not going into Samadhi and coming out again, that is the natural state (sahaja state).’                        ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi

~Nityananda

Read also about happiness pleasures and pains:

• Quotes by Sri Nisargadatta about pleasure pain and real happiness 'I Am That'
• Gunas and happiness by Sri Aurobindo
• What is happiness? by Sri Ramana Maharshi
• Conscious freedom from Pleasure & Pain by Swami Sivananda
• Freedom from desire the origin of ego by Nityamuktananda

 Peace, love, harmony