Life is fulfilling,but you are not in contact with life.Old contact is lost,new has not been made.You are in a transmission,hence you are so dull,hence life looks so mediocre,sad,boring even futile.
Says Jean-Paul Sartre: Man is a useless passion futile,impotent passion,unnecessarily making much fuss about life,and there is nothing in it... meaningless is life.The more you become enclosed in yourself,the more life becomes meaningless.Then you are miserable.Then misery has some other pay-offs.
When you are happy you are ordinary,because to be happy is just to be natural.To be miserable is to become extraordinary.Nothing is special in being happy trees are happy;so are birds,animals and children.What is special its the usual thing in existence.Existence is made of the stuff called happiness.Just look! Cant you see these trees,so happy Birds are singing.Happiness is a very ordinary thing.
To be blissful is to be absolutely ordinary.The self,the ego,does not allow that.Thats why people talk so much about their miseries;they become special by doing so.People go on talking about their illness,their headache,their stomach,their this and that.All people are in some way or other hypochondriacs.And if somebody does not believe in your misery,you feel hurt.If somebody sympathises with you and believes in your misery even your exaggerated version of it you feel very happy.This is something stupid,but has to be understood.
A miserable man can have a more concentrated ego than a happy man.A happy man really cannot have ego,because a person becomes happy only when there is no ego.The more egoless you are,the more happy;the more happy,the more egoless.You dissolve into happiness.You cannot exist together with happiness;you exist only when there is misery.In happiness there is dissolution.
Have you ever seen any happy moment;watched it In happiness,you are not.When you are in love,you are not.If love has ever made its abode in your heart,even for a few moments,you are not.When you see the beautiful sun rising,a silent lake,or a flower,suddenly,you are not.When there is beauty,when there is love,you are not.
Hearing someone,if you feel there is truth,you simply disappear in that moment.You are not,truth is.Whenever there is something of the beyond,you are not;you have to make space for it.You are only when there is misery,when there is a lie,when there is something wrong.You are only when the shoe does not fit.When the shoe fits perfectly,you are not.Then you forget the feet,you forget the shoe.When there is no headache there is no head.If you want to feel your head,you will need a headache;that is the only way.
To be is to be miserable.To be happy is not to be.
When a person learns to read,difficulties arise;now the self is rising.In villages,people are happy.They are closer to trees and nature than in London or New York.Trees have disappeared;there are only asphalt roads,concrete buildings,all man-made.
The farther away you go from nature,the farther you are from happiness.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
When The Shoe Does Fit OSHO, TOI SPEAKING TREE
Saturday, November 5, 2011
Mumukhu Musings
Each morning when I
open my eyes I say to
myself: I, not events, have
the power to make me
happy or unhappy today. I
can choose which it shall
be. Yesterday is dead,
tomorrow hasn't arrived
yet. I have just one day,
today, and I'm going to
be happy in it."
-GROUCHO MARX
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
5 simple steps: Happiness guaranteed Sonal Kalra
This world has two kinds of people. Those who keep waiting for the right time to be happy and those who do not postpone joy!
Chalo ji, tension over. I thought with life being so unpredictable, who knows till when will I get an opportunity to give you gyaan about calm-sutra. Let us, in one stroke, figure out the magic formula for happiness. I can see that some of you have already put the cynics' cap on, and are rolling your eyes on this 243567th attempt by a self-help writer to tell you how to be happy. I wish I could humour your cynicism further by saying things like, 'no one, but I, can teach you how to be happy', but all that is bullshit and you know it.
Nothing I ever say in this column is something you don't already know. But you still read it, right? Please allow me to share the steps I recently followed to drag myself out of a phase where I was feeling a bit low and out of sync. Believe me, these five steps work, no matter what the nature or cause of your unhappiness is. Because this formula, my dearies, focuses on the solution, not the problem. Instant satisfaction guaranteed. Please send Rs. 1000 by cash/cheque/Bank DD (It had anyway started to sound like an ad to cure impotency, so added that for effect :).
1 Check your surroundings
Close your eyes (not now, Einstein, after you finish reading the column) and think about the people you normally spend your day in the company of…colleagues, boss, classmates, facebook friends. Ask yourself if you are spending your days being around people who are mostly happy. If the answer to that is no, please stand up. Bend your right leg backwards and raise it till your foot reaches the right level. Kick yourself in the a**. Heart patients and pregnant women, please abstain. Those who are planning to write to me saying it's impossible to kick yourself over 'there', please remember that you will have to first admit that you actually tried it.
Anyway, the point is this. Happiness is an infectious trait. You have to be around positive people to catch the right infection. If you are wasting away your time in the company of
constant whiners and people who have nothing good to say about anyone or anything, you will, sooner or later, start to sound like them. Avoid. If you have to be physically around them out of compulsion, learn to switch off mentally at the very moment someone starts to say something negative. Start thinking about Rakhi Sawant saying she wants to marry Baba Ramdev, but remember to nod at frequent intervals, with an utterly serious expression, to not give it away.
2 Take the Joy-Test
Every Friday evening, take a piece of paper and on one side, make a list of problems you are going through. (Note: if your list mentions the word boyfriend/girlfriend more than twice, stand again and repeat the exercise you did in step 1, you loser!). On the other side, make a list of things that gave you joy in the past week. Simple pleasures like sharing a cup of coffee with an old friend from school and remembering the crush you both had on the biology teacher. Or indulging in that extra helping of French fries you had when no one else was looking. Or waking up to see that beautiful bird perched on your balcony at sunrise. For every two joys on your list, give yourself one mark. If the total number of joy-marks are more than the number of problems on your list, you have passed the joy test for the week. Treat yourself to something you really enjoy, on Saturday. Make it a rule to do this for six months and you'll start adding more joys to make every Saturday of your life memorable.
3 Kill the 'when' word
The biggest rule in the happiness formula is simple - abhi nahi toh kabhi nahi. If you ever talk about being happy in a sentence, which has the word 'when' at the end, you're not getting it right. 'I'll be happy 'when' - I will - get good marks, get admission, get a job, be rich, lose weight, get married, have babies, buy my dream car, get retired, blah, blah and blah.' The moment you use the word 'when', you put a condition on your happiness. Since your mind is not your slave, it retaliates by ensuring that when you achieve any of these, the condition shifts to the next benchmark. Kill the when. Right now.
4 Try out something crazy, and new
If the first thought that came to your mind was 'drugs', I'm alarmed at what kind of weirdos read my column. It is a scientifically proven fact that doing something you've never done before releases happy hormones in your body. I checked it in my own state-of-the-art laboratory. And no, you don't have to now suddenly think of bungee jumping or deep sea diving. Ek toh movies ne hamein bigaad diya hai. We don't look at simpler things. How about spending an entire day-out, just with yourself. Go, watch a movie alone, then head off to the market and gift yourself something really nice, get into a restaurant and enjoy a lavish meal with a nice drink. For a lot of us, even that has never been tried before. We are too busy putting riders on our own enjoyment. Give yourself a break.
5 Infect others
If as per step 1, your happiness rests on having happy people in your life, surely you also have to be one such person for those who have you in their lives. Last week I happened to be invited to a party where I did not really know anyone from before, except the host. I was obviously wary of spending much time in the company of people I hadn't met before, and kept looking at my watch every five minutes, till I got introduced to this group of women who were laughing the loudest. They turned out to be so full-of-life and happy that the next time I looked at my watch, it was 4am. Happiness, as I said, is infectious. It would have been fairly easy for those women to have spent time cribbing about jobs, kids, mother-in-laws, weight … but they chose to spend time laughing and cracking jokes. If you spread laughter, God figures out a way to reward you by giving more reasons to laugh often. If you become the reason for someone else failing their joy-test, you are unlikely to pass yours for too long. Simple.