Realize Your Independence and Remain Happy
All knowledge is about the “I Am.” False ideas about this “I Am” lead to bondage - right knowledge leads to freedom and happiness.
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To know is to be. Real happiness flows from within.
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Nothing can make you happier than you are. All search for happiness is misery and leads to more misery. The only happiness worth the name is the natural happiness of conscious being.
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Now go within, into a state which you may compare to a state of waking sleep, in which you are aware of yourself, but not of the world. In that state you will know, without the least trace of doubt, that at the root of your being you are free and happy.
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One cannot help [but remain happy] — the inner happiness is overwhelmingly real. Like the sun in the sky, its expressions may be clouded, but it is never absent. Pleasure depends on things, happiness does not. As long as we believe that we need things to make us happy, we shall also believe that in their absence we must be miserable.
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Mind always shapes itself according to its beliefs. Hence the importance of convincing oneself that one need not be prodded into happiness; on the contrary, pleasure is a distraction and a nuisance, for it merely increases the false conviction that one needs to have and do things to be happy when in reality it is just the opposite.
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Real happiness is utterly unselfconscious. It is best expressed negatively as, “There is nothing wrong with me. I have nothing to worry about.” After all, the ultimate purpose of all sadhana [spiritual practice] is to reach a point when this conviction, instead of being only verbal, is based on the actual and ever-present experience.
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Find out for yourself the state of wakeful sleep, and you will find it quite in harmony with your Real Nature. Words can only give you the idea, and the idea is not the experience. All I can say is that true happiness has no cause, and what has no cause is immovable.
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To know the Self as the only reality, and all else as temporal and transient, is freedom, peace and joy.
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Realize your independence and remain happy. I tell you, this is the secret of happiness. To believe that you depend on things and people for happiness is due to ignorance of your true nature. To know that you need nothing to be happy, except Self Knowledge, is wisdom.
Nisarga Yoga - Compiled from I AM THAT - Nisargadatta Maharaj
