Spiritual Message for the Day – Your Unhappiness Is Your Own Creation by  Sri Swami Chidananda

Baba Times Digest© | 27 May 2015 17.15 EST | New York Edition

Your Unhappiness Is Your Own Creation

Divine Life Society Publication: The Path Beyond Sorrow by Sri Swami Chidananda

Unhappiness is your own creation. It is self-created. It is due to non-discrimination and due to your having become the slave of your own senses. And therefore, what you have yourself caused, you have it within your own power to cast aside. So, even as your sorrow has been self-caused, your happiness too can be self obtained through your own efforts. It does not have to be self-created, because it is there already. It has only to be grasped and this is in your own hands. You are the one who has to move towards that which is awaiting you to experience it.

How can you set about doing it? The basic thing is that happiness springs out of a life of virtue. There cannot be happiness without virtue. This unique opportunity of a human birth has been given to you to obtain something which is grand and which is glorious. Delay not! Why should you prolong your bondage because of desires? Why not assert your essential master-nature and claim that glory which is already there?

Your nature always manifests itself, expresses itself, upon a threefold plane—the plane of body, an interior plane about which you do not know (there is a plane of psychic energy within, which makes this body active, dynamic, and function), and the third plane of your mind where thoughts, ideas and desires constantly keep operating. And virtue is that factor; that force in your life, which refines your entire being on all the three planes. It refines the physical, it refines the psychic within, and it refines your mind; and it is only in a mind thus refined and made pure that steadiness, balance and absence of desire become possible.

You may try your hardest, but from a mind that is not pure, you cannot drive out desires, because mental impurity and desire are synonymous terms. Passion and impurity tend to put your entire being into a state of agitation on the three levels upon which I have commented. It is the nature of passion to agitate. Likewise, it is the very nature of purity to steady, to sustain, to strengthen and to make inward.

Therefore, it is a deep psycho-spiritual truth that the practice of virtues like purity, simplicity, truth, compassion, selflessness, humility, removal of greed, and removal of envy and jealousy and prejudice brings about a slow transformation in all your nature and makes it refined, subtle and pure; and with the advent of purity, the condition of the mind undergoes a change. That mind which was restlessly plunging outward towards objects of the senses, begins to go inward, begins to develop calmness. With the mind thus collected within through purity, you slowly begin to have little glimpses of the true happiness that springs from your own inner Self.

One cannot be impure and hope to have happiness. One cannot cling to objects in blind delusion and attachment and yet hope to have happiness. You cannot, out of your selfishness and hardness, cause pain and sorrow to others and at the same time hope to have happiness for yourself. The more you give happiness to others, the more you get happiness. This is the law. The refinement of one’s nature, the culture and purity of one’s whole personality—that is the indispensable prerequisite for the dawn of happiness in one’s life.

Thus happiness is the product of selflessness, the product of negating the constant pull of the senses, the product of virtue actively practised in your everyday life. If you are pure, all the unhappiness that comes out of the guilt of impure living is gone. If you are simple, all the complications and frustrations arising out of a desire-ridden personality are gone. A simple life immediately relieves you from the strain of constant desires. If you are truthful, you can yourself know that the whole world of constant fear and anxiety which follows untruth is immediately gone. One untruth, and to protect it you have to repeat a dozen untruths, and then your mind is in a constant state of fear and anxiety: “If found out, what will be the result?” By sticking to truth, you totally eliminate all the fear and anxiety and unhappiness which untruth or falsehood puts you into.

Then, contentment. When you are contented, you are the richest person in the whole world. You do not have any jealousy. When you are fully contented with what you have, you do not envy others who have more than what you have. Rather, you rejoice in the good fortune of others.

Excerpts from: Your Unhappiness Is Your Own Creation - The Path Beyond Sorrow by Sri Swami Chidananda

If you would like to purchase the print edition, visit: The Divine Life Society E-Bookstore

If you would like to contribute to the dissemination of spiritual knowledge please contact the General Secretary at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.">This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

SEND FEED BACK ON THIS ARTICLE >>> Email to BT Digest Editor ( This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.)