Spiritual Message for the Day – Pleasure Is Not Happiness by Sri Swami Chidananda
Baba Times Digest© | 24 May 2015 20.40 EST | New York Edition
Pleasure Is Not Happiness
Divine Life Society Publication: The Path Beyond Sorrow by Sri Swami Chidananda
When we observe life on the human plane, what do we see? Everyone is in constant quest of true happiness. Happiness is the quest of smiles; we have concealed sighs and sorrows, much grief and disappointment. Why? Why is this phenomenon observed everywhere in the world? This question has been pondered over, has been investigated. And we have been answered. With the dawn of discrimination, we come to realise that we have done something very foolish, because we have missed the path which leads to happiness and strayed off into the by-paths of pleasures. Happiness is one thing; mere pleasure is another. Missing the path to happiness and wandering off into the by-paths of pleasures, we are, as it were, lost beings wandering in a jungle where we do not know the correct direction to take, the correct path to pursue, to reach the destination.
Why did we miss our way? Why this wandering in search of true happiness on the part of all people and their seeming inability to find that after which they quest? It is because the great majority of them never make the right start. Before starting on the search for happiness, one never gets clear as to what is the nature of this happiness one is after and wherein does it lie. Without knowing the destination, without knowing exactly what we wish to obtain, we have started this seeking just because that has been the pattern into which we are born. We are born into a world where all beings everywhere around us are going after something, behaving in a certain way, and we think, “I am born among people living like this and I also have to live like this”; and so that pattern has become an automatic pattern with everyone. We are born into a way of life. We have entered into a current which leads us just where it has been leading the people here from time immemorial—into a whirlpool of disappointments, tears, disillusionments, pains and sufferings which are inevitable in this embodied state upon this earth-plane. Pleasures can never bring true happiness, because the very nature of pleasure is that it is an experience derived from contacts with sense-objects; and quite naturally, it partakes of the imperfections that are inherent in the sense-objects.
All Objects are conditioned in space and time. They are neither permanent nor perfect. They are full of defects, they change, they pass away, and they give experiences which are mixed, which are not unalloyed. All pleasures are imperfect, because they spring out of objects which are themselves imperfect. These sense experiences are of very doubtful value and they are mixed with various side-effects. Every contact-born sense experience inevitably has bound up with it a reaction. If you are eating something very tasty beyond your limits, even as you are tasting it, there is a fear that perhaps tomorrow you will have to take a pill or a dose. Every sense experience has a reaction which brings in anxiety and lack of peace of mind. In the ultimate analysis, these sense experiences turn out to be purely negative experiences; they do not deserve the name of pleasure or happiness at all. They are not positive experiences at all.
Excerpts from: Pleasure Is Not Happiness - The Path Beyond Sorrow by Sri Swami Chidananda
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