Happiness Is Available Right Now

The masters always teach that the key to happiness is surrender to the will of God. The opposite of such surrender is ego, and ego manifests itself through attachment. Therefore, the saints say that our misery, all our misery, is due to attachment. The most significant attachment we suffer from is not the attachment to other people. It is the attachment to our idea of “the way things should be.” We have a deeply integrated concept of who we are, how people should view us, and what we have – our houses, our cars, our positions, our status, our seva positions, our reputation and honour in the sangat, and so forth. All these have been incorporated into our ego. Our great big attachment is to this entire picture of how our life is and should continue to be. It is part and parcel of our sense of self. Put all this together and we have created a self-centred stage for the petty drama of our own lives. Most of our energy is spent maintaining and preserving this stage and our role within it. Let us label this “Our Drama”. When any disturbance occurs in Our Drama, we freak out. Loss of money wrecks Our Drama. Loss of loved ones wrecks Our Drama. Loss of position, loss of health, any loss we can imagine, disturbs Our Drama and we feel pain when this happens. Not just loss but change, any kind of change, threatens Our Drama. So it stands to reason that a global pandemic is going to wreak havoc with Our Drama.

The root of our trouble is that we think the purpose of human life, this life which the Lord has conferred upon us as a valuable gift, is to defend and protect and preserve and maintain Our Drama. We forget that as Hazur has said:

The purpose of human life is to enable us to know ourselves and to know the Lord, which cannot be accomplished in any other form. ¹

Isn’t it the case that we find out more about ourselves in times of crisis? Suddenly, instead of worrying about a house, we realize that health is more important or that it is love that counts, not money. When a real shock comes along, we are torn away from our comfort zone and we turn to God. As Our Drama is destroyed, we find that the lasting wealth is our faith and love and that our priorities have been distorted by stupid attachments. Now we wish that we had prioritized meditation so that, instead of reading messages about Baba Ji’s phone calls to comfort the sangats around the world, we had developed an inner relationship beyond the physical where we need no WhatsApp to keep in touch with our master.

Let us use this pandemic crisis to achieve real change within ourselves. Let us resolve firmly to abandon Our Drama and surrender to the Lord’s drama, His play… After all, His play is going to occur whether we like it or not. He will ignore Our Drama and unfold his own play. Why not let go and submit and enjoy?

Take life easily as it comes. Worry never helped anybody. There is a Higher Power that guides our destinies. Try to move along with His Will. He alone knows what is best for us. He is all good and merciful. Give yourself up to His Hands. May the Lord bless you. ²

If we jettison Our Drama and become open to His Will, then whatever comes is acceptable and will not make us unhappy. In fact, properly viewed, whatever the Lord sends to us will be a source of fun and joy for us. Let us treat the whole global pandemic as an adventure. Life had become too boring and predictable. Now everything is shaken up. How exciting. What a challenge.

The challenge for us all is to put the teachings into practice. Of course, it is easy to feel that we are surrendering to His Will when things are going well. However, we really discover how little submission we have when things get difficult. Perhaps we can embrace this challenge as an opportunity to test ourselves, as an exercise in self-discovery. Baba Ji often encourages us to be objective in our thinking. All the mystics have extolled the virtues of clear thinking. Maybe we can become a little less involved and a little more objective by viewing these events as if we were watching a movie. After all, saints say that this drama was scripted before we were born. Some people even enjoy watching disaster movies, but it is not so much fun when we are actually in the midst of the disaster. Based on our knowledge of the law of karma and the teachings of our masters, we could try to observe the current events as if this Covid 19 Global Pandemic were also a movie, now being released not by Netflix but by Karmaflix. While we may view it as an unavoidable part of the divine plan, it’s still a good idea to do our part as actors in the movie: keep a safe distance from the other actors, wash our hands frequently, keep our faith and trust in God’s love, and above all, never miss our bhajan and simran even in the midst of this scary film.