Exactly who is happy here? || Acharya Prashant, with IIT Bombay (2021)
Questioner: Is it necessary to renounce worldly pleasures in order to gain spiritual experience? What should be the approach to living a spiritual life in the context of this modern world?
Acharya Prashant: No, but where are the pleasures? I do not see any pleasures! I do not see anybody being pleased. You are talking of renunciation of pleasures as if pleasures do exist. Where are the pleasures? Go to a weekend party and show me who is happy. And if people were indeed happy, why would they drink? They drink so that they can forget their miserable state. Who is being pleased in all this? Please, tell me.
But you know, we like to pamper ourselves. We flatter ourselves when we say, “Oh, I am living a life of pleasures and spirituality will snatch away my pleasures, so should I consider spirituality or not?” What kind of bluster is this?
Nobody is happy here, please. Just scratch the surface and you will find. What do you think, those Facebook faces are real? Why do you think people have to display their teeth so much? If one is really happy, it is an internal confirmation. You don’t have to seek validity from everybody. You don’t have to go around tom-tomming your happiness.
So, please drop the illusion that people are indeed happy. This thing about being indeed happy, truly happy, is called joy. We don’t have it, and that is why we run after flimsy pleasures. Spirituality is not about dropping the real thing; it is about dropping false pleasures so that you can have real joy. And false pleasures are the same as suffering. So, spirituality is about dropping suffering so that you can have joy.
All these things that we do to get pleased are just a confirmation of our internal state of wails and tears. Look at the faces of the people on any busy road, stand at a crossing and watch. People are rushing to their offices, it is 9 a.m.; just look at their faces. Are they really in pleasure? Where is pleasure?
Spirituality wants you to have true pleasure. To be spiritual is to go hunting madly, wildly for real pleasure. And to differentiate the real thing from the fake one, a very different name is given: ānanda (joy). Not prasannatā (gladness), not khuśi (delight), not sukha (pleasure)—ānanda . That is real, and that is not dependent on an intoxicant; that is not dependent on when Amazon would put up its next discount fest; that is not dependent on how soon your neighbor loses his job so that you can be happy; that is not dependent on how quickly you can dupe your girlfriend into going to bed with you, or boyfriend, whatever.
Unconditional pleasure. Unconditional, continuous, uncaused pleasure—that is joy. Irrespective of the circumstances, there is a subtle thing within that refuses to be miserable—that is joy. Vedanta says, do not settle for anything less than joy. You deserve that. Otherwise, you are just wasting your life running hither-thither, trying for this and that.
Be adamant. Don’t surrender. Don’t prostrate to temptations or threats. Say, “I want something that time cannot take away. I want something that situations and conditions cannot take away. I want something that I can be utterly secure of. I want something that I can whole-heartedly trust. I don’t want to live in the flow of time where everything just comes and goes and nothing is ever reliable. I don’t want relationships that need to be fortified. I don’t want money that I need to be anxious about. All these are alright—one has to have money, one will definitely have relationships—but I want something higher and deeper than that. Only then will I say that I have succeeded as an individual.”
So, Vedanta impels you, encourages you to go for real success. Real success is joy. Doesn’t matter what one is doing externally; as we said, internally there is something that is always jovial. Even in the greatest of miseries there sits someone within who has a joke to offer. That is joy.
“You are coming to behead me? Even in this situation, I find a PJ (poor joke) arising! What do I do? I know I will be gone the next moment in the physical sense but still, here, before I go, can we take a little joke from me?” Joy!
