Transform Your Mind

It is the pursuit of happiness which prevents happiness from happening and, until this realisation happens, the pursuits must go on. What is seeking happiness is Consciousness. Impersonal consciousness had identified itself with a particular body-minded organism (form) and a name as a separate entity; and it is this trapped, unidentified consciousness which is seeking its personality. When the ego, the practical seeker of everything in life, takes over the search for happiness, pleasure is mistaken for happiness in the flow of life... The few egos that focus on real happiness become spiritual seekers, for they realise that what they are seeking is not to be found in the flow of life, but in their attitude. The Greek word metanoesis implies changing the mind, but means transformation of mind. Transformation happens. The Sanskrit word for it is paravritti, meaning turning around at the deepest level of the heart-mind. Paravritti tells the seeker-ego that happiness is not something to be pursued and achieved. It is one’s natural state. We’re instructed from childhood that life means competition with the other, and happiness means success over the other, in the classroom as well as playing fields. The other is seen as a potential enemy. Ultimately, happiness means not something in the flow of life, it is the attitude to life — paravritti or metanoesis. And the most important point about it is that there is no “doing” in it. It is a pure happening.

Source: Economic Times, 14/01/2019