The ecstatic experience of Love as a key to unseal the treasure of Authentic Happiness

An abstract from Thought, Emotions and Realizations,

by Matsyavatara Dasa

Life is exchanging love, we give love because it was given.

The lack of love leads to an unhappy life, dominated by its personality shade. If we do not clarify the misunderstanding of what identity is, love will never be developed: this feeling made of divine knowledge, runs the risk to downgrade as sentimentalism and we get to know life only by means of sensory mechanism.

Throughout time it was stated that two people exist within us. One is the historic self, called “false ego”: suspenseful, arrogant, proud, irritable, egocentric and substantially fearful and vile. The other one is the Self, the spiritual Self often unseen, the atman, whose clear voice of wisdom is seldom heard and even more rarely listened to. The self (word used by Yung), the soul (christian word), the atman, (vedantic word), is the only real existing identity. The ego is but a shadow of the self and it is mistaken for real due to a distorted mental image, known in our language as immedesimation.

Self immedesimation in something different from the real self, is the origin of entanglement, which is the cause of all attachments to a number of unreal objects that are by nature subjected to transformation, degradation and dissolution. The strongest among all attachments, widely spread and considered an absolutely normal symptom is the identification with the body. Although we may come to the conclusion that we are not the physical body, very few people do not identify themselves with it.

It is also true that the human body is a gift from God, a very precious instrument, but it is not our Self. The nervous system is a powerful machine created to make us successful, to take us to our original dimension, the most fascinating biological structure we could ever imagine, but it is not life in itself. When life leaves the body, for instance after an infarct, although the whole nervous system is undamaged from a physiological point of view, you can rely that a person is dead. Therefore the doer that makes this machine work wonderfully is the atman, the object of our research.

Modern civilization achieved great results in countless fields, nevertheless it produced an odd culture inclined to satisfy an obsessive identification with the body, the need to acquire richness in order to satisfy ambitions of power, by claiming to exorcise fear even knowing that, by definition, richness is like the water of the sea, the more you drink it the more thirsty you are. The fake myth of an easy going life, based on the pleasure of the senses is the heaviest calamity, the most painful and dreadful of all. Richness, aging, youth, beauty do not guarantee happiness otherwise the problems of drug, violence, alcohol addiction, tobaccoism would not be so widely spread.

In the absence of enlightenment because of the identification with the mind, pleasure is often seen as the pleasant and fleeting time of the continuous and swinging cycle through pain and pleasure. Pleasure comes from something which is outside of us, whereas joy comes from within us. What gives us joy one day, is the cause of pain the day after, for how long as it may last, sooner or later we will have to separate from it, and its absence will be the cause of pain. If we think on it, we may well find that each pleasure carries with it the seed of pain, the other face of the coin, which will be known with time.

When passion stirs the heart and the mind we feel a lot of pain because of material entanglements. Such energies will not be good for us if they are not organized, harmonized and directed well.

Many disruptive tendencies are considered harmless because the difference between the Self and the false ego is not well acknowledged or discerned, neither clear is the discrimination between what is ephemeral or real (avidya).

We need the Knowledge to direct and transform tendencies, the same as it is done with the water of a rough river when its impetuous, disruptive force is converted into electrical energy to make the mill turn pump.

A wonderful system was given to us to enable our psychological structure to succeed for the realization of our self-consciousness and upgrade our evolutionary process. The ability to reflect on our thinking process and to detach ourselves from emotions is an exclusive prerogative of mankind, which makes us different from animals, whose psychological structure is not more evolved than humans. Human beings own the prerogative to control tendencies, which instead rule among animals and they are called instincts. This is the great difference in the animal kingdom between humans and the so called animals. We can analyse our paradigms to see whether they are either real or depend from our conditionings, or impermanent situations of all kinds. Animals cannot change their tendencies, whereas humans can. Perhaps it may cost a sacrifice but it is worth it. The enterprise to elevate our consciousness, (indeed it is a true and real enterprise), and to expand our own vision of reality is the greatest decision for a human being to claim. You would have never spent your time, your health, your energy any better. Those who consume energy, health, time and money in ephemeral enterprises can only but grow their own poverty and unsatisfaction.

As a matter of fact all that you had wished for, once received would reveal its intrinsic inconsistency and temporary term. Each dream vanishes by facing its reality, except for the Self and God. For this reason the wise men of all religious traditions say that this world is meant to suffer, that the experience of life is an experience of pain. However if this may be true in a general sense, it makes no rule for each person who, by using the power of will is able to transform one’s destiny and experience success by nourishing himself with the feeling of love, the reason of living for all of us.

The ecstatic emotion of love, satisfaction and intense happiness can be experienced too, in the dimension of life we actually live, by gaining freedom from entanglement of all attachments .

The vedic literature describes the identity of jivanmukta, as a combination of two sanscrit words: jivan, which means life and mukta which is the past participle of moksha, freedom, and can be translated as a liberated being. Therefore jivanmukta means “free in life”. According to the Veda this word is used very often and it shows that it is possible to gain freedom even here, although the jiva is temporarily embodied . The ecstatic emotion is the inner nature of the soul, its more related attitude or atman svabhava. When this dimension is simply touched it is called bhava, when we enter into it it is called prema. Even a simple contact with it produces emotions which become unforgettable for the rest of our whole life.