Cultivating Right Attitudes

 

MANY THINGS HAVE TO be understood before one can understand this sutra. First, the natural attitudes: whenever you see somebody happy, you feel jealous - not happy, never happy. You feel miserable. That's the natural attitude, the attitude that you have already got. And Patanjali says the mind becomes tranquil by cultivating attitudes of friendliness towards the happy - very difficult. To be friendly with someone who is happy is one of the most difficult things in life.

Ordinarily, you think it is very easy. It is not! Just the opposite is the case. You feel jealous, you feel miserable. You may show happiness, but that's just a facade, a show, a mask. And how you can be happy? And how you can be tranquil, silent, if you have such an attitude?

Because the whole life is celebrating, millions of happinesses happening all over the universe, but if you have an attitude of jealousy, you will be miserable, you will be in a constant hell. And you will be in a hell precisely because all over there is heaven. You will create a hell for you - a private hell - because whole existence is celebrating.

If somebody is happy, what comes first to your mind? - as if that happiness has been taken from you, as if he has won and you are defeated, as if he has cheated you... Happiness is not a competition, so don't be worried. If somebody is happy, it does not mean that you cannot be happy, that he has taken happiness - now how you can be happy. Happiness is not somewhere existing, which can be exhausted by happy people.

Why you feel jealous? If somebody is rich, maybe it is difficult for you to be rich because riches exist in a quantity. If somebody is powerful in a material way, it may be difficult for you to be powerful because power is a competition. But happiness is not a competition. Happiness exists in infinite quantity. Nobody has ever been able to exhaust it; there is no competition at all. If somebody is happy, why you feel jealous? And with jealousy, enters hell in you.

Says Patanjali, when somebody is happy, feel happy, feel friendly. Then you also open a door towards happiness. In a subtle way, if you can feel friendly with someone who is happy, you immediately start sharing his happiness; it has become yours also - immediately! And happiness is not some THING; it is not material. It is not something that somebody can cling to. You can share it. When a flower blooms, you can share it; when a bird sings, you can share it; when somebody is happy, you can share it. And the beauty is that it does not depend on his sharing. It depends on your partaking.

If it depended on his sharing, whether he shares or not, then it was totally a different thing. He may not like to share. But this is not a question at all, it does not depend on his sharing. When the sun rises in the morning you can be happy, and the sun cannot do anything about it. It cannot prevent you being happy. Somebody is happy: you can be friendly. It is totally your own attitude, and he cannot prevent you by sharing. Immediately you open a door, and his happiness flows towards you also.

This is the secret of creating a heaven all around you, and only within heaven can you be tranquil. How can you be tranquil in hell-fire? And nobody is creating it: you create it. So the basic thing to be understood is that whenever there is misery, hell, you are the cause of it. Never throw the responsibility on anybody else because that throwing of responsibility is escaping from the basic truth.

If you are miserable, only you - absolutely only you - are responsible. Look within and find the cause of it. And nobody wants to be miserable. If you can find the cause within you, you can throw it out. Nobody is standing in your way to prevent you. There is not a single obstacle to be happy.

But by being friendly towards happy people, you become attuned to happiness. They are flowering; you become friendly. They may not be friendly; that is none of your concern. They may not even know you - that doesn't matter. But wherever there is a blooming, wherever there is bliss, wherever somebody is flowering, wherever somebody is dancing and is happy and is smiling, wherever there is celebration, you become friendly, you partake of it. It starts flowing within you, and nobody can prevent it. And when there is happiness all around you, you feel tranquil.

With the happy, you feel jealous - in a subtle competition. With happy people, you feel yourself inferior. You always choose people around you who are unhappy. You become friendly with unhappy people because with unhappy people you feel superior. You always seek somebody who is below you. You are always afraid of the higher; you always seek the lower, and the more you seek the lower, the lower you fall. Then even more lower people are needed.

Seek the company of those who are higher than you - higher in wisdom, higher in happiness, higher in tranquility, calmness, quiet, collectedness: always seek the company of the higher because that is the way how you become higher, how you transcend the valleys and reach to the peaks. That becomes a ladder. Always seek the company of the higher, the beautiful, the happy - you will become more beautiful, you will become more happy.

And once the secret is known, once you know how one becomes more happy, how with others' happiness you create a situation for yourself also to be happy, then there is no barrier; then you can go as far as you like. You can become a god where no unhappiness exists.

Who is a god? A god is one who has learned the secret to be happy with the whole universe, with every flower and with every river and with every rock and every star, who has become one with this continuous eternal celebration, who celebrates, who doesn't bother whose celebration is this. Wherever there is a celebration, he participates. This art of participating in happiness is one of the foundations if you want to be happy. It has to be followed.

Just the opposite you have been doing: if somebody is happy, immediately you are shocked. How is it possible? How come you are not happy and he has become happy? There is injustice. This whole world is cheating you and there is no God. If God is, how come you are not happy and others are becoming happy? And these people who are happy, they are the exploiters, they are tricky, cunning. They live on your blood. They are sucking others' happiness.

Nobody is sucking anybody's happiness. Happiness is such a phenomenon, there is no need to suck it. It is an inner flowering; it doesn't come from the outside. Just by being happy with happy people you create the situation in which your own inner flower starts blooming:

You create the attitude of enmity. You can feel friendly with a sad person, and you think it is very virtuous. You can feel friendly with someone who is depressed, in misery, and you think it is something religious, something moral you are doing, but what are you doing, you don't know.

Whenever you feel friendly with someone who is sad, depressed, unhappy, miserable, you create misery for you. It looks very irreligious, Patanjali's attitude. It is not, because when you will understand his whole standpoint you will see what he means. He is very scientific. He is not a sentimental person, and sentimentality won't help you.

One has to be very very clear:

Not friendliness - compassion. Compassion is a different quality; friendliness is different. Friendliness means you are creating a situation in which you would like to be the same as the other person is, you would like to be the same as your friend. Compassion means that someone has fallen from his state. You would like to help him, but you would not like to be like him. You would like to give him a hand; you would like to bring him up, cheer him up. You would like to help him in every way, but you would not like to be like him because that is not a help.

Somebody is crying and weeping, and you sit by the side and you start crying and weeping: are you helping him? In what way? Somebody is miserable and you become miserable; are you helping him? You may be doubling his misery. He was alone miserable; now there are two persons miserable. But in showing sympathy to the miserable you are again playing a trick. Deep down, when you show sympathy to the miserable - and remember, sympathy is not compassion; sympathy is friendliness. When you show sympathy and friendliness to a depressed, sad, miserable person, deep down you are feeling happy. Always there is an undercurrent of happiness. It has to be so because it is a simple arithmetic: when somebody is happy, you feel miserable, then how it is possible when somebody is miserable you can feel unhappy? Somebody is happy you feel miserable; then somebody is unhappy, deep down you feel very happy.

But you don't show it. Or, if you are observed acutely even you show it - even in your sympathy there is a subtle current of happiness. You feel good; you feel cheered up really, that it is not you who is unhappy, and you are in a position to show sympathy - and you are higher, superior.

People always feel good when they can show sympathy to others; they are always cheered. Deep down they feel that they are not so miserable, thank God. When somebody dies, immediately an undercurrent in you comes that you are still alive, thank God. And you can show sympathy and it costs nothing. Showing sympathy costs nothing, but compassion is a different thing. Compassion means you would like to kelp the other person; you would like to do whatsoever can be done; you would like to help him to come out of his misery. You are not happy about it, but you are not miserable also.

And just between the two exists compassion: Buddha is in compassion. He will not feel miserable with you because that is not going to help anybody, and he will not feel happy because there is no point in feeling happy. How can you feel happy when somebody is miserable? But he cannot feel unhappy also because that is not going to help. He will feel compassion. Compassion exists just in between these two. Compassion means he would like to help you to come out of it. He is for you, compassion means, but against your misery; he loves you, but not your misery. He would like to bring you up, but not your misery with you.

When you are sympathetic you start loving the misery, not the man who is miserable. And if suddenly the man is cheered up and says, "Don't bother," you will feel shocked, because he never gave you a chance to be sympathetic and show him that how higher, superior and happy a being you are.

Don't be miserable with somebody who is miserable. Help him to come out of it. Never make misery an object of love; don't give any affection to misery, because if you give affection and you make it an object of love, you are opening a door for it. Sooner or later you will become miserable. Remain aloof. Compassion means remain aloof. Extend your hand, remain aloof, help - don't feel miserable, don't feel happy, because both are the same. When you feel miserable on the surface with somebody's misery, deep down runs the current of being happy. Both have to be dropped. Compassion will bring you tranquility of the mind.

Many people come to me; they are social reformers, revolutionaries, politicians, utopians, and they say, "How you can teach people meditation and silence when there is so much misery in the world?" They tell me, "This is selfish." They would like me to teach people to be miserable with others who are miserable. They don't know what they are saying but they feel very good - doing social work, social service, they feel very good. And if suddenly the world becomes a heaven, and God says, "Now everything will be okay," you will find the social reformers and revolutionaries in absolute misery, because they will have nothing to do.

Khalil Gibran has written a small parable. In a city, in a big city, there was a dog who was a preacher and a missionary, and he preached to other dogs that "Stop barking. We waste almost ninety-nine percent of our energy in barking unnecessarily. That's why we have not been evolving. Stop barking unnecessarily."

But it is difficult for dogs to stop barking. That is an in-built process. Really they feel happy only when they bark. It is a catharsis. They feel silent when they have barked. So, they listened to the leader - the revolutionary, the utopian, who was thinking of kingdom of gods, kingdom of dogs, somewhere in the coming future, where every dog is reformed and has become religious - no barking, no fighting, everything is silent... a pacifist, must have been - that missionary.

But dogs are dogs. They will listen to him and then they will say, "You are a great man, and whatsoever you say is true. But we are helpless, poor dogs. We don't understand such big things." So all the dogs felt guilty because they couldn't stop. And they believed in the message of the leader, and he was right: rationally, they could follow. But what to do with the bodies? The bodies are irrational. Whenever there will be a chance - a sannyasin walking - they will bark: a policeman, a postman... because they are against uniforms.

It was almost impossible for them, and they had settled it that "That dog is a great man, and we cannot follow. He is like an avatar - something from the other shore. So we will worship him, but how can we follow him? And that leader was always true to his word: he never barked. But one day everything failed. One night, dark night, the dogs decided that, "This great leader is always trying to convert us, and we never listen to him. At least once a year, on the birthday of the leader, we should keep complete fast: no barking - absolute silence - no matter how difficult. At least once a year we can do that," they decided.

And on that night not a single dog barked. The leader went from this corner to that, this street to that, to watch, because wherever dogs will be barking, he will preach. He started feeling very miserable because nobody is barking; the whole night completely silent, as if no dog exists... He went many places, watched, and by the midnight it was so impossible for him that he moved in a dark corner and barked!

The moment the other dogs heard that one has broken, they said, "Now there is no problem." They didn't know that the leader has done it. They thought one of them has broken the vow. But now it was impossible for them to contain; the whole city barked. The leader came out and he started preaching!

This will be the condition of your social revolutionaries, reformers, Gandhians, Marxists and others - all brands. They will be in such a difficulty if the world is really changed. If the world fulfills really the utopia of their minds and imaginations, they will commit suicide or they will go mad. Or, they will start preaching just opposite, just the contradictory, just the opposite whatsoever they are preaching now.

They come to me and they say, "How you can tell people to be silent when the world is in such a misery?" They think first the misery has to be removed, then people will be silent? No, if people are silent, misery can be removed, because only silence can remove the misery. Misery is an attitude. It is less concerned with material conditions, more concerned with the inner mind, the inner consciousness. Even a poor man can be happy, and once he is happy many things start falling in line.

Soon he may not be a poor man, because how can you be poor when you are happy? When you are happy, the whole world participates with you. When you are unhappy, everything goes wrong. You create all around a situation which helps your unhappiness to be there. This is the dynamics of the mind. It is a self-defeating system. You feel miserable, then more misery attracts towards you. When more misery attracts you say, "How I can be silent? So much misery there." Then even more misery is attracted toward you. Then you say, "It is impossible now. And those who say they are happy must be telling lies: these Buddhas, Krishnas, they must be telling lies. These Patanjalis, they must be liars, because it is possible, so much misery?"

Then you are in a self-defeating system. You attract, and not only you attract for yourself: when one person is miserable, he helps others also to be miserable, because they are also fools like you. Seeing you in misery, they sympathize. When they sympathize, they become vulnerable. So it is just like that: one ill person infects the whole community.

Mulla Nasrudin's doctor sent him a bill. It was too much. His child was ill: Nasrudin's small son was ill. He phoned to the doctor that "This is too much." The doctor said, "But I had to come nine times to see your son, so that has to be accounted for." Nasrudin said, "And don't forget that my son infected the whole village, and you have been earning a lot. In fact you should pay me something."

When one person is miserable, he infects. Misery is infectious just as happiness is infectious. And, if you are vulnerable towards misery - as you are because you are always seeking unknowingly - your mind seeks misery, because with misery you feel sympathy; with happiness you feel jealous.

Mulla Nasrudin's wife told me once that "If you are going to New Delhi - the winter is coming - you bring me a drop-dead coat." I was surprised. I couldn't follow what she means. I told her anyway, "I don't know much about coats, but I have never heard. What is a drop-dead coat?" She said, "You never heard?" and started laughing and said, "A drop-dead coat is a coat, when you put it on, neighbors drop dead!"

Unless others drop dead, you don't feel alive. Unless others are in misery, you don't feel happy. But how can you feel happy when others are unhappy, and how can you feel alive really when others are dead? We exist together. And sometimes you may be the cause of many people's misery. Then you are earning a karma. You may not have directly hit them; you may not have been violent to them. Subtle is the law. You need not be a murderer, but if simply you infect people by your misery, you are participating in it; you are creating misery. And you are responsible for it, and you will have to pay for it. Very subtle is the mechanism!