Transcending Happiness and Sadness

Swami Bhoomananda Tirtha

Question:   

As I stated, all things have been going well. They were well before also, but now they are even better.  I wonder about your words often, I listen to a few tapes of yours that I have with me.  One thought I would like to ask you,  Swamiji, about.  You mentioned that most lives are lived like a wheel.  The person, one day is happy.  Almost assuredly that happiness will eventually pass and the person will become sad.  In my case the happiness period or the joyful period seem to last much longer than the sad period.  Is this natural for some people?  Must the time for happiness equal the time for sadness?  Do some people have more sad than happy period?  Also I understand that one should try and achieve a state that is neither sad nor happy. Could you possibly explain this state a little further for me?  Can one be joyful in this state?  Is their emotion of any type?  Perhaps I am asking too much, but I feel very close to this question of the wheel going up and down, controlling one’s mood and emotions.  Are there things to do to stay in one mood?  What does one do to achieve the state in between happiness and sadness? 

Poojya Swamiji's Answer: 

Now, will the happy periods equal the sad ones or not?  The answers to this question are two: First, you have to consider the two periods after you see them for the whole of your life, or very nearly that.  Possibly, the happy periods may dominate for the first few years or decades.  But sad periods will take their place later.  Conversely, the first phase of one’s life may be mostly sad and then later on it may turn to be happy. 

Secondly, the periods which you describe as happy, were they really so?  The judgement has to depend upon your insight and the capacity to evaluate the point.  Thus, what you have now felt may be quite disproved later when you will have become riper and mature in your understanding.  Then again, if closely examined, the happy states and the sad states are there everyday, every hour, every half hour and even in still shorter periods.  You will understand the truth of this statement only when your analysis becomes sharp and rarefied.  It is like saying that even in the so-called stillness there exists motion or vibration.  Within the inert matter exists a potent revolution, constant revolving.  One more point is that the notion or verdict of happy period or unhappy period is also subject to correction, change and improvement.  Your present verdict quite possibly is replaced by another in the times to come.

Yes, the true state which alone can last always, can be achieved in the manner of achievement and preserved for one’s enduring benefit, is the one devoid of the so-called happy and unhappy periods.  But the word “devoid” does not mean to lose the benefit of, to be rid of, and hence suffer on some account or another for that sake.  On the other hand, it means that one goes beyond or transcends.  When you leave the school after passing the last examination and then go to the university, you have transcended the school course to become an entrant to the higher one. Similarly, here the higher state is had through transcendence, not by avoiding or excluding.  The real description of the higher state will be that it includes (not excludes) and transcends the other two – the happy and sad.  As the happy and the sad periods are, by their very nature, not static, by looking to the happy ones, you won’t achieve your ideal of everlasting joyfulness or peace.  Whereas when you look to the transcendental state, it will, by its very nature, endure ever and ever.  When you are in the happy period, you will equally be in the one higher.  In the same way, when you are in the sad period, then too the higher state will concurrently be enjoyed by you. 

To be un-illumined soul, only the so-called happy and the unhappy periods are there, but one of them alone (namely the former) is he able to feel contented.  The other disturbs him.  But to the illumined, that period becomes as much relevant, useful and enjoyable as the happy one, and he has his safe seat and state of being in the one higher state.  Dear J, it is a wonderful state of becoming.  How can I explain it further?  It comes to one by wooing it exclusively, by entering repeatedly into the state of Samadhi (the state of no-mindedness or above-mindedness), and then by intelligently understanding both the Samadhi state and its benign-ness in the context of the mind’s usual witch-craft of “happiness and sadness”.  

[This is an extract from a correspondence that appeared in August-September 1974 issue 
of the monthly journal ‘Vicharasetu – The Path of Introspection’ ]

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