Words from the Master

We always think, If I get married, my life will be settled. So let me work towards getting married.
If I have two children, my life will be fulfilled.
Once I retire, I’ll be peaceful.

It is the attitude - Now I’ll be serious, later I’ll be happy!

In the end, you will be happy neither now nor then. You will lose your capacity to be happy at any time.

Just live with simplicity, with spontaneity, with innocence.

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This excerpt has been taken from the book: Guaranteed Solutions.

Words from the Master

When you are serious, you are being egoistic, because you fail to see that the whole thing is only a Cosmic drama. You feel too much as a separate entity, too much of ‘I’ and so you are serious. If you understand that the whole thing is only a drama, you can never be serious. When this understanding happens at a deep level, you will simply do things with the sheer joy of moving in tune with the Cosmic drama or Existence. And when you do it this way, you are not serious, you are just sincere in playing your part, that’s all.

You see, there are two things: chronological planning and psychological planning.

Chronological planning is planning on a timescale. You decide: You will get up at such and such a time, finish your morning routine by a particular time, reach office at a particular time, and get certain tasks done that day at the office. This is alright. It is a practical way to organize your work in a way that can give the best results. This kind of planning with sincere action will take you from happiness to more happiness!

Psychological planning on the other hand, is planning in your head with no relevance to time or space. It is just a constant serious planning going on in your head, over and above the chronological planning. It keeps you thinking that you are serious and dutiful. It is actually nothing but complex negativity being applied to the chronological planning that has already been done. You keep analyzing your plan, and getting into a dull state because all your energy is going in analyzing the plan again and again.

Psychological planning boosts your ego. It makes you feel great and worthy. It helps you to stay serious. It makes you feel that you are handling things of a great magnitude. It makes you feel that it is wholly in your hands to worry about it and make it happen. You keep hankering after every small thing that needs to get done and feel that your happiness lies in getting that done. This is psychological planning.

I tell you: This is actually a way of postponing happiness, postponing life, waiting for something particular to happen to start enjoying life.

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This excerpt has been taken from the book: Guaranteed Solutions.

Words from the Master

When you do something too seriously, when you are too concerned about the result, you are actually not allowing yourself to perform at the optimum level.

Of course, you need to make plans, you need to think ahead. But do it with sincerity, not with seriousness. Seriousness is not the same as sincerity. Sincerity is focusing on the task with enthusiasm and youthfulness. Sincerity is giving the task your best without worrying excessively about the result.

When you are serious, you don’t enjoy, you don’t laugh. How can you laugh when you are serious? They are mutually exclusive. Either you are serious or you are laughing; you can’t be both at the same time because the very definition of seriousness is such.

But when you are sincere, you can be laughing and playful. You can continue to do the job on hand in a playful and creative way and the job will get done in a joyful fashion, and because you have finished the job, you have been sincere.

With sincerity, there is no worry, there is only enthusiasm.

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This excerpt has been taken from the book: Guaranteed Solutions.

Words from the Master

Science has proved that when you perform a task in a relaxed and light manner, your thinking and decision-making capacity is automatically enhanced. The same task when performed in a serious manner dulls your mind.

I tell you: All our seriousness is just sickness. When I say all, I mean ALL. And all our sickness originates from seriousness. Seriousness begets sickness and sickness begets seriousness.

One night, a man called me on the phone and started crying.
He said, “I fall at your feet, Swamiji! Please help me. I’m so depressed! I am going to end my life!” and so on.

I tried to calm him down, and finally said, “Why don’t you come to the ashram tomorrow morning and spend a few days with me? Let us see what can be done.”
He replied, “Tomorrow Swamiji? Oh… tomorrow I have to go to office… shall I come next weekend?”

Most of us are like this - getting unnecessarily tense about our so-called problems. Just one jolt is enough and our seriousness will drop. When we wake up to reality, we see how insignificant our problems really are.

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This excerpt has been taken from the book: Guaranteed Solutions.