What do you want?
One Sufi mystic who had remained happy his whole life — no one had ever seen him unhappy — who was always laughing, who was laughter, whose whole being was a perfume of celebration…. In his old age, when he was dying, on his deathbed and still enjoying death, laughing hilariously, a disciple asked, "You puzzle us. Now you are dying, why are you laughing? What is there funny about it? We are feeling so sad. We wanted to ask you many times in your life why you are never sad. But now, confronting death at least, one should be sad. You are still laughing — how are you managing it?"
The old man said, "It is simple. I had asked my master — I had gone to my master as a young man; I was only seventeen and already miserable, and my master was old, seventy, and he was sitting under a tree, laughing for no reason at all. There was nobody else there, nothing had happened, nobody had cracked a joke or anything, and he was simply laughing, holding his belly. I asked him, 'What is the matter with you? Are you mad or something?'
"He said, 'One day I was also as sad as you are. Then it dawned on me that it is my choice, it is my life.'
"Since that day, every morning when I get up, the first thing I decide is… before I open my eyes I say to myself, 'Abdullah'" — that was his name — "'what do you want? Misery? Blissfulness? What you are going to choose today?' And it happens that I always choose blissfulness."
It is a choice. Try it. When you become aware the first moment in the morning that sleep has left, ask yourself, "Abdullah, another day! What is your idea? Do you choose misery or blissfulness?"
And who would choose misery? And WHY? It is so unnatural — unless one feels blissful in misery, but then too you are choosing bliss, not misery......
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Lasting Happiness
The real reason why we sometimes experience a lack of real deep lasting happiness in our lives is dependency.
We are taught to make our happiness dependent on some event, condition, person, object etc. This is why we keep delaying our happiness, until things are just right in our life. We think we will be happy in the future and then wonder why we are not happy now. But life is never just right and the future never comes, there is only now. That is why in order to be happy we must make our happiness a decision and not a dependency. This may seem slightly difficult in the beginning, because we have just spent our life being dependent on acquiring something or someone, or seeing the result we desired, or wanting some pain to go away, before we allow ourselves to be happy. Happiness is an easy choice, intoxication that will be visible from the sparkle on one's face through our thoughts, words and actions.
If you give happiness you will receive happiness. Your soul, your Consciousness knows your original natural harmonic rhythm of kindness, a being of spiritual peace.
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H A P P I N E S S
Happiness is man's nature. You need not worry about happiness at all, it is already there. It is in your heart – you just have to stop being unhappy, you have to stop the mechanism functioning that creates unhappiness.
But nobody seems to be ready for that. People say, "I want happiness." It is as if you go on saying, 'I want health' – and you go on clinging to your disease, and you don't allow the disease to go.
If the doctor prescribes the medicine, you throw away the medicine; you never follow any prescription. You never go for a morning walk, you never go swimming, you never go running on the beach, you never do any exercise. You go on eating obsessively, you go on destroying your health – and again and again you go on asking where to find health. But you don't change the mechanism that creates unhealth.
Health is not something to be attained somewhere, it is not an object. Health is a totally different way of living. The way you are living creates disease, the way you are living creates misery.
For example, people come to me and they say they would like to be happy, but they cannot drop their jealousy. If you can't drop your jealousy, love will never grow – the weeds of jealousy will destroy the rose of love. And when love does not grow, you will not be happy. Because who can be happy without love growing? Unless that rose blooms in you, unless that fragrance is released, you cannot be happy.
Now people want happiness – but just by wanting, you cannot get it. Wanting is not enough. You will have to see into the phenomenon of your misery, how you create it – how in the first place you became miserable, how you go on becoming miserable every day – what is your technique?
Because happiness is a natural phenomenon – if somebody is happy there is no skill in it, if somebody is happy it needs no expertise to be happy.
Animals are happy, trees are happy, birds are happy. The whole existence is happy, except man. Only man is so clever as to create unhappiness – nobody else seems to be so skillful. So when you are happy it is simple, it is innocent, it is nothing to brag about. But when you are unhappy you are doing great things to yourself; you are doing something really hard.