Consuming happiness versus Cultivating happiness || (2019)
“You have never enjoyed happiness in full freedom Little Man. That’s why you consume it. You take no responsibility for the preservation of your happiness. You haven’t learned (you never had a chance) to cultivate your happiness with loving care, as a gardener cultivates his flowers and a farmer his wheat. You consume your happiness.” ~ Listen, Little Man!
Questioner: Acharya Ji, can you please clarify, what does it mean to enjoy happiness in full freedom? Is it the conditioned mind of the little man that stops him from cultivating and preserving happiness? The author also indicates that in the company of little man, cultivating happiness is a little hard. Please help me understand how the little man could grow from being a consumer of happiness to a cultivator.
Acharya Prashant: Happiness is a glimpse. Glimpse of what? Glimpse of the absence of suffering. That’s why we like happiness. That’s why everybody says, “I want to be happy”. Why do we say we want to be happy? Because our default state is of suffering. And man suffers much more than any other being in the world. No being is capable of suffering as much as man is.
Man is a suffering animal. Other creatures have pain but not so much suffering. To suffer, you require a consciousness with depth. Man has that. Other beings have that only in a limited way. You could say, “Man is born suffering or Man is born to suffer.” That’s the arrangement his physical apparatus has ensured for him. Suffer.
Trapped in this body you want great things to happen to you. Suffer. Confined to a little stretch of time, a little expanse of space, you want everything to be limitless. Now suffer. That which your consciousness wants militates against everything that your body has arranged for you. It’s a very-very peculiar situation. You could call it tragic. That which your consciousness wants is not at all what your body is configured to give you. So the body gives you one thing and what consciousness wants is not merely different but dimensionally different. So man suffers.
