Mechanics of joy

[1]

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev [1]

Qestioner: You have emphasised the importance of being joyful in all we do. Is it possible to
achieve such a state in the rat race all of us are caught in?

Sadhguru: Everything that a human being does is in pursuit of his joy. So whether you are racing with the rats or with the dinosaurs, why don’t you do it joyfully? If you are going to be in this race for a major part of your life, what you are saying is that you cannot be joyful for a major part of your life. You believe that you will be joyful when the race stops or when you fall out of it or when you are incapable of racing. This is an argument for living miserably.
Joy is not about what you do and what you don’t. Joy is about how you are within yourself. If your mind functioned the way you wanted it, if your mind was taking instructions from you, you would definitely keep it joyful. The question is not about joy or misery; the question is whether your mind is in your control or not. If it is in your control, you will create a joyful situation for yourself. Only because it is out of your control — it is reacting randomly to external situations — you are not joyful.
You can manage external situations only to a certain extent. Whether you are in the race or not, external situations will affect you only to some extent. If your inner situation reacts compulsively to the external situation, you being joyful is always going to be accidental. What you call the outside is made up of a million different ingredients over which you have no control. But inside there is only one — which is “you”. If “you” become the way you want yourself to be, your choice is definitely to be joyful. The problem is that your interiority, your mind, your body, your energies, your emotions, nothing is reacting the way you want them to. Everything happens accidentally in compulsive reaction to the situations in which you exist.
Just as there is a science and technology to create external situations the way we want it, there is a whole science and technology to create inner situations the way we want it. If you use this technology, an inner technology — the yogic technology — to create your inner conditions the way you want, being joyful or unhappy is never in question because if you had a choice your intelligence would definitely choose to be joyful, not miserable. So to be in the race or out of the race is not the question. The question is whether your body, mind, emotion and energies are taking instructions from you or they are reacting in a compulsive manner to external situations.

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is a spiritual leader and visionary, a humanitarian, author, poet and speaker. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org