Misery

Question: BELOVED MASTER, WHY DOES MISERY FEEL SO SAFE AND HAPPINESS SO THREATENING? Deva Surabhi, happiness is threatening and misery is safe; safe for the ego. Ego can exist only in misery and through misery. Ego is an island surrounded by hell; happiness is threatening to the ego, to the very existence of the ego. Happiness rises like a sun and the ego disappears, evaporates like a dewdrop on the grass leaf. Happiness is the death of the ego. If you want to remain a separate entity from existence as almost everybody is trying to do, you will be afraid of being blissful, cheerful. You will feel guilty in being blissful. You will feel suicidal because you are committing a suicide on the psychological level -- the level of the ego. It almost always happens that people enjoy a few moments and then afterwards they feel very guilty.

Someone asked: what is the cause of our miseries?

Don't say miseries; say 'misery', since there is only one misery, i.e. isolation from God. We are not aware of this fact; surrounded by a multitude of miseries we forget the original misery. The one root misery creates the illusion of a number of miseries. We have to be radical, and deal with this root misery. If a tree is to be destroyed completely, one does not cut a branch here and a branch there, but either uproots the tree, if that is possible, or cuts the main trunk near the roots. Similarly, we have to destroy the root of all miseries. We certainly are like fish out of water, -- like the fish we saw dying on the sands. We can well imagine those around us and even ourselves as the dying fish on a river bank. Come to think of it, man is both the fish that is…

Why do I always create misery around myself? Beginning to see that I consistently choose this vicious circle. Is the choosing in itself the misery?

Forty-two is the age when life comes to a certain conclusion -- whether you have failed or succeeded. Because beyond forty-two there is not much hope: if you have made money, you have made it; by the time forty-two arrives, you have made it -- because the greatest days of energy and power are gone. Thirty-five is the peak. You can give seven more years; in fact, already for seven years you have been going downhill. But you have done everything that you could do. And now the age has come, forty-two, and suddenly you see that you have failed. Now you need some rationalization... immediately a heart attack comes. That's a great boon, a blessing from God. Now you can fall into the bed and you can say, "What can I do? The heart attack disturbed everything. When everything was going to be okay, when I was just going…

Why can I not live without misery?

You are miserable because you have decided to be miserable -- maybe the decision is unconscious. And you have to be conscious about the decision, only then can it be dropped. Because nothing can be dropped from the unconscious. The unconscious is a great preserver, it preserves everything. Once you make anything unconscious it will be preserved for ever and ever unless you make it conscious again and throw it. Your unconscious is a basement where you never go, and you always go on throwing things in the basement. Whenever you are miserable you repress it. Your eyes may be full of tears but you try to smile -- you throw those tears into the unconscious. You may be boiling with anger but you go on repressing the anger, the sexuality, the greed. You go on throwing all this into the basement, and there all these things are creating a…