If bhakti practice doesn’t make us joyful, what can we do?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
I’m sorry, I don’t feel like I… I understand your question. No, I’ll rephrase your question.
So, even when we practice some spiritual process, still we don’t get that spiritual connection. And is it because… Why does that happen? Is it that we know certain things, but still we don’t experience it, and we don’t experience peace, joy, or any happiness, peace and joy regularly? Intermittently we may experience it. There are, I would say, three broad things in this.
First is that happiness is very paradoxical. John Stuart Milley said that, ask yourself the question, Are you happy? And from that moment you stop being happy. Why is that? Because as soon as you start asking, Am I happy? At a subconscious level, we have associated happiness with certain things.
Oh, if I’m meant to be happy, then this sort of thing should not be happening with me. Or even if we don’t think about these sort of things, we may even think, Oh, for me to be happy, these kind of thoughts should not be coming with me. I’m having these kind of thoughts, I’m not happy.
So, actually speaking, happiness is best perceived as a by-product, never as a product. If we look back at our own lives, which are the happiest moments of our life? They are rarely the moments when we were most concerned about happiness. They are the moments when we were most concerned about doing something positive.
We’re absorbed in something. But then, that time I was so happy. That is so good.
So, it’s like, if you want to, if some person is very elusive, as soon as we look at them, they notice we’re looking at them and they go away from there. So, the only way we can, if they are a little shy or elusive, the only way we can look at them is a side glance. So, happiness is like that.
You cannot have a full glance at happiness any time. As soon as you try to glance at happiness, happiness disappears. But happiness can only be side glanced.
That means that, rather than pursuing happiness, we pursue a purposeful cause, a valuable cause, and that will give happiness as a by-product. Now, applying this to our spiritual advancement, to our spiritual growth. So, this analysis that happiness is a by-product, it applies for every walk of life.
If somebody is an artist, say, I’m a writer. That’s one of my main services. So, when I’m writing, at that time, if I consider, am I happy? I’ll not be able to write, and I’ll not be happy also.
Because I’ll feel, this sentence has not come out right. This is not the right word. Get this right.
It’s not coming right. But, at the end of it, once I have written something valuable, something that is good, I feel, I’m so absorbed in it. For me, when I write something, one, two hours that I’m writing, I easily forget the whole world, get absorbed in it.
So, when we are absorbed in some purposeful cause, that absorption itself is satisfaction. So, this applies to anything, anything, even if it is not directly spiritual. Sports players, when they do workouts, when they are practicing, that’s not really enjoyable.
It’s exhausting. But if you see the, if you look at our life, most of the best experiences of life, when we go through them, they are exhausting. While we are going through them, they are exhausting.
But later on, they turn out to be exhilarating. So, that’s why happiness is best perceived as a by-product of engagement in something purposeful. Secondly, if we apply this dynamic to our spiritual growth also, rather than thinking that, oh, I’m not feeling peaceful, I’m not feeling joyful, we can instead focus on, am I spiritually connected? Am I striving to be spiritually connected? Okay, I’m not feeling peaceful, I’m not feeling joyful, okay.
What am I doing to connect myself? In spiritual life, there are many practices which are more, they are meant to be at the spiritual level, but we often do them at the physical level. So, for example, mantra chanting. Mantra chanting can be done just as a verbal utterance without any investment of consciousness.
Then, it won’t lead to much experience. So, what am I doing to connect myself with spiritual reality? Rather than whether I’m experiencing spiritual happiness or not, if I focus on what am I doing to connect myself with spiritual reality? If we shift our focus to that, okay, yeah, I can do this better, I can do this better. And we do this not in a dissatisfied or a discontented sense, just in an objective sense, like an observer, like a clinical observer.
Okay, this is what has not been done, let me do it this way. And again, that focus on connection, on connection through contribution. Okay, what can I do right now? What can I do right now to be spiritual? What can I do right now to help someone else to become spiritual? That connection through contribution, focus on that rather than the experience that will result from that.
Then the experience will automatically come as a result. And the third point is what you raised about expectations. In general, expectations, they can affect all walks of our life.
So, sometimes our expectations of spiritual life may stop us from growing in spiritual life. Because we think the spiritual journey should be like this. But when I talk about these three levels, level three, level one, level two, level three, at a level of a conceptual model, it seems very simple.
But for each one of us, each level could be huge. So, in level one, I might be way, way down somewhere. And I have to raise my consciousness to that.
In level two, the level of the, the thickness of the glass that is distorting my perception, that may be variable. And for somebody, reworking that conception may be very easy. For somebody, it might be very difficult.
Actually, for everyone, it is difficult. But the areas where it is difficult may be different for different people. So, because of that, we, with respect to spiritual life, it is best to be, best to focus more on our application to spiritual life rather than our expectation from spiritual life.
Because again, our expectation is shaped by maybe something that we read somewhere, maybe something that, something that others are experiencing. And actually, it is not even that others are experiencing it. It may well be that we are thinking that others are experiencing it.
So, everybody on the spiritual journey has their, has their joys and has their struggles. But, one of the greatest causes of unhappiness is our belief that everyone else has happiness. So, this doesn’t mean that we wish, we want everyone else to be distressed and everyone else should be going out with a heavy, long face and a scowl or a frown or a morose face.
It is not like that. It is everybody has their struggles. So, rather than having a, having an unrealistic expectation of how our spiritual life should be, if you just understand spiritual growth and spiritual journey, spiritual life, it is just a matter of experience.
The experience, not that we seek the experience, but we seek the connection and the experience will come. And even if we have a long, long journey to go right now, at our level, where we are, if we seek for a connection, we will have an experience that is fulfilling at our level. But it is only when we compare our experience with someone else’s experience.
They must be experiencing that. Oh, I am not experiencing it. But there is no need to do that.
All of us are individuals and we are on an individual spiritual journey. So, best focus on, on putting aside the expectation and just focus on the application. Thank you.