Freedom to choose your state - Free from the need to be happy

2020-12-25

Freedom to choose your state - Free from the need to be happy

A Sufi mystic, Bayazid, was a tremendously happy man. Nobody had ever seen him unhappy; nobody had ever seen him sad. He never complained or grumbled about his situation. 

Whatsoever happened he was cheerful. Life was not always easy for him: sometimes there was no food, yet he was happy. Sometimes for days he went without food, yet still he was happy. Sometimes there were no clothes, yet he was happy. Sometimes he had to sleep under the sky, yet his happiness remained undisturbed; it was unconditional. He was asked again and again, and he would laugh it away. When he was dying somebody asked, “Bayazid, now give us your key, your secret. You will be leaving soon. *What was your secret?”

He said, “There is nothing like a secret. It was a simple thing. Every morning when I open my eyes, life gives me two alternatives. It says, ‘Bayazid, do you want to be happy or unhappy?’ I say, ‘I want to be happy.’ And I choose to be happy and I remain happy. It is a simple choice, there is no secret.”

The day you decide that it is your decision to be happy or unhappy you will never again be able to say that someone else is making you unhappy, because that is a declaration of slavery. You have become a MASTER.

Note: 

While the above can be appreciated from one perspective (i.e. one always has the freedom to choose; it is a question of realizing that and abiding by that), why should one be a slave to 'happiness'? 

We can say one can also choose to go with whatever life presents - happiness, sadness, joy, sorrow, indifference etc. 

While the freedom to choose may be better than being slave to emotions (i.e. not choosing to flow with it), it is best to be free from the need to choose; one needs to be free from the need to be happy (or sad etc).  No fixed state.

Freedom is a burden in one way (that is why slavery endures; there is less responsibility in a way); giving up that burden too can be the real 'freedom'. 

It is the (false) sense of separation which creates concepts like 'slavery' and 'freedom'. There is really no separate individual to be a slave or to be free. 

In that sense, seeing through the false sense of separation is freedom / liberation. 

'Seeing through' doesn't mean one will not have the sense of separation; it may continue (as it came on, on its own; if it has to go away, it will drop off on its own accord) but will lose its grip and will not be a thorn any more.