Happiness and Intentions

You are at a social gathering and one of the guests starts telling jokes with joyous enthusiasm. “What gets wetter the more it dries? A towel. Why do ducks make great detectives? They always quack the case.” Maybe you don’t think that some of the jokes are particularly funny, but you notice that you, along with most of the other people, are laughing and having a good time. No one enjoying those moments had any intention of laughing; it just happened. Maybe being around someone who is laughing and has a joyful nature can cause their happiness to be contagious.

Children often exhibit this quality. Have you ever noticed that children who are playing or starting out their day are generally joyful? They don’t have any intention of being joyful. They don’t concoct any elaborate plans to be joyful. Instead they just seem to get involved in whatever they are doing, whether it is eating breakfast, playing in the yard, or walking with their parents to the store. Even if a child is upset, once they see and join with other children who are happily playing, they often become happy as well.

Yet so much in society is geared to having great intentions: intentions to get a better job, intentions to eat healthier, intentions to be sympathetic to others. Many organizations and groups are built with good intentions as their foundation but are often unable to carry them out.

Sadhguru clarifies why having good intentions is not the answer and gives us insight  into what is.

Sadhguru: You may have great intentions. You may have great ambitions. You may have many desires, but fundamentally, everything that you do in this world spells out who you really are within. One thing that I would like to remind you of at this point is, in this work, on this planet, most of the harm most of the pain and most of the suffering that has been caused to people or the humankind is done only with good intentions, not bad. The intentions behind the maximum slaughter and killing have been good.

If you look at the world, the fight is not between the good and the bad. It is always the good people who are fighting. If you are a good Indian, you fight a good Pakistani. If you are a good Hindu, you fight a good Muslim. The better you are, the more you fight. It is not the bad people who are fighting each other; it is always good people with good intentions.

So our intentions are fine, but fundamentally every human being first needs to work on himself/herself. Because whatever you do in your ignorance, you are only harming yourself and the world around you.

The first and most fundamental responsibility for a human being is to become a joyous human being because no matter what you are doing — it doesn’t matter what you are pursuing in your life, whether it is business, money, power, education, service, or whatever else — you are doing it because somewhere deep inside you is a feeling that this will bring you happiness.

Every single action that we perform is springing from an aspiration to be happy.  Today we are seeking happiness so vigorously that the very life of the planet is being threatened.

In the last one hundred years, with the aid of science and technology, much has been done on this planet. There are many conveniences and comforts that could never have been dreamt of one hundred years ago. In spite of that, it cannot be said that humanity is any happier than it was.

So it does not matter with what intentions you do any act because, fundamentally, you are only creating what you are. If a man does not take up this project in his life ­­— that he changes himself into a joyous human being by his own nature, not because of something or somebody else — then unknowing, with good intentions only, he will cause much damage to everything around him.