We think the more pleasure I have, the more pain I avoid, the better my life is. And all the celebrities out there give us a picture of how to be all the time. And it’s also our neighbors and friends trying to show us, “look how amazing my life is, it’s better than yours”. We are living through comparison: “I am more rich than you, I am suffering less, my husband earns more money than you, I can afford a longer and more far away holiday than yours, I have a better car than you, I go to the party with more celebrities than you.”
And this is expressed by one of my teachers, Ramana Maharshi, who came up with the: “who am I?” The “who” means you are constantly trying to find out who you are. It’s a constant process, 24 hours in your mind, trying to find out who you are. Constantly comparing yourself with others. You see somebody: “ok, more rich, less rich, more beautiful clothes, more jealous of boyfriend, whatever.”
This machine is going on all the time. Later, when you go a little more into consciousness, you go, “who does better yoga than me? I’ve done this seminar, and this spiritual holiday and gone to this healer and blah blah blah”. This is called the spiritual ego. It goes from the material ego to the spiritual ego. But it’s the same, underlying it’s the ego. And mostly this part in us is totally protected. It only changes the form. It looks better in the outside, it’s much more beautiful to have the right yoga clothes, and do the “right thing”, but it’s still the ego.
There’s not really a problem, but this ego protects itself so strong that there’s no chance for God to enter that system and to help you be happy. Not what you do, not what you play, God lets you play whatever you want. It doesn’t matter what you play, but the thing is that God, as our father, wants us to be happy with what we play. The problem is that within this ego game we are not happy.
And those people that show you that they are happy, they are also not happy. You read the celebrities after some time they are just coming out of an alcohol or drug rehabilitation, or suicide, or whatever, and they are more fucked up than us.
There is no one out there that has a life different than yours. There is only an industry that has 100 celebrities and they just change them from time to time to make you believe you are inferior and that you will never be like that.
You are constantly trying to be better than others. You are constantly trying to be someone different than you are.
When I lived this 14 years in India, I saw that the poorest people are the most happy. They didn’t have any worries. They didn’t have to worry about avoiding taxes or how to repair the car. They are happy with having enough food and that’s enough. Sometimes we dream of a simple life like that, but because someone imprinted in us we have to “be somebody”, we are trying to “be somebody”. And we think that that’s all that we can achieve.
And our ego starts when we are young, that’s the first start of the ego, on the material level, saying “I want to be rich and famous”. Than when we are 25 we see we are not one of those geniuses that are rich with 18. Then we get the idea of having the most amazing relationship. So we try that. And after some boyfriends or girlfriends and one or two divorces, we think that then we have to go for enlightment.
Every time we create impossible goals, because the mind likes that. We keep in inferiority :“I haven’t achieved my goal, I haven’t achieved my goal”. And then you feel bad about yourself. So by looking through that you can say: “o.k., what makes me happy right now?”
The key to be happy is to release everything which makes you unhappy. That’s the way that thousands of years of Hinduism, thousands of years of Buddhism…because that’s the only way. We are the sun, we are shining all the time. Then there are clouds in front of us, that don’t allow us to shine. When these clouds are gone, we are shining.
One of Amma’s favorite sayings is: “the difference between a saint and a sinner, is that the sinner still has to do everything that the saint already did“. Even a saint came to the place of being a saint simply by removing all of his garbage. There’s no one that’s suddenly woken up enlightened and something has happened and he’s free of everything. Everybody has to go through their own stuff, everybody has to go through their own hell, through their own shit that they have from karma, from past lives, and clean it up, to be who they really are. There’s no exception. You hear about people living in caves for ages and meditating, others doing their penance, it’s for everybody the same.
This path that I’m offering, the SACRED path, it’s a path to freedom. It’s a path where you first create a beautiful illusion, a much better illusion, because you’re happy in it. And the second is that it’s a path that no matter how beautiful the illusion is, there’s always something missing, there’s always the spiritual aspect, there’s your divinity missing. So it brings the divinity in it and it draws you closer and closer to God and to your essence.