The biggest mistake of your life is putting responsibility of your happiness on someone or something.
When we think that a particular thing, person, or place can give us happiness, we immediately put the responsibility of our happiness on something or someone other than us. In other words, we give the control of our happiness to something or someone.
And since most of what we do in our lives, we do to get happy, by giving the control of our happiness to something or someone, we give the control of our lives to something or someone.
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| Moti Doongri - Jaipur |
By doing so, we make things in our life beyond our control. This is so because we cannot control how a particular thing or person, which or who is separate from us, behaves.
Thus, in our search for happiness, we give up our control of that happiness and also our control of misery. This paradoxical situation happens over and again in our lives though we see the same thing in the lives of people around us.
This difficult situation arises because of two main problems. One, deep down, we think that we cannot control our happiness or misery. Two, because of such a belief we seek happiness outside of ourselves. The solution to this is quite simple. We need to remind ourselves all the time, in our waking state and also in our dreams, that we are the sole creators of our happiness or misery. This can happen only when our attention to the external conditions is reduced and we start focusing on our inner selves.
Source – excerpt from Prabuddha Bharata Magazine Editorial December 2019