The Atma Jyoti Blog

The fifth post in the series “Creating Your Happiness” by Paramhansa Yogananda

Do you ever think seriously of salvaging your treasure of happiness which is sunk beneath the sea of your tumultuous life? Can you make your half-dead rose plant of life bloom again?

We are usually born rich with smiles, youth, strength, beauty, health, mystic aspirations, and swelling, thrilling hopes. As we live and grow, we begin to lose those riches, and the roses in us begin to fade. Why is this? Are we to grow warm with riches and then suddenly be frozen by the chill of poverty? The rose blooms only to die. Does our happiness come only in order to vanish?

No, the rose usually dies on the bed of beauty, yet some roses, worm eaten encounter a premature ugly death. We want to bloom with good actions, fragrant with happiness, and to rest forever with the memories of those who appreciate us. We do not have to die devoured by poverty, sickness, or sorrow.

To guard our rose plant, we must attend to it properly with much digging, watering, feeding, and guarding it from pests and chill. The rose plant of our happiness can grow only on the abundant fertile soil of our peace. It can never grow on hard, stony, unfeeling soil of human mentality. We have to constantly dig into peace with the spade of our good actions. We have to keep our happiness plant well watered with our spirit of love and service. We can only be happy by making others happy.

The real food for the happiness tree can be supplied only through meditation and actual contact with God in daily life. Without our contact with the Infinite source, from which all our human faculties and inspirations spring, we can never grow perfectly and completely.

The worst pests which attack our plant of happiness are lack of the desire to progress, self-satisfaction, and skepticism. The chill of inertia, or lack of definite, constant effort to know the Truth, is the greater ill from which our happiness plant suffers.

We can never be happy until we keep progressing and seeking satisfaction in doing so, and guarding that happiness from all the influences which destroy it.

More from Paramhansa’s writing on happiness:

• Important Conditions for Happiness
• Discover Your Soul as Happiness Itself
• Happiness Is in the Mind
• Creating Your Happiness – Paramhansa Yogananda

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