To be alive is to navigate a million thoughts, feelings and sensations. To live is to awaken to consciousness in medias res, cast into existence with no understanding of how we got here, or where we are to go. We do not live, we discover ourselves as living.
What is living? What is alive? In the Bhakti tradition, a living being is called a jīva, a ‘living entity’. The word ‘jīva’ says not one, but two things. We are, and we are alive. What is the difference between being and being alive?
Spiritual practice means following a path from moment to moment, from step to step, from experience to experience, from breath to breath. Every instant presents us with a crossroad, a choice, an intention. Where is my head? Where is my heart? What are my intentions? What are my circumstances?
Spiritual consciousness begins with the simple yet profound suspicion that we are not identical to the body we occupy—that being and being alive are not the same. This awareness can arise through everyday experiences, sometimes troubling, sometimes sweet.
For example, we may observe that while our bodies change significantly over time, our sense of self remains constant. Or we might experience a moment of watching our own thoughts and emotions even as we are having them, as though they belonged to someone else. Or perhaps, more profoundly, we might find ourselves deeply present in a given moment, momentarily forgetting the situation around us. These and other experiences lead us to the suspicion that some kind of self-consciousness, transcends the ordinary physical experience of our existence.
Like many spiritual philosophies, Bhakti teaches that happiness and well-being grow when we learn to discern the difference between what is changing, passing, and ephemeral—ultimately destined to disappear—and what remains untouched by the claws of time.
In other words, to understand the self as unchanging, as eternal, is to understand the soul. Soul is the name of what we authentically are, in our nature, in our being.
When we seek happiness by attaching our attention to the aspects of life that are ephemeral or changing, then then consequences—the pleasure or happiness produced—will be equally fleeting and changeable. On the other hand, when we remain attached to painful experiences, chronically mindful of past suffering we cannot undo or future difficulties we cannot predict or control—without realising that these do not belong to our true nature or being, and are not born of circumstances that are truly our own—that pain, too, will remain attached, masquerading as if it were who we really are. Both of these errors prevent our happiness and block us from spiritual growth.
The alternative offered by the spiritual path is to cease living from the ego-self—subject to the random waves of change—and to live instead from the soul. This means to act in harmony with who we truly are, to desire what we truly receive pleasure from, to seek what truly gives us happiness.
How do we do this?
We do it by living, feeling, thinking and acting from the soul, from the heart. We do it by living at every moment and in every place as though this life is the one we have chosen to live with intention, as though this is the life we mean to live, and as though we were meant to live it.
To live with intention means to feel, think and act not with the shifting sands of our material circumstances, but in harmony with that which is unchanging in its truth, unwavering in its beauty.
It actually matters little what feelings we feel, what thoughts we think or what actions we take. What matters is whether they are done in the intention of satisfying the whims of the material world or for satisfying the simple spiritual desire of being ourselves.
Material happiness, causes more need for material happiness. Once satisfied, it requires new satisfaction, leading to new unhappiness, requiring renewed action, and so on. Spiritual desire satisfies itself in the realisation that there is nothing to satisfy.
But how to know which is which? How to know which feelings will bring joy, which thoughts will bring happiness, which actions will bring peace?
In the simple words of the spiritual master: Check yourself!
This magical proximity between self and soul that is the heart of spiritual life. Living life awkwardly, haltingly, hesitatingly, we are touched by an awareness that we have a soul, that something more awaits us, that we are eternal, that we are sparks of the divine. Let us ask why. Where there are thoughts, where do they come from? Where there are desires, who desires them? Where there are actions, who takes them. For whom do we live? By whom?
It’s not a matter of having or not having. It’s not a question of the things we want, or think we want. It’s a matter of how the desire for what we believe will make us happy comes to be. It’s about how we came to believe that happiness is a program, and not a way of being.
Check yourself!
Does happiness belong exclusively to one, or to some of us? Do we have a right to it? Is it personal or impersonal? Is my happiness different from yours? Is satisfaction equal if happiness is enjoyed by someone else? Can the words ‘there is happiness’ simply and softly take the place of ‘I am happy’? Is there happiness when it is not mine, when it is not yours? Is ‘happiness’ the name of a need for happiness that lives beyond happiness itself?
Check yourself!
Are our desires determined by our circumstances? Do they, in turn, determine our circumstances? Or do they originate beyond our immediate situation, only to eventually reach it? Do our goals depend on other goals and wishes remaining stable? In other words, can we reach our objectives in a world that is constantly changing? Do our goals depend on us remaining unchanged? Or must we become something other than what we are in order to achieve them?
Check yourself!
And where do these desires originate? Are they merely born of other desires? What will our desires lead to? Will they give rise to more desires? Does obtaining satisfaction automatically set in motion a new quest for happiness? Are our desires merely stand-ins for deeper longings? Do they serve other, hidden desires? And does our satisfaction quietly sow seeds of dissatisfaction elsewhere?
Check yourself!
In the end, happiness is the name of the state of being in which happiness is no longer the question, when self and soul dissolve into one. Not the moment when we know with certainty and self-assurance who we are and what we are. It is rather when the question of who we are no longer interests us. Because: it cannot give happiness.
It’s when we realise that this here-and-now—these circumstances, this tree, this stone, this house, this car, this job, this life, this longing and desire—are also the name of a soul seeking goodness, sweetly stumbling along its path of sadhana, finding spiritual hope and sacred meaning in the tender moments of real life, when even a timid, material self can no longer fully stand in the way of the ambitions of our divine, yearning hearts.
Check yourself!