Talks Excerpt 614. Swamiji says: Only you can make yourself happy.

From Mother Radha’s recordings of Swamiji.

A sadhaka must think: ‘I am Brahman.’ But when the thought comes, ‘I am the body,’ he must use the other mantra: ‘neti neti’. When you look at others as the body, think: ‘Neti neti: Brahman has come and I must worship It.’

Keep yourself cheerful; that is the secret of yoga. Keep yourself happy; and if you cannot keep yourself happy, no gods, no goddesses, no saints, no scientists, can ever make you happy. You will live such a miserable life that you yourself will be fed up with it. Do not think that someone else can make you happy. Nobody else can make you happy.

Now, how to make yourself happy? That is another secret of yoga: Whatever you feel to be painful, do not tell anybody; and whatever you feel to be blissful, tell everybody. In Lanka Mother Sita must have felt a lot of miserable thoughts going through her mind. But if the Ramayana was full of those thoughts how would you read that scripture? But in fact we only see how blissful she was, how happy she was, how she took Sri Rama’s name and thus lived her life.

If you do this for three months you will be the most blissful person under the sun; people will come to you for inspiration. No outward expression of your feelings of depression or of limitedness should be felt.

If you have not felt the power of Master’s [Sri Ramakrishna’s] name it is because you are just treating it as something ordinary. You do not know the power of it. The power is so great that it will increase love for your own Deity and it will increase love for all religions. That is the power of this Name. At the same time it will give the moksha of all the scriptures as promised. It will give you the moksha of the Christian Bible, it will give you the moksha of the Koran. Even more He will give His own abode: Ramakrishnadham. That is the crux of the whole thing: Master’s Name.

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These recordings or the excerpts from them, were made from the early 1970s onward, by Mother Radha, a close devotee of Swamiji’s and edited for uploading here by our gurubhai and her son, Brother Tim. Please be mindful that what Swamiji was saying may have been specific to an individual or a group of people with him, at the time.