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196
Aptavani-2
Understanding worldly happiness and misery
The Lord does not consider worldly pleasure and pain as pleasure and pain. He calls it vedaniya (that which is to be endured). Pleasure is shata vedaniya and pain is ashata vedaniya.
Questioner : Why has the Lord called it vedaniya?
Dadashri : Because when the intensity of the suffering (pleasure or pain) increases, a person begins to get tired of it. If you had to eat the same food every day, you would get tired of it. That too is vedana (suffering), is it not? Shata vedaniya or pleasant suffering is a result of punya (merit) karma and ashata vedaniya i.e. unpleasant suffering is the result of paap (demerit) karma. Everyone at a wedding is enjoying except for Chandulal His face looks like he just drank some castor oil! Why? It is because the ashata vedak (the sufferer of pain) within is miserable. This vedak prods and pushes Chandulal in all directions, it gathers all kinds of scientific circumstantial evidences of pain and misery. There is no God or planets (graha) up there that bring misery. There is no one up there, sitting idle giving you misery. It is the vedak, the sufferer of pain and pleasure within that does everything. The Soul is not involved in this. Besides the soul, there is an army of other things within too. In this army there are policemen, soldiers, superiors, etc; they are all in this army!
Questioner : Dada, the Gnani Purush does not have these two vedaks, does he?
Dadashri : No, Gnani too has them, but He remains the 'seer' and the knower' of shata and ashata vedaniya; He
remains the seer and knower of the experience of pleasure and pain. Whenever someone insults or defames you. You have to tell this entity (vedak) within, "This is happening because of your pending karmic account." The real You (the Self) are the seer and the knower and are in eternal bliss and so You have to live as a neighbor with the non-self within. These are all temporary adjustments. When a person has a toothache, why does he not worry that it will hurt him forever? There is a time for everything The pain will stop when the time is right. No circumstance will last longer than forty-eight minutes, that is the order and regularity (niyam) of this universe.
There is no happiness in any situation (avastha). Situations and circumstances are constantly changing. If there is happiness in the park, you still have to come home. Instead, it is better that you remain in the location of misery and pleasure will arise. A person who walks in the scorching heat under the sun is bound to find pleasure even under the sparse foliage of the acacia tree. If a person does not appreciate the shade of an acacia tree. just make him walk under the sun for a few hours, and then he will Happiness is the end result of all clash filled activities of the world. After an exhausting day's work, one feels pleasure in merely sitting under a fan and leisurely drinking tea! On the other hand, the boss who spends his entire day in the comforts of his own home does not appreciate the fan or a cup of tea. All worldly pleasure is the reward of fatigue, mental or physical. Eternal bliss; elemental bliss (sanatan sookha, tattvik sookha) is such that it remains for ever.
There are situations where a wife hurts her husband and where a husband hurts his wife. Now why do they suffer pain? It is because they inflict relatively lesser pain than necessary. Now if they were to inflict more pain than necessary, they get used to it, accepts it and along with this acceptance, there is a relative sense of relief and happiness. The knowledge (relative gnan) at the end of such prolonged pain, tells them is that this
