If You Are a Slave to Your Senses, You Cannot Be Happy

If you are a slave to your senses, you cannot be happy. If you are a master of your desires and appetites, you can be a really happy person.

If you overeat against your will; if your wish anything contrary to your conscience; if you act wrongly, forced by your senses, against the will of your Inner Self, then you cannot be happy.

People who are slaves to the senses find that their evil habits compel them to do things that will hurt them. Stubborn bad habits bludgeon your will power every time it tries to take the lead and guide your thoughts to the kingdom of right action. The remedy lies in rescuing your will power from the imprisoning power of the senses.

To yield to bad habits is to make them stronger and your will power weaker. Find your bad habits of anger, meanness, jealousy, fear, inertia, overeating, or whatever your particular weakness is, by not yielding to temptation against your will.

When you determine to do something that you know is absolutely right, go through with it at any cost. This will give you wisdom-guided will more power over your bad habits.

What Are Happiness Thieves and How to Defeat Them

Almost every soul is a prisoner of the senses, which are entrenched on the surface of the body. The soul’s attention is lured away from its inner kingdom in the medulla, the spiritual eye, the chakras, to the outer region of the body, where greed, temptation, and attachment have their strongholds.

The devotee who wants to lead King Soul away from the misery-making slums of the senses, finds that he cannot do so without a severe clash between the soldiers of the senses and the divine soldiers of the Soul.

Thoughts of dishonesty, temptation, or revengefulness are soldiers of the misery-making senses. They want to conquer the kingdom of your happiness and keep you prisoner of the dungeon of unhappiness and misery.

As soon as the soldiers of wrong thoughts rally together to attack your inner peace, wake up the soul soldiers of Light, Honesty, and Self-Control, and wage a furious battle.

Remember it rests with you whether you want greed, sense-slavery, anger, hatred, jealousy, revengefulness, or worries to rule your life, or whether you will let the divine soldiers of Self-Control, Calmness, Love, Forgiveness, Peace, and Harmony to rule your mental kingdom.

Drive away the rebel sense habits that have brought misery to the empire of your peace. Be king of yourself, and let the soldiers of goodness and good habits rule the kingdom of your mind.

Then happiness will reign within you forever.

Excerpted from How to Be Happy All the Time by Paramhansa Yogananda.

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