The Bliss of Non-Possession

In the Taittiriya Upanishad, there is an interesting chapter often referred to as the "calculus of bliss". It starts from the measure of one human being who has everything, health, strength, all human opportunities fully available to him. That is the measure of "human bliss". The recitation goes on to systematically increase the amount of bliss "a hundred and a hundred fold" to reach the next successive level, and this goes on for ten successive levels until the bliss of Brahman is attained, representing a form of bliss millions of times greater than the greatest experience of the fortunate human being. Since the conception of this quanta of bliss beyond the experience of the human being is not able to be grasped by us, this is of course just interesting, until we come to the important part repeated at each level: "and this is the bliss of the veda-wise, whose soul the blight of desire touches not."

If we consider for the moment the stress that arises from the attempt to acquire, own, possess or retain possession, we can easily recognise the pressures and, even, suffering that goes along with any attempt to own anything. Ownership is a fiction of the ego and the illusion of the exte
al reality. If we reflect deeply, we understand that we depart this world without all of the accumulation of wealth, or possessions that we worked so hard, and with so much stress, to acquire! If we condition our happiness on possession, we find it to be a very transient, weak and variable thing indeed. Someone wins a lottery and has a million dollars in their hands. They are happy about winning that sum of money. Then they find out that relations, friends and others have expectations or at least attempts to cause that money to depart. We have to deal with the complexity of taxes, investment decisions and all kinds of pressures that either lead to dispersal of those winnings, or to struggles to hold onto them. During the great depression, individuals who had accumulated great wealth and financial power found themselves suddenly bankrupt. Many were those individuals who were found on a sidewalk after having leaped from a tall building window to end their lives. At the end, assuming we have maintained the accumulation we worked so hard to achieve, we die and cannot even use the assets we worked so hard to acquire to buy our way into some heaven in the afterlife.

This does not imply that one must adopt the attitude of the renunciate, the ascetic, the monk who has taken a vow of poverty. This is an extreme that our mental logic frequently presents as the only true option if one wants to avoid the suffering of possessions. There is another way. Some people take the attitude that they do not own or possess anything, but act as trustees, and as trustees, they handle what comes to them with care and in a proper and appropriate way, they work to put those things to use in ways that enhance the overall well-being and purpose of the creation, and when it is time to put those things aside, they do it with a feeling of satisfaction and then enjoy the new focus or tasks they are given to undertake.

When do we feel the greatest unalloyed joy in our hearts? The moments are generally those that do not involve possession. It may be when an individual walks along a beach at the seaside, the sun shining, the waves lapping at his feet, and he does not feel a care in the world for anything other than the experience of being. It may come when some light of illumination descends on him and he sees and understands something that was hidden from him previously. Or it may come when he sees or experiences a selfless sense of giving, or a sense of surrender to the divine Force.

The issue here is not the lack of involvement with the various powers, forces, objects and activities of the world, but the lack of any form of desire or attachment to them. The secret, as the Upanishad told us is to avoid the 'blight of desire' in order to achieve bliss.

The Dhammapada states: "Happy indeed are we who own nothing. We shall feed upon delight like the radiant gods."

The Mother observes: "We could translate it [the verse] like this: 'Happy is he who possesses nothing, he will partake of the delight of the radiant gods.' To possess nothing does not at all mean not to make use of anything, not to have anything at one's disposal. 'Happy is he who possesses nothing'; he is someone who has no sense of possession, who can make use of things when they come to him, knowing that they are not his, that they belong to the Supreme, and who, for the same reason, does not regret it when things leave him; he finds it quite natural that the Lord who gave him these things should take them away from him for others to enjoy. Such a man finds equal joy in the use of things as in the absence of things. When you have them at your disposal, you receive them as a gift of Grace and when they leave you, when they have been taken away from you, you live in the joy of destitution. For it is the sense of ownership that makes you cling to things, makes you their slave, otherwise one could live in constant joy and in the ceaseless movement of things that come and go and pass, that bring with them both the sense of fullness when they are there and, when they go, the delight of detachment."

"Delight! Delight means to live in the Truth, to live in communion with Ete
ity, with the true Life, the Light that never fails. Delight means to be free, free with the true Freedom, the Freedom of the constant, invariable union with the Divine Will."

"Gods are those that are immortal, who are not bound to the vicissitudes of material life in all its narrowness, pettiness, unreality and falsehood."

"Gods are those who are turned to the Light, who live in the Power and the Knowledge; that is what the Buddha means, he does not mean the gods of religion. They are beings who have the divine nature, who may live in human bodies, but free from ignorance and falsehood."

"When you no longer possess anything, you can become as vast as the universe."

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Looking from Within, Chapter 5, Attitudes on the Path, pp. 158-160