Addiction – Trying to Elongate the Joy Shaft🔗

Addiction means believing that joy or ecstasy came due to some object or person or situation. People try to reproduce the same thing again and again, even though the same joy or experience does not come back again.

Understand, this is the definition of addiction: trying to elongate the joy shaft, by recreating or reproducing, or again bringing the same persons, situations, incidents, or happenings into your life, knowing that the same joy is not coming.

Some people are addicted to partying, some people are addicted to smoking, some people are addicted to drinking, and some people are addicted even to newspaper reading, especially about violence. You do not know how much violence we are swallowing.

Relation between Awareness and the Thoughts in Your Inner Space

Understand, the more and more violence you swallow, you will become aware only if the violent pictures are moving in front of you. The projector light which is inside you comes on, the awareness that you exist comes to life only when the violent thoughts cross in front of you. It is like an automatic alarm clock. You tell yourself, 'I cherish this kind of thoughts; when these kinds of thoughts are coming in front of my mind, please wake me up.'

If you are enjoying lustful thoughts, whenever lustful thoughts cross your system, you will come to the awareness, 'I exist'. If you are enjoying violence, whenever the violent thoughts come into your system, you will come to life and know that you exist.

If you empower a particular thought again and again, when those thoughts cross your inner space, you will come back to life. It will become a vicious circle.

This is what I call vicious circle, you empowering negativity and negativity bringing you back to life; you empowering again more negativity, and more negativity bringing you to life and excitement.

That is why, if you start cherishing violence, you don't have to reach hell, you are in hell! Even if you reach hell, you won't find any difference. See, I am not talking about getting information about life. For example, knowing about some accidents or murders that happened in your city is ok; it is knowing about life to be safe yourself. That is not what I am talking about. Many times we enjoy violence, reading tabloids and seeing violent scenes in the media.

An important thing we need to understand, the Western countries can afford to create violent movies; they can afford to create violent presentations in the newspapers, media or movies. They can afford because they have huge law enforcement and legal systems. There is no county, no village without a police station in the so-called developed countries. Of course, even with that, it is very difficult, but they can at least manage.

The other day, I was reading an article saying, with the support of a lot of scientific data and statistics, that in any city, if a boxing competition happens, within 30 days, the crime rate of the city goes up by 30%! In the same way, there was another study which said, that if a group of people meditate sitting in the center of the city, within 30 days, the crime rate of the city comes down by 67%. The study was done by one of the leading organizations teaching meditation, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM group.

See, the West can afford to have these violent programs because they have the infrastructure to control and manage the society. In the USA, there is no county, no village without a police station and if you just dial 911, within 3 minutes, you will see a cop standing in front of your home to take care of you, to attend to you. We can't afford to copy, duplicate and bring about the same violence in the East.

Bharat is running because of Ramayana and Mahabharata, not by any law enforcement control! It runs by the eternal Cosmic Constitution. We call it Sanātana Dharma. So, we can't afford to break it.

I want all our intellectuals to please understand, we can't afford to break our dharma. We don't have the infrastructure to replace it. If we dump our dharma, we don't have something to replace and maintain the social balance. If we are going to dump our dharma, we are swallowing too much of violence, too much of these tabloid ideas. If you see these people who read these weekly tabloids, you will see in them a very low level of consciousness. They will be constantly attracting accidents in their life, suffering in their life, because they are just waiting for painful incidents, because that gives them excitement.