Happy For No Good Reason

From the Back Cover

This unique guide to meditation, written by Australia's leading meditation teacher, will help you find inner peace.

Swami Shankarananda is the Director of the Shiva School of Meditation in Melbourne. He has taught meditation to the Victorian Police and the Fire Brigade, and lectured widely, including the National Gallery of Victoria. Swamiji has written extensively in his field, lectured internationally and has appeared many times on national television. Born in New York, he taught English Literature at Indiana University before going to India in 1970.

Happy For No Good Reason is a comprehensive manual of meditation and related topics, written by one of the first Western spiritual masters trained in the East. Learn to meditate easily with this book and its accompanying CD, and then take this transforming skill into your everyday life.

"After three years of visiting and working with Swamiji I accepted him as my teacher, the one I trusted to teach me what he had learned. I started to experience a contentment that I never thought I would find. This contentment has everything to do with self-acceptance—it is a wonderful journey." — Garry McDonald, Actor

"Swami Shankarananda is one of those rare souls who has probed and discovered the meaning of life. His teachings are offered in a form everyone can understand and, most importantly, everyone can apply in their daily lives. This book is an inspiration and valuable source of meditation techniques for those interested in enriching their lives." — Dr Nicholas Brash, Corporate Lawyer

"Swami Shankarananda is a remarkable teacher who has made the practice of meditation both accessible and natural. This book is a treasure, filled with teachings that truly help people bring more happiness and peace into their lives." — Dr Isobel Crombie, Senior Curator, Photography, National Gallery of Victoria

Book Preview: Introduction: My Second Education

Aim for heaven and you will get earth thrown in.
Aim at earth and you will get neither. — C.S. Lewis

“We are the most educated and affluent people in human history, the most literate, the most technologically proficient. We can replace one person's heart with another's we can fly people to other planets, and we can send tiny cameras into people's organs to inspect them from within. We are able, or will be able, to do almost anything in the physical world. However, we find this world stressful and demanding. We have trouble motivating our teenagers and keeping them away from negative influences. We find it difficult to control anger, fear, or depression. We are confused by the world within ourselves.

Our situation becomes intelligible if we recognise that we actually live in two different worlds simultaneously. One is the outer world of people and objects and the other is the inner world of thoughts and feelings. Each has its own laws and each has its own form of education. We have explored the outer world in detail, however we have neglected the inner world.

In my early life I was an academic, deeply involved in Western education. I call this form of conventional education, First Education or the "knowledge" tradition. The focus of First Education is the outer world, on science and technology, facts, events and history. This knowledge education embellishes us but does not transform us. We can acquire more and more information and still have the emotional sulks and tantrums of a child.

Over the past 30 years I have been involved with what I call Second Education, or the "wisdom" tradition. Second Education says that true happiness lies not in the outer world but within each of us. Not only that, it can be realised. The process of awakening to Second Education is called inner work. In all my years involved with institutions of higher learning, both as a student and a teacher, no one had ever spoken about conquering depression, overcoming fear and anger and attaining happiness and self-mastery. I learned so much about history and the stuff of the external world, but almost nothing about myself.

By contrast Second Education works on "being." It does not give much information in the usual sense, but it empowers us. It turns a weak person into a strong one, an unhappy person into a happy one, a confused person into a person of clarity and wisdom. Only through work on our being can such alchemy take place. Meditation is the bedrock of such change.” - Swami Shankarananda

About This Book

“ In the years that I lived with Muktananda I would hear him lecture almost every night. He always taught essentially the same thing, though he found creative ways to say it. The substance of his message was: meditate on the Self, God dwells within you as you. He also told his audience to see God in each other, to welcome others with love and respect. Though he repeated his message I always felt uplifted by it.

In this book, also, the argument is simple. I talk about the mind and I talk about the Self. I give three main techniques of meditation and subsidiary contemplations. About the mind I say that it can be positive and reflect the light, or negative and reflect darkness. A positive mind can lead us beyond the mind to the inner Self, which is the goal of meditation. We have to make effort to quiet the mind and educate it to move in positive grooves. I go back and forth over this ground, looking at it in many ways from many perspectives.

I will explore the practice and philosophy of meditation and the traditional meditation techniques of mantra (the repetition of a phrase) and witness-consciousness (watching the thoughts). Other topics include the emotions and "tearing thoughts." You will also learn a technique of Self-inquiry. It is a method of meditation that directs the mind to the power and wisdom of the inner Self. In the latter part of the book I emphasise active meditation, or meditation in life, a 24 hours-a-day awareness.

I think you will be able to tell that I love meditation. I also have great faith in the inherent wisdom of the inner Self. If we learn to hear it, the Self provides us with wisdom-in-the-moment to meet situations as they arise. Rather than a consistent theory, I would like meditators to have a quiver full of possible responses to meet each moment freshly. Hence the "arsenal approach" of this book suggests many meditative possibilities.

This book is first and foremost a meditation and Self-inquiry manual cum workbook. But, it is also a textbook of Second Education. The reader will not fail to notice a very large number of stories. I have culled these from Yoga, Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, Sufism, and other sources including Western ones. Some I have come across in my reading, but mostly I have heard them directly from spiritual teachers, especially, my own.

Teaching stories and parables are the lingua franca of spiritual teaching. Many dramatise a teaching given by a guru to a disciple. The wisdom tradition is based in the guru-disciple archetype. I have also included a number of vignettes from my own relationship with my teacher.

Most people do not have the opportunity actually to sit "at the feet" of a spiritual teacher. In general our culture is suspicious of gurus, perhaps with good reason. Nonetheless, we continue to be fascinated and touched by the mentor archetype: the man (or woman) of wisdom and experience who imparts the truth to the young aspirant seeking relief from ignorance and suffering. Think of Jesus, the Buddha, Don Juan, Socrates, Obe Wan Kinobe, Black Elk, the Dalai Lama and numberless other sages, seers, Boddhisattvas and realised beings.

I have always been moved by this archetype in all its forms, even the Hollywood version where an old gunslinger teaches an impetuous youth the wisdom of the violent frontier and how to shoot a gun. The presence of the mentor archetype tells us that we are encountering Second Education. Sometimes in First Education an encounter with a great teacher engages us emotionally in an unusual way. In such cases First Education is moving towards Second Education. The ideal student is open, earnest, eager to learn and respectful. His heart swells with admiration and love for his teacher. He is willing to follow and not argue with the teaching. On his side the teacher is moved by the student's love. Compassion and spontaneous wisdom flow from him, as much to his surprise and delight as the student's. Openness and love are the context of transmission in Second Education. “ - Swami Shankarananda

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