Guiding Light: Contentment: The greatest form of wealth

It has been often observed that whenever people meet any Spiritual personality or a learned — enlightened soul, they invariably give an expression to the feeling that their faces reflect inner contentment, peace and purity. However, hardly do these people make a sustained effort to go deeper into the factors that lead to a life of contentment and inner harmony and a state of calm and composure and much less do they make a serious attempt to attain these even though they value these highly.

A quiet reflection and serene introspection would, however, lead to the conclusion that contentment does not come from high and numerous material attainments. Contentment dawns when the dark night of ignorance ends. Only he, from whose mind the desire for mundane achievements has been eliminated, has contentment. Contentment is thus a sign of spiritual wisdom and maturity. It comes when there is the spirit of renunciation and service and the feeling of fulfilment.

What is so special about contentment that has made lots of great people talk or write about it? Well!! to understand it we would first need to understand the opposite of it, that is discontentment. If we look around, then we would hardly find anyone who is not discontented. Right? According to experts studies, there are numerous causes of man’s discontentment or dissatisfaction that brings mental agitation and disturb his intellectual equipoise as a result of which he is weighed down with despair, indifference, tension, animosity and mental agony.

A discontented person has a typical habit to build castles in the air while he is as poor as he can be. Such people totally fail to understand that it is only by dint of hard work that a man can make both ends meet, and only a man of right understanding can work on the right lines. Otherwise, it is a blunder to let your reason be clouded by passion and thus lose your happiness. Hence, we should remember that just as food sustains the body so does the mind find sustenance in happiness. The saying goes: There is no food as good as happiness. And, to be happy, you have to be content.

As Alfred Nobel rightly said that ‘Contentment is the only real wealth,' we should, therefore, not run after securing another kind of wealth to lose the wealth of contentment… (to be continued)

(The writer is a spiritual educator and popular columnist for publications across India, Nepal and UK. You can write to him at nikunjji@gmail.com or visit http://www.brahmakumaris.com/)