Ananda Sangha of Portland--Destroying Depression by Substituting Prosperity by Paramhansa Yogananda

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Creating Happiness
by Paramhansa Yogananda
from Inner Culture Magazine, December 1934

Children crying, screaming, and quarreling with the neighbors’ children, and at last falling on the pavement bleeding; disease, dissension, differences between parents, the monthly bills, taxes, mortgage payments—all these keep biting into the flesh of family happiness like a swarm of pismires [ants–Ed]. The continuous bites of these little sharp-toothed worries are not death-dealing in their effects, but they are very painful and annoying. They make the family life pretty miserable.

These pismire worries are hard to get rid of. You kill off some and others seem to swarm in seemingly from nowhere. They almost bite the life out of you. Just as you use ant-killing poison powder to kill the pismires which infest your house, so you must use the chemical of peace to destroy thoughts of worry. Every time a swarm of worries invades you, just refuse to run wild, and wait calmly, seeking the remedy. Spray the appearing worries with your powerful peace chemical.

You cannot buy this peace chemical in any drug store. You must know how to manufacture it in the stillness of your daily practices in concentration. You must make it within yourself. This peace chemical is a compound of the burning acid of worry-destroying habitual calmness and a diluted element of sorrow-killing pale happiness. The acids of calmness and pale happiness must be prepared in the laboratory of self-discipline and constant trials. Pale happiness is the first by-product of the acid of strong, steady calmness. Without mixing both together, the worry-killing peace chemical cannot be made.

Worries are stupefied by calmness and slight happiness, but are completely eradicated by the constant culture of steadfast peace. Worries greatly distress the person who habitually submits to them. They can’t be quelled by more worrying or by madly chasing to quell them, but all the worry-pismires can be destroyed by the habit of fostering powerful permanent peace.