Swami Rama Tirtha was a mystic saint of India who travelled to the US, preceded by Swami Vivekananda, during the last century. He was a great teacher of practical vedanta who used to call himself Baadshah Ram, Emperor Ram, even though he had renounced his family and all worldly belongings. It is reported that somebody who saw him in the US without any worldly belongings asked him: “You look like a beggar, then why you keep calling yourself the emperor? Swami Ram replied: “Look at me and not what I have or not have.” He really looked like an emperor and behaved like an emperor. A man who has no desires does become an emperor in the real sense, but an emperor who is full of desires is just a beggar with unfulfilled desires. Contentment makes us emperors.
Talking on the phenomenon of happiness and contentment, Osho introduced a certain law that only some mystics have known. He says: “I can make you kings without kingdoms; you only have to act like kings, and act so totally that before you even a real king will appear as if he is just acting. And when the whole energy has moved into it, it becomes reality! Energy makes anything real. If you wait for kingdoms they never come. Even for a Napoleon, for an Alexander, who had big kingdoms, they never came. They remained miserable because they didn’t come to realise the second, more basic and primal law of life.”
This basic and primal law depends on how we use our energy. The secret is hidden in our energy. One has to work on one’s energy. One has to learn the art of becoming total and undivided in whatever one does. Totality creates its own reality. Act totally and be one with your act, it will become real. If you are acting half-heartedly then it will remain artificial.
Osho suggests this secret law in My Way: The Way of the White Clouds, “Create the effect, become the emperor, be a magician... and from this very moment, because there is no need to wait. One has to wait if the kingdom has to come first. If the cause has to be created first, then one has to wait and wait and wait and postpone. There is no need to wait to create the effect. You can be the emperor this very moment... Be happy, and in that peak of happiness you will see the whole world is happy with you.”
The enlightened mystic concludes: “There is an old saying: Laugh and the world laughs with you; cry, and you cry alone. Even the trees, the rocks, the sand, the clouds... if you can create the effect and be ecstatic, they will all dance with you; then the whole existence becomes a dance, a celebration.”
