Happiness is...
"Am I accurately describing your life, today, in the last week, if I say
that you're very worried about your life, about yourself and that you
have a heavy spirit? And you sought answers everywhere and you never
found them and you thought that nice people were going to help you and
nice helpful organizations were going to do something for you and so you
joined them and associated with them and you married them and you
unmarried them and you ended right back where you started. Oh no, not
quite; you ended back a little more depressed, a little more despair
than before because you remember how hopeful you were before you entered
this alliance with another person or before you went to college or
whatever you planned to do to uplift your life. You remember how hopeful
you were, how excited you were.
Where is it now, where's that excitement that you took as happiness,
wrongly took as happiness? Well, it's way back there in the ashes
somewhere, isn't it, all gone. Not once, not twice, a hundred times, a
thousand times, you were so sure that this was it, that you had it made.
'Ah, he was such a nice man, she's such a nice lady, that was such a
nice group of people that I joined and associated with.' And inwardly,
listen to me, inwardly nothing happened, nothing right happened, nothing
lifted one ounce of the burden that you have on your minds and spirits
as I'm talking to you right now. This is what is known as being asleep.
This is what is known as not understanding life at all. This is what is
known as not understanding your own thoughts and your own emotions and
your own reactions. To be asleep is to not understand, to be in a state
of spiritual sleep. It also means to not understand what your future is
all about -- Vernon Howard
We all have ideas and beliefs of what happiness is. Finding the perfect spouse, owning a beautiful home filled with children, pets and a spouse we love, travelling when and where we wish, making a living doing what we love to do. From where did our ideas and beliefs of what happiness is come from? Did you come up with the ideas yourself, or were they just built into the life that you were brought into?
The problem is, we believe that happiness is something "static" - something that if we attain it, will make us happy forever. There is no such thing, as evidenced over and over again in our lives. There is also a part of us that believes that when we are unhappy, that something is wrong - when no such thing is true.
What is actually wrong is our understanding, as Vernon Howard stated above. What is wrong is that we haven't come to understand that negative states are intended to move through us, not make a homestead IN us. What is wrong is that we don't know that something owns our attention and uses those vital energies for ITSELF and not for our transformation.
We were never meant to live our lives through an insatiable appetite of wanting and not wanting the moments that arise in our lives. The intention of life is not to become something static wherein we are always reaching for or trying to achieve something that will make us happy. No such thing exists because life is a living relationship, a moment to moment relationship.
Is there such a thing as true happiness?
Yes, but it can't be defined by our mind. The mind always has ideas as to what it says is missing or incomplete in our lives so that it can keep us reaching and seeking instead of simply being in our lives.
Happiness is our natural state when we want what life wants - when we flow with the events of life instead of resisting them by not wanting what is taking place in the moment. Happiness is being in the moment and seeing the part of us that always claims we need to do something, get something, fix something in order to be happy.
Admitting the truth of Vernon Howard's words above-referenced is the first step toward entering a new life where there isn't a self that cares what others do or think, how it is looked upon by others or what others have that we don't. Can you see how carrying those kinds of burdens would stand in the way of true happiness?
We were never meant to carry any burden. We were meant to let go moment to moment - to give the burdens that we currently carry to something higher that knows how to lighten our load....and oh what a load we have. If you like scripture "My yoke is easy and my burden is light."
It's truly astounding that something in us chooses to carry such a heavy load over wanting true happiness. But this we need to see for ourselves as true.
Unhappiness exists only when we resist Life. It is that simple.
Image courtesy of: Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash
