Happiness is not something you can get from the outside world or obtain by doing specific actions. You can only be it and the good part is that you already are it. In this post I would like to talk about how happiness is strictly connected to the process of waking up, a process that requires removing rather than acquiring.
"When your pockets fill with dollar bills,
your heart forgets to eat"
-Shakey Graves-
About happiness many words have been spent in human's history. What I have discovered and I have been experiencing through my personal journey is that happiness is not a state we can achieve no matter how hard we try. Why?
Because happiness is what we are and therefore any attempt to achieve it represents an illusion, a surrogate that can only function as a pale version of what actual happiness is. Happiness is not a state to be obtained by doing some special actions or by introducing something in our life that is not present yet. It is a process of removal of all the illusions that are currently veiling what we are. Happiness is another name for Consciousness and for Love. It might all sounds cheesy and creamy but it is what is true and you had better to get rid of any other beliefs you are holding on in order to discover this life-changing truth.
Everyone knows that money, power, success, material gaining, career, sex, drugs but also the search for a partner or looking for a better place to live cannot and will never make anyone happy in the long run. It might offer some rest and peace but it will not last. But why is it so? Why bringing something into our life will never manage to fill up the sense of lack that we all feel and that naturally makes us wondering around the planet earth to feel complete?
The number one reason is that what we think we are does not represent what we actually are. The one that is looking for peace and happiness is an illusion, a non-existing entity that has mislead the body and the mind to be its own identity. What most people are identified with is the inner chattering within their head, the constant voice running no stop that thinks to be the "I" that is in control of a body that has to survive within a world.
That is the problem: what you think to be is not what you are.
Mind is, by its nature, restless and ever moving, constantly creating new ideas and projecting into a future that does not exist and attached to a past that represents only the present moment. Mind is never in the timeless moment of reality where true happiness happens. If you decide to identify with the flow of mind, you are choosing a dangerous path, a crazy horse hard to be tamed. This identification might get you some excitement for a while but in the long run you are going to fall and get hurt. Excitement and euphoria are transitory events and as such they do not represent the place where happiness should be looked for.
There is a "place" where happiness can be found constantly because it is made out of it and this "place" represents what you already are, ultimately. But by strongly identifying yourself with a movement, a manifestation that owns you its existence, you are veiling the real source that represents your true nature.
What you are, Consciousness, that is, That which is conscious of anything happening in the manifested world of forms, is complete and does not lack anything. Consciousness is the formless container from which all forms come into existence. However this coming into existence as something is what is called an illusion: it seems that reality is made out of things and objective objects with their own existence but their true nature is equally formless, it is made out of not-a-thing, they share the same nature of their source. As I said many times in previous posts, what seems to be made of something else that Consciousness such as, metal, glass, wood, plastic, water is simply illusory, a conceptual superimposition of mind into reality.
Consciousness to experience itself and its creation had to take a distinct point of view but it forgot it did so. And from this sleepy position it forgot that the so called body-mind and the world around is itself. Anything in existence is Consciousness but it is now forgetful about that. Most of humans are ignorant about this important true. Most of people are trapped in a dream where they are dreaming about being a limited and mortal human entity living in a physical world made out of objects and surrounded by other beings without realizing that everything is themselves.
However, what we are, Consciousness, is an intelligent being and it has planted in each of its creation the seed to be able to wake up from this dream. Within all humans there is a call, an intuition that this life hides a secret that needs to be discovered. So most of us start this journey in the search for an higher truth, that is nothing else than the discovery of who we truly are.
The historical era in which we live is definitely much more challenging than others in being able to focus on this journey. In previous times, where humans were more in contact with nature, where certain spiritual exercises and the usage of holy plants were common practices, their journey back home was in a sense easier and there were masters and teachers supporting this path to be smoother than ever.
Modern humans live mostly in chaotic cities, busy in achieving material goals and completely projected outwards. The inner world has been completely put under the rug. We have visible problems with handling emotions and thoughts, we are in denials of our problems and we have learnt to blame the world for our miserable fate. The possibility that all the world's problems represent a reflection of our own messed up mind cannot be even taken with the necessary seriousness. Our connection with nature is clearly broken and the practice of spiritual exercises has been either turned into a new agey trend or dismissed by the spreading of a new form of dogmatism called science currently deceived in thinking that what is measuring is an objective reality rather than its own personal dream.
This current situation in which we found our self makes extremely challenging for most of humans finding some time to stop watering the seed planted within us to wake up from our own dream (for most a nightmare). The danger in being identified with the biological machine or body-mind structure is that we consider the external world as a place in which we have to survive and compete with others rather than a mirror in which our shadows are clearly manifested to make us grow (see my post "The Magic Shift: Turn The Outward In").
What we call the "external world" is a personal and unique projection of aspects of our self that need to be regarded as an opportunity that lead as to the realization of being already complete. At the moment most humans feel like being incomplete, they feel a sense of lack, a sense of emptiness that are desperately trying to fill up by projecting outwards, by looking for an external help. We are champions in doing that: some people are busy in building up a career, others they go for sex, drugs or alcohol to get that excitement that gives them the desired high, others jump out of a plane to feel alive, others play the victim part to get from others the love they cannot give to themselves, others spend hours in a gym to build up the confidence they need to walk around, others keep changing cities to find the perfect one and so on.
Nothing wrong in all this. I do not want to sound moralistic. We are given the freedom to occupied the day as we like, doing what we love but for those who wants something more from life it has to be understood that most of the activities we are into are a consequence of the state of ignorance in which we find our self. It a mind's trap veiling a priceless treasure that would solve most, if not all, of our dysfunctional behaviors. The sense of lack and emptiness and our consequent search for surrogates in the outside world comes from a misunderstanding of what is actually going on here.
As I said, everything that is being perceived right now, such as what you call your body and mind and the world around, is nothing but Consciousness but you have forgot this truth. You now think to ultimately be a human being. This step of identification was necessary for Consciousness to experience itself: the formless needed to (apparently) become a form to participate in its own creation like a wave wanting to surf the ocean (see my post "Like Water").
But being trapped in the illusion of being a form, like a human, feels limiting for you, Consciousness. The body-mind capsule feels oppressive for your unlimited nature. Water enjoys to be a wave as long as its infinite nature is preserved and remembered. And to get you back on track to make you waking up from the illusion to be a physical human surrounded by an objective world, suffering is experienced. If you kept feeling just fine within the skin boundaries you would never challenge these self-imposed limitations and you would probably live an ordinary life.
But we are not meant to live an ordinary life because our true nature is magical. And suffering comes handy in pushing our beliefs and in getting out from our comfort zone in just being fine. Without suffering we would not see throughout the illusion. Suffering is what makes us taking important decisions to change what is not working, it is our best ally in realizing that what truly matters in not our job, money or career. Suffering makes us reevaluating our own life's condition and the way we are living it.
And if you suffer enough you will dig so deep into your whole existence that you will wake up to the realization that external world is actually a mirror that is projecting 24/7 anything you need to learn to wake up. The external world is not an objective place equal for every human but a self-constructed world in which each deceived human is projecting its own limitations, fears and beliefs to realize their relative and subjective nature.
The external world, if you have not realized it yet, is not triggering us in the same way, each of us responds in a very particular and specific way to what is happening "out there". Each world is carefully sewn on us, it seems to know all our blind spots and how to piss us off very efficiently. This is not a coincidence, it is not a random and mechanical process. It is our hidden nature that knows what we need to go through to wake up. It is pushing and pushing from within until we have had enough of our own deceptions, until we see that all the limitations and fears are not objective features of a reality standing out there but a subjective reality from which we must awake.
If people keep thinking to be ultimately a human being and treating the world as an objective world standing out there without seeing themselves in it, they will keep chasing illusory surrogates. The human entity will keep accumulating "objects" and obtaining "recognition" without realizing that those "things" are inner projections reflecting a personal desire to fill up an existential emptiness. This emptiness can be only satisfied by moving within, by looking for your true nature and realizing your completeness and your being already happiness. Your emotional and mental desire for "objects" and "recognition" exists only to drag your attention inward to find yourself.
The external world functions as a mirror to show you which parts of yourself you think you are missing. Then the biological machine is codifying those projections in emotions, feelings and thoughts (that are completely subjective to your personal needs) to make you experiencing the sense of lack and suffering necessary for you to start working on your own shadows. What has to be done then is not going back outwards in the world of your own projections but within. If you keep going outward trying to heal your suffering with non-existing "objects", you are bound to live this loop over and over. Those projections will keep manifesting, maybe in different forms and life's challenges, emotions and thoughts will keep triggering you and nothing will change leading you to blame others and the world.
By going inwards, instead, by asking who is the one that is suffering and by taking full responsibility for what you are projecting outwards, you will discover the illusory and relative nature of your own suffering, of your own projections and of the "I" that is suffering unveiling your true nature, Consciousness, which is happiness and love itself. All the fears and troubles you are experiencing are not features of an objective world separated from you but your own personal shadows projected "out there" to be visible in order to become conscious of their illusory nature and realize what lays behind the curtain of this show called life.
Only then, after such a long journey, work and commitment for what is really true, your own shadows and projections will be purified and your own world will look fresh new. Finally Consciousness wakes up to its own nature and it is now free to work, create and shine through a functional biological machine to show to others beauty, happiness and love as the only real reality when not masked by the projections of an illusory entity.
Consciousness is formless but it has decided to take a form to be manifested happiness. It got trapped in its own plan but it is now your job and responsibility to get your illusory entity out of the way, clean up your own world and be Happiness itself.
It is not a mistake you are reading such a post after all. You are projecting it in your own world meaning that you are ready to have such a shift. It is time to wake up and get real: the only way to change the world is by changing your own world from illusory beliefs and false projections that you are taking as real.
Why do you want to be happy when you are Happiness itself?