Happiness is your natural state

The irony is we were born happy; we lost touch with it.

Have you ever felt the utter meaninglessness of working for a degree, finding a job, then settling down to a life of boredom? Or, if you are an achiever, settling down to a life of emotional turmoil caused by the things that you are chasing after?  Take a look around and see if you can find just one completely happy person, someone at peace with themselves, someone who is fearless and free from insecurity, depression, lack, and worry. You would be lucky if you found one in a hundred thousand.

The irony is we were born happy; we lost touch with it. We were born surrounded by a divinity of peace, joy, and love; we lost sight of it. It’s as if we’ve been hypnotized to see what is not there and not see what is there.  Who is responsible for this condition? Not you.

Has it ever struck you that you have been programmed by society to be unhappy?

It was your parents, your society, your culture, your religion, and your past experiences that fed the operating instructions into your computer, imperiously insisting that its demands be met by life, by people, and by you. If the demands are met, the computer allows you a precarious peace, precarious because at any moment, some trifle—a plane delay, a device that doesn’t work, a document that hasn’t arrived, a spot on your shirt, you name it—it is going to be out of conformity with your programming, and the computer will insist that you become upset again. If the demands are not met, even though it is no fault of yours, the computer generates negative emotions that cause you to suffer. In short, you’ve been trained to upset yourself.  These things depend on the criteria society establishes; they depend on your conditioning.

Most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are.

If you look carefully, you will see that the one and only thing that causes unhappiness is attachment. What is an attachment? It is an emotional state of clinging caused by the belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy. It’s a false belief.

Just take a look around. Everywhere you look, people have built their lives on the unquestioned belief that without money, power, success, approval, a good reputation, love, friendship, spirituality, or God, they cannot be happy.  Most people are so brainwashed that they do not even realize how unhappy they are. It’s only when they make contact with joy that they understand how depressed they had been.

The only method that we have been taught for attaining happiness is guaranteed to produce anxiety, disappointment and sorrow.

Stop for a moment now and think about the endless list of attachments that you have become a prisoner to. Think of concrete things and persons, not abstractions. Once your attachment had you in its grip you began to strive might and main, every waking minute of your life, to rearrange the world around you so that you could attain and maintain the objects of your attachment. This is an exhausting task that leaves you little energy for the business of living and enjoying life fully.

So instead of a life of serenity and fulfillment you are doomed to a life of frustration, anxiety, worry, insecurity, suspense, tension. There you are loaded down by your attachments – and striving desperately to attain happiness precisely by holding on to the load. The very notion is absurd.

The world is crazy!

We’re living on crazy ideas about love, about relationships, about happiness, about joy, about everything. People go to psychotherapy but most don’t really want a cure. What they want is relief; a cure is painful.  They want the therapist to do is to mend their broken toys. “Give me back my lover. Give me back my job. Give me back my money. Give me back my reputation, my success.” They want their toys replaced. If they’re on the verge of going insane, raving mad, they’re about to become either a psychotic or a mystic. That’s what the mystic is, the opposite of the lunatic.  Do you know one sign that you’ve woken up? It’s when you are asking yourself, “Am I crazy, or is the world crazy?” It really is. Because we are crazy. The whole world is crazy. Certifiable lunatics! The only reason we’re not locked up in an institution is that there are just too many of us.