Most of us are not suspicious about our “happiness.” We should be.

Few of us live consciously and even fewer care to become conscious and live from an awakened posture in this world. For the most part, people will sacrifice their life to their bodies and merely allow the body to dictate to them the quality of their living and the proportions of their outcome in this world. Most people will succumb to what they call “happiness” in order to achieve a sense of relief from their genetic dispositions in emotionality.

Nothing brings about deep despair as does a person on their “death bed” realizing that everything that has ever made them “happy” has placed them in the position of another useless death. I have found in my Hospice work that few recognize this. People die rationalizing their “evils” just as they justified their “joy.”

It is the illusions that arise from our insecurity, which is supported through our continual appeasement of emotionality, that eventually become the “reality” we act upon in this lifetime. Most of us live from an unconscious mind created solely from an emotionality that was pre-programed by the genetics of our parents and, when combined with our basic DNA, dictates the gravitas of our own self-hatred.

Realizing our own self-hatred is a very important process in our lives…to recognize the hate we keep hidden within our desire for what we call “good.” The ideal of “good” to most of us simply means whatever we can get from the outer world that will make our lives more convenient and comfortable so we don’t have to feel the state of our deepest sorrows. It is difficult for most of us to realize that it is our idea of “good” that causes our greatest suffering in this world.

When we understand the nature of our humanity and how it works, the way it works – we mature into the ability to no longer allow self-hatred and emotionality to govern our life.

The Law of Impermanence

Nothing ever stays the same. Everything is subject to change and deterioration. The elements of emotionality that made us happy when we were children no longer exist as they did when we were little. Most of us resent this and live irresponsibly in this lifetime doing things that are immature.

Although our body grows in physical maturity, most of us do not develop as spiritual beings. So we adopt a “Peter Pan Syndrome” and merely live irresponsibly as a child in an adult body. This often takes the form of behaviors that are unkind and self-defeating, which devolve into states of Karma that are very painful. Most turn to drugs and alcohol to sustain this state of immaturity, which accounts for the alarmingly high level of substance abuse in our country.

Happiness is a Quality of Consciousness

The continual pursuit of pleasuring the senses makes us impulsive and molds our thinking into the derangement of merely lining up one desire after another, and gratifying ourselves quite literally to death. In our pursuit to have our every desire fulfilled, we undermine ourselves and create our own demise.

Once a man was traveling and he accidentally entered paradise. In the Indian concept of paradise there are wish-fulfilling trees, known of as Kalpataru. When you sit beneath them and desire anything it is immediately fulfilled – there is no gap between the desire and its fulfillment.

There is no gap between a thought and a thing. So you think and immediately it becomes a reality in this world; the thought realizes automatically. These trees are a symbolic representation of the mind. Mind is creative with its thoughts and manifests all sorts of mischief.

The man was tired, so he fell asleep under the wish tree. When he woke up he was feeling very hungry, so he simply said, “I am feeling so hungry, I wish I could get some food from somewhere.” And immediately food appeared out of nowhere, floating in the air, delicious food.

He was so hungry that he didn’t pay much attention to where it had come from – when one is hungry, one is not philosophic. He immediately began eating, and the food was so delicious that he was caught up in the flavors. Once his hunger was gone he looked around. Now that he was feeling very satisfied, another thought arose in him: “If only I could get something to drink.” And since there is no prohibition in paradise, immediately precious wine appeared.

While drinking the wine and relaxing in the cool breeze of paradise under the shade of the tree, the man began to wonder, “What is the matter? What is happening? Have I fallen into a dream, or are some ghosts around and playing tricks with me?”

Immediately ghosts appeared and they were ferocious, horrible, nauseating. The man started trembling and a thought arose within him: “Now I am sure to be killed. These ghosts are going to kill me.”

And he was killed.

The man was killed by his own fears.

We do not realize that even though we may seem “happy” and having “fun,” which we believe is the “right” way to live…something else is occurring. We are invoking a quality of energy into our lives that brings about the enormity of obsession. The more we get what we want, the more we feel frightened about eventually losing what we have…which causes us to become even more obsessed about clinging to what we desire. Through our obsession with painful ideals of what a “good” life here on earth should be, we continue to undermine the most precious aspect of our state of Being.

We must abandon allowing the emotional mind to overwhelm us with contrived evidence, manufactured by the ego, that tells us we need a certain “thing” to make us happy. When we focus our attention on the energy of the Heart, rather than the traditional myth that “happiness” is a result of getting what we want, we experience the Joy that arises within as we move our attention away from emotion. We come to a place where we understand that we are here to know a Love through which we have everything we need…and much more.