Hack to happiness

What does it mean to be truly happy?

What are you seeking? - happiness, joy - is it that you are seeking for? You are trying, you have been seeking for millennia, but have not been able to find yet - did you ask and ponder why? Well, it is time to sit with yourself, the right time to think again, time to meditate again. You must have been trying so hard and perhaps with you trying so hard, you are missing it all. Maybe your trying, seeking so hard, is the reason that keeps you away from happiness. So, how about taking a little pause to your search- recapitulate.

The greatest truth is nobody ever found or will find happiness by searching, it seems something mysteriously is wrong in the search. Because naturally in search, you forget yourself as you start to search everywhere, everywhere else. Like my Guru told me - in search, you look in all four directions, up into the sky and underneath seas, and the search becomes so desperate because the more you search, the more you do not find it, creating anxiety and in the doubt, a question arises- am I going in the right direction, am I going to make it this time, will I find it, or omg will I miss it again?

Search and you are going to miss it always.

Happiness is the function of our consciousness when it is awake, so unhappiness is the function of our consciousness asleep. So, what is unconsciousness- our mirror burdened with much dust and luggage of the past? Happiness is dropping the burden to find the clear mirror again, which will reflect all clearly - the sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the birds, all. The key is to become innocent and regain the eyes of a child- in clarity, happiness becomes visible.

'Perhaps trying even makes for unhappiness. Perhaps all the din of my desiring has kept the strange bird from my shoulder. I have tried so long and so loud after happiness. I have looked so far and wide. I have always imagined that happiness is an island in the river. Perhaps it is the river. I have thought happiness to be the name of an inn at the end of the road. Perhaps it is the road. I have believed that happiness was always tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Perhaps it is here. Perhaps it is now. I have looked everywhere else.

'So: here and now.

 'But here and now is unhappiness. Perhaps then, no such thing as happiness. Perhaps happiness exists not, it is just a dream created by an unhappy mind. Certainly, it cannot be as I unhappily imagine it. Here and now there is no happiness. So happiness is not. I need not therefore waste myself on what is not. I can forget about happiness then; I can cease to care and instead concern myself with something that I do know, can feel, and fully experience. Happiness is an idle dream: now it is morning. I can awaken and stay with unhappiness, with what is real under the sun at this moment. And now I see how much of my unhappiness came from trying to be happy; even I can see that trying is unhappiness. Happiness does not try….

'At last,, I am here and now. At last, I am what I am. I am unpretending and at ease. I am unhappy – so what? But is this what I ran from? Is this unhappiness?'

"Think over it, meditate over it.

'And when I cease to try to be happy or anything else, when I do not seek anymore, when I do not care to go anywhere, get anything, then it seems I am already arrived in a strange place: I am here and now. When I see that I can do nothing, that all my doing is the same dream, in the moment that I see this, my mind the old dreamer and wanderer is for the moment still and present.'

'For the moment, here and now, the real world shows, and see: here and now is already and always all that I had sought and striven after elsewhere and apart. More than that: I have hunted after shadows; the reality is here in this sunlit place, in this birdcall now. It was my seeking after reality that took me from it; desire deafened me. The bird was singing here all the while.

'If I am still and careless to find happiness, then happiness it seems is able to find me. It is, if I am truly still, as still as death – if I am thoroughly dead, here and now.' - Michael Adam

Naturally, if we are not searching, not seeking, not desiring, not dreaming, for a moment the mind will fall into silence, stillness, as there is nothing to hanker about, nothing to make a fuss about, nothing to expect and nothing to be frustrated about. For a moment the mind stops its constant chasing. In that moment of stillness, we will be in a strange place, in a strange unknown space, never known before. A new door opens and for the moment the mind is still and present. And magic happens - happiness suddenly begets us- when desire disappears, happiness appears. It is that for the first time, a knowing comes and we can see who we are. That knowing is what Buddha means - Ihi Passika. Come and see- he is calling us from desires as with desires, we go away far from our home, we lose our home, and are somewhere else - imaginations and illusions of self-creation are over and we have arrived - Happiness