Will I Ever Be Happy?

Probably not, but don't worry, its's okay.

A state of ongoing happiness just doesn’t exist. It may however, be reasonable enough to hope for spontaneous moments of joy. Even that seems to require a good amount of persistent attention. It’s just not easy being alive.

What if the universal design doesn’t contain any constancy at all? That obviously negates any possibility of continued happiness. What if the design never had anything to do with being happy? What if we are lucky to feel any happiness at all, let alone to have what some might call a happy life? By definition a universal design includes everything. All the good and all the terrible.

Does the universe care if you are happy? Maybe like a child with a bin of legos, universal intelligence has joyfully dumped them out on the floor and with focus, determination, and love is assembling them into rich and varied forms that are always changing? What if that is the game?

What if all of the manifest world is always moving, always changing, and always hopelessly flawed. Even more so, what if it is supposed to be?
Always in flux, everything that is alive is moving. The wild creativity of universal intelligence is free to create anything at all. And it does. Always fragmented, the individuated bits of life never land in a single spot. They touch, dance, and move on. Is this an acceptable situation? Do we really have to deal with so much uncertainty? Is there anyway to make our situation more comfortable?

DEEPENING AWARENESS THROUGH INQUIRY
Yoga has a few maps for exploring these questions. Through different methods they all lead to finding a context of wholeness that underlies and contains the wild and seemingly chaotic manifest world.

At the most surface levels of our beings—the arenas of sensing, thinking and feeling—we always vacillate between joy, sorrow, and all the rest of it. Yoga’s maps provide direction for inquiry into the root of intelligence and creativity that is unchanging and stable at our cores.

The koshas is one of these maps. From core stillness and potentiality—without form—the koshas show us how life manifests from this radiant ccenter into increasingly complicated and differentiated qualities and traits. The map of the koshas clearly shows us where real comfort lies. Using the koshas as a guide we can find our way through the surface rumblings and difficulties—toward deeper and deeper comfort and wisdom. We necessarily need to traverse through all expressions of human form and function. Right to the source. And right back out again.

So, who are we in this? We get to choose. We choose based on what we are able to perceive directly. So, we practice. We refine and clarify our perceptions to the very best of our human ability. We follow our inherent and wholesome desire to see life more clearly, to experience its source of radiance and creativity.

TO HEAL OR NOT TO HEAL
We can work for years trying to perfect ourselves, to become less fundamentally dissatisfied. When confronted with our fragmented forms—our clusters of recurring thoughts and feelings—we want to heal something, heal the whole thing. But, what if it doesn't need to be healed?

What if it is just fine as it is? What if you and your worst imagined faults are just fine? What if each seemingly imperfect fragment is already fully unified into a gigantic whole? It never left it. And furthermore, what if we can not abolish our hidden sorrows and pain? What if the only real solution to our suffering is to witness it directly and accept its existence in order to move on.

There is no way out of unity. We are swimming in it. Maybe effective practice is using discriminative mind to home in on and notice the very nature of the fragments themselves. To accept them fully as part of a larger picture. Even when we don't necessarily like them all.

From where did these messy and supposedly flawed pieces of life actually arise? Can we recognize them for what they are before we panic, harden, and attack? Locking ourselves into a rigidity and judgment is just not the most effective method for feeling okay and free in your life.

If you want to change something, first of all see it clearly. Allow it to be exactly as it is without immediate and reactive need to alter, to change, or to improve it. Then, if you want to do something about it, you have the space to choose wisely and take effective action.

IT’S A QUESTION OF CONTEXT
Unfortunately, so often we perceive only the bits and fragments of our personal existence without also perceiving ourselves as a part of the unified whole. We completely miss the universal context in which we live and don't notice who we actually are.

The radiance of universal awareness is obscured. Not because it isn't there, but because we — in our own individual swirls of consciousness — are so preoccupied with something else. We become trapped in the narrow space of our individual ego-mind. We perceive everything from there. The full picture is lost. Knowing the larger context is the only hope for gaining some semblance of ongoing comfort, acceptance, and even joy in life.

This is why we practice. Practice clarifies vision. We practice to free ourselves from the domination of an out of control and immature ego-mind. Ego mind is in charge of differentiating the individual from the whole. That’s its job and it is good at it. Sometimes too good. Our individualtion from the universal whole is necessary to self-our personal preservation. to funtion in life we need to see that we are separate from other things and entities. But it would be a lot more comfortable to maintain the context of the whole, even as we view our individuality. Our ego minds drive us to do our work, to brush our teeth, eat food, etc. Where would we be without them. Our individuality moves and shapes us. We work, we breathe, we feel, love, rage, and honor one another. And yet, it is actually not all about I, Me, Mine. 

There is more to the picture. We learn to pay closer attention. We discriminate and pierce through the illusion of separateness and alienation. We pierce through our own consistent and reliable vacillating between grandiosity and self loathing. We see the pieces and we see the context in which they live.

It is actually not all about the I, me, mine of it all. There is more. We delve deeper. We discriminate and pierce through the illusion of separateness and alienation. We see the pieces and we see the context in which they live.

How can the fragments be a problem if they are nothing more than the creative play of intelligence that is way larger than we can even imagine? In other words, can we accept our flawed humanity, and at the same time recognize our universality? Can we make a choice to perceive and to act from the larger container, the big picture even right in the challenging moments?

WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?
It is a question of perspective. It’s like pushing a cart full of young children through the aisles of a toy store. Eventually one or all of them begin to scream and try every trick they know to get the fancy toy, or the next one, or the next one. You know that toy is expensive, environmentally disastrous, and won’t provide any lasting satisfaction. The children don’t know that. The child doesn’t share our larger perspective. They want that thing with all their might.

Who would you prefer to be making decisions for you? Your immature two year old or the wiser, more mature grownup? The immature ego mind, might have a huge tantrum, but which is better over the long haul? A mature ego knows that the desire for immediate gratification is very powerful and that satisfying it all the time is a prescription for disaster. They are both functions of ego, one more mature than the other.

Our egos are not bad. They are however, in most cases, extremely immature. Learning to shift from our self-centered perspective to a more expansive vision, our egos and their out-of-control desires can be seen for what they are. There is no need to demolish or extinguish individuality. There’s no need for self-aggrandizing or self-loathing either. Allowing the self referential home of “I, me, mine” to run the show is a sure way to live in chaos and to endlessly suffer at the hands of life’s fluctuations. It’s a prescription for never achieving any lasting satisfaction…at all.

The key is to allow our self-definitions to develop and grow into maturity. Once our egos have found a a wholesome place to live they can do their appropriate good work. They can define and care for our individuality in wholesome ways. They assist our actions in the world. We need them. And, we need to keep them in check. We do so by recognizing their place within a larger and more inclusive whole.

FREEDOM AND SPACE
Our willingness to see ourselves as we are is not easy when coming up against patterns and traits that we find distasteful. Accept even that!? Yup. You must. You can change it if you want. Later. But for now you need to see it without resistance. Then you can extricate yourself from the battle in which you are caught. Resisting what is actually true is not a step toward freedom. Acceptance leading to skillful action is the best medicine. Drop the resistance, see it for what it is, and then take action. Accept that it is so and then do something about it.

This is a powerful inquiry. It requires tremendous bravery to truthfully inquire into who we are. Who am I at my core and who am I in the world? What is happening here? Who am I in this?

Releasing resistance to what is creates immediate space in the mind. We feel the space. The freedom is instantaneous. We see how our small self-definitions are just phantoms of thoughts and feelings. They can be held in space or they can dissolve into it. Freed from them, if only for a moment, we are confronted directly with the larger field — the space — in which they live. Which is bigger? The field in which everything is happening or our little individual swirling world of perception and thought? Who is in charge?

Is freedom and space happiness? Maybe, maybe not. The only possible window to happiness is momentary anyway. Stay present, inquire, pay closer and closer attention to what is actually presenting in each moment. Don’t resist seeing what you see. Allow it.

Resist nothing, until you know what it is made of and then do whatever is necessary.
Happiness is waiting in the space. It is not happy. It’s just there.