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Shiny, Happy, People

posted 29th December 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Inspiration, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about happiness.

True happiness that isn’t dependent on external circumstances but rather that arises from a deep sense of internal peace.

It’s the kind of happiness that Eastern religions often call Enlightenment.

I’ve been thinking about Enlightenment because, well, I’ve realized that I don’t want my sense of peace and contentment to be dependent on external things: the right house, the right car, the right job, the right partner, or the right friends.

All of these things, while sometimes wonderful, are ephemeral. They don’t last forever and even while they last the fear of things ending can make us miserable.  It’s like this story I read years ago by Krishnamurti that just popped into my head. A man has a wonderful job, a wonderful wife, beautiful daughters, but he lives with a constant low level of anxiety. Why? He doesn’t merely love and enjoy those things, they define him. The loss of any one of these things through divorce, firing or death means death of his sense of self.  Consequently, he lives every day in vague fear and unease at the loss of these things.

“We are seldom happy with what we now have, but would go to pieces if we lost any part of it.”  -Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic’s Notebook, 1960

This is silly.

If you take a happy kid and stick her in an amusement park she will ride the rides, and fill herself with cotton candy until she is sticky with sweet and sweat and utterly exhausted.  She knows intuitively that eventually she will lose the amusement park, but that doesn’t diminish her pleasure of the amusement park today; it actually increases it. She knows that tomorrow will bear other wonders and even if it doesn’t, she has her own imagination and spirit to keep her company.

This is something that makes sense to me intellectually and intuitively and yet as I sat here I found within me a strong resistance to the idea of even striving for that kind of deep peace. The problem, I realized, wasn’t that I was afraid to fail, but rather that I feared success.

“There is only one cause of unhappiness: the false beliefs you have in your head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them.” – Anthony de Mello

The way we’ve positioned enlightenment, inner peace, spiritual achievement or however else you want to phrase it, is as a solitary pursuit. Achieve enlightenment and you’ll have to go live somewhere in a yurt or travel the planet trying to spread the word of your life’s lessons. You won’t want to meet the gang for beer anymore after work (will you even work?), you won’t be able to stay with your partner or spouse, you will be an insufferable know it all and in the process of becoming enlightened you will find yourself… alone.

And I think for most of us, more than anything we fear being alone.

“Happiness is a function of accepting what is.”  -Werner Erhard

“Most people would rather be certain they’re miserable, than risk being happy.”  -Robert Anthony

So let’s look at history. The two enlightened people that I know the most about offhandedly are Jesus and the Buddha neither of whom lived solitary existences. If anything, their deep spirituality propelled them forward making it easier for them to be among people; not harder.  Both found, interestingly enough that their deep sense of inner peace didn’t isolate them, but rather connected them more deeply and without fear and actually brought people to them.

Enlightened people, apparently, are attractive people.

The Buddha was even said to have something of a kicking sense of humor.

As I release the notion that my search for happiness will somehow lead to my own unhappiness, I can’t help but wonder what other deep resistances we hold that act as barriers towards our own self-development?

photo credit: donna cymek

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