I’m making changes in my life. What was good enough last year is not good enough now. What seems to happen when you look down the road, and not at your feet, is you see all the constraints and webs of habit that have been bedeviling you, without your conscious awareness.
I realized this morning several things. First, failure which is unaccompanied by self pity is a means for generating detachment of precisely the sort the Buddhists, Taoists and others advocated. Any trauma, that you confront honestly, and which you do not contexualize as unnecessary–as if any life event could be called that–helps you grow. You become deeper and richer in the ways that matter. You become more invulnerable to the shocks to which the flesh in prone.
What also occurred to me is that we contextualize happiness. We view it as the outcome of certain sorts of experiences. I was doing my morning exercises, listening to music, and suddenly felt happiness. It just came to me. I don’t know why.
And this is the point: happiness does not NEED a point or purpose. I think we often feel it, and reject it on a preconscious level as contexually inappropriate. Why would driving to work make you happy? Why would doing another report make you happy? Why would being at work make you happy? Why not?
I spoke several posts ago about negative hallucinations. I think we have happiness negative hallucinations, in that happiness is there, it is present and possibly expressable to our conscious awareness, but we repress it, thinking it can only happen when you’re having sex, or on your boat, or shopping, or winning something.
It is, I think, accurate to say that to the precise extent you make happiness an end, it disappears. That is why so many members of the Me generation, and their kids, are on anti-depressants.
Think about how you conjure a Patronus in Harry Potter: you think of a happy, powerful experience, and you give external expression to it in the form of light. You do not find something out there: you take something inside, and move it outside.
I read a Sufi story once where he was talking about the innate justice of wisdom which, as he put it, could not be given to the unworthy, nor withheld from the worthy.
This feeling of Windhorse, which I have described on here somewhere, likewise can neither be withheld nor given. I saw that yesterday.
One more Harry Potter example (clearly, Joanne Rowling’s success arose in no small measure from her capacity for myth-making): the mirror of Erised. The Sorcerer’s Stone could only be released to someone who did not want to use it selfishly.
Life, likewise, in the sense of pleasurable, deep experience, can only be released to those who are not trying to consume it like famished wolves.
This probably sounds deep, and maybe it is, but I will point out that I am still often a screwball. There, now the mood is gone.
Or maybe that was the path forward. You decide. Good luck!!!!