Can you ever be happy?

To what end do you toil? Ask anyone and the answer is most likely to be "I want to be happy ". Even the saints and good Samaritans do what they do to be happy. Meditators meditate, new age people read tarot cards, do reiki, take deeksha, go to satsang, and do yoga; all intended to make them happy. Is that true for you too?

Here is my problem. Unless you know what you are and unless you can define happiness, can "you" really be "happy" ? 

Oh yes, you could get that exciting feeling in your spine or that blissful state with tears of love running down your cheeks. Is that it? You are looking for some euphoria  like in an orgasm? So it is a body thing, is it? Try this, go to a scary movie. Curious you will get a similar wave of excitement in your body as you would in a feel good movie. The body doesn't know where you get it the chemical fix, as long as you get it.

Or, may be you are a mind person, looking for cerebral happiness like the one you get when you win a lottery, a game, a fight or discover the cure for cancer. Or is it? How would your million dollar win feel if every one else won $2 million? And what if the day they gave you Nobel  prize for curing cancer, someone found an African plant that proved be 100% effective in wiping out cancer? Yes, if a process could guarantee no more suffering like meditation, mind will be truly happy. No need for a million bucks or the recognition you seem to seek.

That is still only partial solution to my dilemma. This happiness you seek seems to apply only to the body and mind. But are you the body and mind? If you are not the body and mind but something beyond, or worse still nonexistent, how could you ever be happy?

May be that's why Krishna said in the geeta, karmanyeva adhikarashte ma faleshu kadachina... " you only have the rights to act none for the results". He knew it won't make you happy anyway, so why bother. Actions on the other hand may make your body sing and mind suffer less. That's about the best you can hope for if happiness is what you seek.

So, can you ever be happy? Unfortunately, no!  The body and mind could feel  bliss and euphoria but you my dear just don't exist. 

Mindfulness Misunderstood

Once during a Buddhism meditation practice, we did this raisin eating exercise. If you haven't done    the experiment, it is simply taking a very long time to touch, feel, taste and finally eat a raisin in five may be even ten minutes. Some may call it mindfulness but I think this works well only if you make your other senses come to life and engaged. It works well if you cajole your mind into stopping its normal function of thinking and get our other organs which are normally hijacked by the mind, to do what they do best. Feel!

So to me, mindfulness really means paying attention; eyefulness, nosefulness, tastiness, touchyfeelyness and simply loveliness.

The confusion arises due to the common understanding of mindlessness, when one goes about living like a mindless zombie. So naturally we assume that being mindful is the opposite of that. It is the process of thinking that confuses the issue. Being mindless means living without paying attention not necessarily without thought.

"I,Me, Self" was born out of love

Not I, the body, I the mind or I the soul but I the label was also born in love.  This body at the age of nine months and before survived due to just one reason, love. Had it not been the love from my parents, "I" would just be a lost entity. They offered "Me" the identity as an I with a name, a home, a country, a religion and a whole bunch of attributes. Nothing other than love could have such an immense impact on the psyche of the body and mind to imbue an unshakable belief that "I" actually exists.

To undo this, to realize that there is no I, me or self, unfortunately I has to discount the most sacred thing in its life and being and that is the love of the creator, the creator of this I.

Truth is born out of disloyalty to the love that created you. What a bummer!

Love takes on this grandiose conceptual status but it starts with the body and touch which nature has designed for you to feel immediate bliss. It is the most powerful drug for all life and it is wildly addictive. It is mind bending and intoxicating and it is operating on you 24/7. Look within and find that ALL you do is for this concept created by the blissful touch started right at the beginning when your senses started to report to your brain and to form neural circuits.

But to know this truth that "you" are just a mis-perception, an illusion you have no choice but to undo this love and discover that the drive within you to seek this bliss through this love is also an illusion. As long as you keep seeking it in this way, you will be attached to the this dual world and not be free.

Mind has created elaborate schemes to keep tying you into this duality as a force of habit, as a way to keep getting this fix. Transcend this habit and find that it isn't the touch from another that creates bliss but the body itself is bliss available to you 24/7 when you know how.

Find out how?

Why Me?

Biological and mechanical sensors have limited range. So while body and mind can quickly notice an aching back, I can't sense the supernovae light years away. This gets more complicated as mind and thoughts interpret the pain as belonging to it because of the proximity. Thus the chain of identification begins eventually leading to this clumsy world of fear and joy.

Mind does have the ability to parse through the signals and opt to limit itself to this puny self or extend its reaches to totality. Takes constant vigil known as meditation.

All there is, is an integral of all changes in the limits of 0 and infinity. Me is just a very tiny part of the resulting unity and loves the comfort and limits of its existence. That's why.

TOTAL RECALL

Every thing you know or can know is or is based on memory. Everything! So, can you trust your memory to tell you the truth?

A seeker said in passing that the reason we do not recall much of our first three years of life is because our memory is not fully developed. Think of a really bad experience from the past. Death of a parent or a loved one for instance. That was a body of flesh and bones that was labelled by your mind as a dad or a spouse. When he or she left for a few days, your mind labelled it brief absence. But now it is labeling it a permanent absence. All labels! In reality everything you felt in his or her presence or you feel now is based on memories. Your sadness is based on a memory of not having the interaction then or now.

Your fear of losing a job not having money or a catastrophe in the future is based on a memory of similar event or memory of something you read, saw or imagined. How many times have things not been what you anticipated them to be?

If you were able to recall all your life events even from early years, they would still be memories. All your suffering is based on memories haunting you. All your happiness is also based on  memories.

Reality beyond memories is not fathomable by a mind which is nothing but a collection of memories.