What is happiness?

[PureRogueQ]

Funny, so have been trying lots of stuff lately, well as usual  and came to conclusion no matter what I do there is some problem when it comes to elevate wellbeing as it does not hold together as well as you might want it to , so I have come to new idea, I know idea, but idea is that life requires for you to be involved in it, involved is not even the right word for it , misleading.

It is just main building block of happiness, I know my explanation of this idea here is really vague and there is lots more to really say to it, but I think this is where love comes in, as it is one thing that can express involvement in anything , in so many different ways, because I  know there will people out there who will think that love is like Conor Murphy style thing, I guess it can , but there are is way more to it and does not have to be like that at all. 

And I am not by no means saying that it is all you need, involvement can be painful, there are lots of people who are involved , their suffering does not come from lack of involvement, my point of this post was really to point out that life requires involvement, without it, there is nothing to be happy about. 

Maybe word love is not right word because of how misunderstood it can be, but who cares , just wanted to share  for fellow explores alike. 

[Someone here]

10 hours ago, PureRogueQ said:

and came to conclusion no matter what I do there is some problem when it comes to elevate wellbeing as it does not hold together as well as you might want it to. 

No matter what you do.. There is always a sense of lack.. Incompleteness.. Disappointment.. Not good enough.. Etc... Why is this the case??  Do you have answer to this question? 

Edited February 16, 2021 by Someone here

[Breakingthewall]

15 minutes ago, Someone here said:

No matter what you do.. There is always a sense of lack.. Incompleteness.. Disappointment.. Not good enough.. Etc... Why is this the case?? 

because your ego, which lives in time and of time, cannot be established in the present moment, it needs to project into the future, invent something that needs to change to be happy. There will always be something that is not right, unless the ego is the one who leaves and the real substance remains, which is pure happiness, neither more nor less. the smaller the ego, the more of that substance leaks out. a strong ego that never shuts up, that needs to know, is opaque. almost none of that stuff leaks out and the feeling is infuriating, relentless. If at some point the ego disappears completely, the substance will manifest itself completely, pure light, wonder, enlightenment, the real nature . The problem is that even the ego knows that, he cant remove himself. If he is trying to remove the ego, there is the ego in action, getting stronger doing that work

[Someone here]

13 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

because your ego, which lives in time and of time, cannot be established in the present moment, it needs to project into the future, invent something that needs to change to be happy. There will always be something that is not right, unless the ego is the one who leaves and the real substance remains, which is pure happiness, neither more nor less. the smaller the ego, the more of that substance leaks out. a strong ego that never shuts up, that needs to know, is opaque. almost none of that stuff leaks out and the feeling is infuriating, relentless. If at some point the ego disappears completely, the substance will manifest itself completely, pure light, wonder, enlightenment, the real nature .

I think I agree with this conception. Although I won't boil it down to just that. A question tho.. How do you go about eliminating that ego.. In the teaching it's illusory in the first place..? For example if you work on thoughts (what's known as monkey mind).. There is no thinker..it's just an explosion of mental imagery spontaneously foaming out of the 'mind'.. (as one example). 

14 minutes ago, Breakingthewall said:

problem is that even the ego knows that, he cant remove himself. If he is trying to remove the ego, there is the ego in action, getting stronger doing that work

Yes exactly. Furthermore.. I can't picture how are you supposed to  hang out permanently ego-less..? As Alan watts puts it.. "you wouldn't know who's shoe to put on in the morning" lol. 

[Breakingthewall]

True, thinking about tying your shoes already implies intention, an objective, a before and after ... ego. The problem is if I now have three hours in which I have nothing to do and I think: I am going to disconnect my ego for a while and just be. very difficult. First, it's the ego who thought that, requires to have an ego as small as possible, to know himself completely, to have been egoless before, with psychedelics or in some way, to subconsciously know that egoless is not death, have a strong discipline, and even so almost impossible

[PureRogueQ]

9 hours ago, Someone here said:

No matter what you do.. There is always a sense of lack.. Incompleteness.. Disappointment.. Not good enough.. Etc... Why is this the case??  Do you have answer to this question? 

That is not true , you can feel no lack or incompleteness, disappointment or your experience not being not good enough, you can have most deep and beautiful encounters in life , just as you can have terrible time, in my opinion it is because humans simply do not know much about them self, what they are capable of  and how to properly use what they have. 

 

 

 

[Surfingthewave]

@Someone here You eliminate your ego through meditation (and other practices). 

Leo has a long list on the website. 

Enjoy. 

Edited February 17, 2021 by Surfingthewave

[Someone here]

10 hours ago, PureRogueQ said:

That is not true , you can feel no lack or incompleteness, disappointment or your experience not being not good enough, you can have most deep and beautiful encounters in life , just as you can have terrible time, in my opinion it is because humans simply do not know much about them self, what they are capable of  and how to properly use what they have. 

 

 

 

Well I've tried a lot of stuff (material stuff) and as expected I end up craving for more. Because the nature of those things is transitory. It's like chasing a mirage. So I'm convinced that chasing experience or external conditions Will not result in deep satisfaction (and this goes against what 99% of people are busy doing). Will result in a temporary satisfaction before the longing resurfacing again. I haven't found a resolve to this issue yet. Except maybe complete monk-mode and abstaining.. Fasting etc... Which doesn't work either. Some people are just not born to be monks. 

Edited February 17, 2021 by Someone here

[mandyjw]

2 minutes ago, Someone here said:

Well I've tried a lot of stuff (material stuff) and as expected I end up craving for more. Because the nature of those things is transitory. It's like chasing a mirage. So I'm convinced that chasing experience or external conditions Will not result in deep satisfaction (and this goes against what 99% of people are busy doing). Will result in a temporary satisfaction before the longing resurfacing again. I haven't found a solution to this issue yet. Except maybe complete monk-mode and abstaining.. Fasting etc... Which doesn't work either. Some people are just not born to be monks. 

It was only because of Rupert Spira's English accent saying "Mirror, Mirage" accent that I got the link between the words mirage and mirror. Told my husband this and he was like, yup, like the Spanish word "mirar" to look, to see. 

Look in the mirror. What you think you perceive is not actual. The reflection in your mind of yourself is not actual. A thought of yourself is not actual. The mirage is seen as a mirage and no longer believed as actual. Mirage doesn't go away. Nothing changes but everything changes. It's a miracle. 

 

 

[Someone here]

@mandyjw don't go full 'Nahm-mode' on me and explain yourself lol... 

[nistake]

Well, I'd be a bit cautious about this 'eliminate the ego' business. As Eckhart Tolle would say: If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego. I'd go with observing it closely and trying to understand it fully. Maybe even befriend it or (dare I say it?) love it.

[mandyjw]

11 minutes ago, Someone here said:

@mandyjw don't go full 'Nahm-mode' on me and explain yourself lol... 

The point is, I can't explain myself. I'm a miracle. 

[Someone here]

20 minutes ago, nistake said:

Well, I'd be a bit cautious about this 'eliminate the ego' business. As Eckhart Tolle would say: If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that's just more ego. I'd go with observing it closely and trying to understand it fully. Maybe even befriend it or (dare I say it?) love it.

Agreed. 

 

18 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

The point is, I can't explain myself. I'm a miracle. 

Ok lol. I understood what you said btw. Just not sure how it's linked to the post you quoted. 

[mandyjw]

@Someone here You said it was like chasing a mirage. 

[Someone here]

12 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

@Someone here You said it was like chasing a mirage. 

Yes. "it" being chasing money and sex and whatever else material gains in order to achieve happiness. 

[mandyjw]

Just now, Someone here said:

Yes. "it" being chasing money and sex and whatever else material gains in order to achieve happiness. 

 No, it is you, YOU are the "it" you think might choose to chase money and sex.

When I graduated highschool I decided to take a risk and start a business. Almost all my friends went to college and I often felt like a loser living with my parents doing something that might not work. It took a lot of practice to learn the skills I needed and since it was something obscure, I had to be self taught expect for advice on online message boards like this one. I remember a turning point a couple years after a lot of perseverance and some embarrassing setbacks where I realized that it WAS going to work, that I was doing what I loved and it felt amazing. This kind of happiness just flooded me. I had done it. I also remember this horrible feeling, almost immediate reaction where my mind went to the first and worst thing it could think of to ruin it. 

If you believe you are physical, you must abide by the laws of physics. Every action (that you believe you made) has an equal and opposite reaction. Because if you believe that you can be happy, you believe that you are a thing that can be something, happy or unhappy, alive or dead. 

Duality, starts with I and the opposite side of the coin hangs over us as long as we believe ourselves to be responsible. 

As you ruthlessly go for your dreams and what you think will make you happy, all the blocks you have will pop up. You are the only ultimate block. What you really are, is the complete lack of resistance to what is, which is exactly the same as causeless happiness.  

[Someone here]

3 hours ago, mandyjw said:

If you believe you are physical, you must abide by the laws of physics. Every action (that you believe you made) has an equal and opposite reaction. Because if you believe that you can be happy, you believe that you are a thing that can be something, happy or unhappy, alive or dead. 

Duality, starts with I and the opposite side of the coin hangs over us as long as we believe ourselves to be responsible. 

As you ruthlessly go for your dreams and what you think will make you happy, all the blocks you have will pop up. You are the only ultimate block. What you really are, is the complete lack of resistance to what is, which is exactly the same as causeless happiness.  

I do believe there is a correlation between happiness .. Pleasure.. Pain.. Suffering.. Etc. Tbh there is no such thing as what you call "causeless" happiness. Unless you can explain it to me.. Maybe will change my mind. But I do think happiness is a condition. And just like all conditions.. Temporary and unsubstantiated. It's not like you can be happy all the time. You have to experience pain and suffering. In fact I'd argue that happiness is only 20% of life (generally). While 30 % is suffering. And the rest 50 % is mundane and boring (just another day). 

Tbh I'm leaning toward a depressed nihilistic view on life recently. But this nihilism also has been a great pain-killer. I was walking home one evening earlier this year.. my existence shifted with a single passing thought.... 

I was chronically stressed at work.. overwhelmed by expectations.. grasping for a sense of achievement or greater purpose and tip-toeing towards full-on exhaustion. Then it hit me: “Who cares? One day I will be dead and no one will remember me anyway.”

I can’t explain the crashing sense of relief. It was as if my body dumped its cortisol stores.  I looked at the sky and thought: “I’m just a chunk of meat hurtling through space on a rock orbiting the sun In the middle of the nowhere. Pointless.. Futile.. meaningless.” It was one of the most comforting revelations of my life.. To discover that real happiness along with other kinds of illusions are indeed illusions. Please dont get upset or anything.. Im just sharing honest opinions on hope for clearer communication.  Don't know if you ever went through a nihilistic phase in your life. But I'm stuck in one atm . It's kinda like when you are so autistic smart that you simply can't buy the BS that people use to comfort themselves in this dumb meaningless weird existence. 

Edited February 17, 2021 by Someone here

[mandyjw]

@Someone here We attribute a cause to happiness. Happiness is just the end of a desire or the absence of fear, tension, or holding yourself apart from something.  You cannot remember happiness itself, but you can remember the objects and circumstances around during the time that you felt it, so you attribute those objects, circumstances, etc as its cause. Because it's what you really are, and because it's actually complete absence you mistake happiness for what you believe is you and so you see it as temporary, fragile, the same as you see "you" or your body. That's why dropping the belief in you, or seeing the mirage in the mirror is key. You cannot do anything to get happiness, but you can see what you are not, and you can see what happiness is not. 

21 minutes ago, Someone here said:

 

I can’t explain the crashing sense of relief. It was as if my body dumped its cortisol stores.  I looked at the sky and thought: “I’m just a chunk of meat hurtling through space on a rock orbiting the sun In the middle of the nowhere. Pointless.. Futile, meaningless.” It was one of the most comforting revelations of my life.. 

Of course, you dropped your idea of you as meaningful, keep discarding, that sense of relief, grows and grows. Emptiness is Fullness. That Fullness is beyond all ideas of happiness. But you can have your positive ideas of happiness too, you can have your cake and eat it too. Just not the ones that hold you apart from happiness and create suffering. The ones that you tell yourself are about happiness but really are about fearing its absence. You cannot fear its absence because the essence of what you seek in seeking happiness is absence itself. 

21 minutes ago, Someone here said:

It's kinda like when you are so autistic smart that you simply can't buy the BS that people use to comfort themselves in this dumb meaningless weird existence. 

You don't know what other people do. Every thought of judgment you have of stupid things other people do in order to feel better is only holding feeling better apart from yourself. Instead just be really fucking honest with yourself about what YOU want.

You want to feel better. 

Edited February 17, 2021 by mandyjw

[Someone here]

9 minutes ago, mandyjw said:

You don't know what other people do. Every thought of judgment you have of stupid things other people do in order to feel better is only holding feeling better apart from yourself. Instead just be really fucking honest with yourself about what YOU want.

You want to feel better. 

Yes of course I want to feel better. I can go party and get drunk rn and feel better.. What good is that in the long run??? I'm still a fragile human being who is sensitive to all sorts of suffering.. Sickness.. Death etc...

What is your conception of "feeling better"?  Chasing a temporary fix (high) doesn't work.. 

[mandyjw]

@Someone here Chasing a temporary high is what people do when they don't understand themselves, they often do it out of fear of missing out or feeling bad. It's not that it works, or doesn't work. It's that it's irrelevant. 

It's important to see that feeling better and judging myself from some illusory outside perspective as being happy or feeling better is not actually feeling better at all. The actual direct experience of feeling ITSELF will automatically take you "there". This is the Grace of God, Wonder of Wonders, I don't know how else to describe it. 

So in practical terms, meditate with the intent to drop resistance rather than accomplish or find something, or just do what you're feeling like doing, or choosing a better feeling thought or perspective, or choose to love rather than judge, whatever it is in the moment, you as Infinite Intelligence will know. You will know by how you feel what really feels better to you. Feeling and Awareness merge when you stop cutting yourself off from what you really are with thoughts that feel bad to think. They feel bad because they aren't True, they aren't how you really Feel. 

 

Edited February 17, 2021 by mandyjw