Joy, peace, love: have them all now

What you have now is never good enough for the sense of a me. A “me” or “my self” wants more, always wants more, it can not be any other way because this sense of personal self is by its very apparent existence selfish. That is what the word means the self can only behave selfishly. From the perspective of separation as life versus me. Yet you are life, you are not separate as life, and where is this life? Here. Now. This life spending away here as this. Awareness brings the self back here, here where there is no need to perpetuate the sense of personal self with stories of the past or dreams of the future because awareness is aware that this is it! This aliveness now is it. All the self was looking for in time, all the self was longing for is what it already was and is... Alive.

This aliveness is joy.. Love… Peace.. To be here aware as this, the old self dies into and as this.. It is arduous for that dream self, it doesn't want to desist. It was happy with its own discontent because it felt itself. Living here no self is here, it is living with an open hand. No one to hold, nothing to hold. Fear has no footing here because I am not here. When I am…fear is. Aliveness is like the sun, nothing survives its intensity. No sense of I can be here.

There's always more joy, fun, peace and Love to have than we've ever known. It's not about thinking what we have is good enough, but more so that I'm still here and there's more I have to offer to continue to prosper and serve my purpose, which we may not ever really know what it is but can and know there's so much more. There's always more to learn (we can never know everything) and always more people that will cross our path to Love, that can continue to enhance what we already have.

Of course what we have is good, but if we just stop where we're at, it's more like saying I'm done and no longer have a purpose. There's so much more within us to discover that can bring more of all these things. Never stop at enough for surely you will stop when you're finished. Strive to finish, instead of settling for what is considered enough. Life is a journey, full of trials and triumphs and forever growing. Strive to leave this world with having accomplished more than enough. Strive to leave finished, using all the things you've listed as tools to reached your finish line, where you’ll come to find the greatest of all these things are forever, with Grace.

95% of our emotions arise from our subconscious brain pathways/patterns … previously created by what we have consciously fed into our brain. So outer things (money, love, fame, power, adventure, pleasure) are only 5% effective at causing happiness. Mostly what they DO is to temporarily distract us from inner unhappiness. But that underlying discontented feeling that somehow something is not quite “right” … remains. And if we have a lot of buried pain, the anxiety and stress can be very strong, despite great distraction from external things.

Of course, there is the “honeymoon” phase, where a new love, or winning the lottery, or what-have-you … makes us very happy but just not permanently. Marriages start to have problems 1 to 3 years into the marriage, and that is just the relationships that make it to the altar. And big winners on lotteries are only happier for about a year, and then go back to being no happier than before. Celebrities, having gotten all they thought they wanted, and still being unhappy, try to escape with drugs, alcohol, risk-taking … or even suicide.

At its very basic, happiness is a decision: Do I want to let this event/person/lack disrupt my inner happiness? if you want to be happy, the only answer is “No” The only things that this attitude doesn’t work for are starvation (literal starvation), freezing to death, agonizing physical pain, and dying. We cannot avoid all negative things in life, but whether or not we allow ourselves to suffer because of that is up to us.

Buddhism says that enlightenment is remembering that everything is impermanent (even pain), and to just accept whatever happens and relax into it. And to focus on finding joy from helping others, rather than focusing on what we want. Even psychology says that the more we focus on ourselves, the more neurotic and unhappy we will be .. but that the more we focus on caring about and sharing with others (even with strangers), the more inner joy we find. And even all religions tell us to love one another.

If you choose to have more fun, to love more, be more joyful etc. then you realize there’s always room for improvement…apparently according to St. Francis de Sales, you should be improving till the day you die, especially in the field of love. ‘The more we progress (spiritually) the more we realize our unworthiness.’ Gandhi. Does that mean I’m going to be miserable and unhappy thinking ‘It is never going to be good enough’, or ‘I am never going to be good enough’? I guess there’s a kind of spiritual maturity that realizes our worthiness and enjoyment of things can be complete and incomplete at the same time. Cheers!