LIVE BETTER: Happiness
Happiness is separated between conditioned and unconditioned happiness, between a relative and an absolute kind.
Relative happiness has to do with experiences, absolute happiness has to do with experiencer itself. When one watches the outer world, the factories, streets, houses and cars, it is evident that they were made because beings wanted to experience something pleasant. Hospitals and prisons, on the other hand, were built in order to avoid certain kinds of suffering. Actually, beings constantly try to change outer conditions with the aim of receiving pleasant feedback. No matter how beautiful houses, cars, or landscapes may be, they cannot feel happiness.
The only thing which can ever be happy is mind. What looks through our eyes and listens trough our ears right now - is where it all happens. Thus the common attempts to base happiness on outer factors are both transient and inaccurate by nature... Trying to attain lasting happiness through conditioned causes simply does not work...
What can one truly rely on in this world?
Neither materialism nor nihilism. Outer and inner phenomena posses neither existence nor non-existence. The way thoughts and feelings come and go, the parts of the atom can be made to disappear, while particles may appear again from apparently empty space.
That means that today both of the main extreme philosophies have lost their scientific basis. Being and non-being both cannot be proven and must be seen as two sides of the same totality... When that is the case, then what can one rely on? What has the power to hold things? There is only one thing which one can absolutely trust - the potential of space. Space is much more than a black hole or a nothingness. Often one knows who is calling before one hears the voice on the phone. Often letters arrive from people whom one has recently thought strongly about. This is not due to improved eye-sight or hearing, but to moments where we forget about being separated from the totality. When we are simply there, naked, open and resting in whatever is happening, things happen.
During such moments we not only experience through our senses but through the vibration of every atom in our body. Because space and energy inside and out, are expressions of the same totality, and cannot be separated, we are always connected with everything.
It means that everything is part of the same totality. On another level it expresses that space is like a container - that we are inside it... It is very important to see space as something which connects beings and is alive, as a container which also conveys information between beings.
However, space has more to it than awareness, and that is what makes it interesting; it is joyful by nature. The radiance of mind itself is much richer than the conditioned experiences of joy we all strive for. The best moments in life are actually gifts and appear when beings forget themselves.
There are situations where feelings of separation disappear, like being in the arms of our loved ones - the timeless moment of 'being one'. Here mind's innate, timeless joy can manifest, and it will become permanent when one stays beyond hope and fear in the richness of immediate experience. This state is inseparable from space, expresses its limitless qualities and is most convincing. Highest joy is thus inseparable from mind's spontaneous insight and is a transmission of wisdom. It is mentally joyful; it is the basis of everything outer and inner and may even recognize itself through the process.
