The Unbearable Happiness III

I have been searching for truth – whatever that might be- all of my life.
I have been learning and accumulating life experiences like a bee gathers pollen and I thought that I had everything figured out in my head.
Trying to put that truth into words and conveying it to other people made me realize that I still have a lot to learn.

I have two sources of knowledge:
What other people have experienced, discovered and shared with the world.
In other words the collective body of work and knowledge of humanity.
And metaphysical knowledge. Knowledge that I started uncovering while doing experiments with self hypnosis and meditation.

Let me give you a little example of what I mean by that.
I’ve been meditating about the meaning of happiness lately – since this is the way the blog discussion has taken me.
During this exploration one thing I found for certain.
Happiness is an absolute.

Happiness is like “life”. You are happiness the same way you are alive.
We are confusing happiness with pleasure and joy, much the same way we are confusing love with sex.
Pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow are emotions and feelings we get when we experience life.

Pleasure and pain are feed back signals that we get when we are doing something right or something wrong.
Both of them are extremely important, if we learn to understand their meanings and we learn how to manage them.
The blind pursuits of pleasure as well as the avoidance of pain at all cost are extremely bad habits we have developed as modern people.

I found out that many people do not know how to manage pain – both physical and emotional pain.
The horrific trend our modern society has taken in dealing with pain, is that we consider pain as bad and try to eliminate it by means of drugs.
But pain is not a problem. Pain is a symptom and by eliminating the symptom instead of fixing the problem that has caused that pain, we are creating even bigger problems.

Here is a little true story:
I have a colleague that suffers from low back pain – much as I do :(
For years he has been taking drugs in order to manage the pain – really heavy stuff like morphine injections and patches.
Finally after a couple of years his spine became so screwed up they had to take him to surgery and bolt his spine with metal screws.

Any way, I would like to share with you my little bag of tricks on dealing with life’s problems, pain and sorrow.

Realize that much of life’s problems are not that much of a big deal.
On my last day of my perfect vacation I got a speeding ticket.
Did I feel bad about it? Of course I did.
But then I asked myself “Am I going to let this incident ruin my vacation?”
Of course not. It is not worth it.

When something bad happens to you, think how big of a deal that would be if it happened to somebody else.
We have a tendency to see our own problems blown out of proportions but looking at a problem from another perspective will give us a better measure of our trouble.

Also 90 percent of our problems are material loss.
Is it worth it to suffer for a material loss?
After all “it is only money”.
Once you put it that way, things are not as bad as before.

Realize that much of your life problems are impermanent.
I fell in love at 16 and been dumped at 17.
I was so crushed I swear I would never love another girl for the rest of my life.
Of course that did not last for too long before I fell in love again.
So remember: Whatever your situation might be. “This too shall pass”

What if there is something like a scar that wouldn’t go away for the rest of your life?
Learn to practice forgiveness.
Here is a very good post I wrote about the power and practice of forgiveness:
The Power of Forgiveness

These are some of the tools available at consciousness, level.
The problem in dealing with emotions in a “reasonable” manner is that even if we know that we are right some time it is difficult to overcome the emotional trauma by means of logical argument.
There is another level – the subconscious – of dealing with pain and suffering but that implies that you are familiar with the meditation practice.
I will share with you some of that on my next post.