The Unbearable Happiness II

If you want to know what happiness is don’t look into the holly scriptures and don’t talk to the holly men, just watch some children play.
I often watch my children play in the playing room.
I look at their pure and unadulterated joy and I can’t stop thinking that I was once just like that.
I look at them and I can’t stop asking myself: “What ever happened to that happy boy?”

I grew up on a farm at a time when ADD was not a childhood disease but rather a childhood requirement,
If you did not climb up trees and jumped over fences, if you did not have a permanent assortment of scars and bumps, you were considered a weird, abnormal kid.
We did not have a lot of toys, computers or video games, but boy, did we have fun!

The first “joy kill” memory I can recall was going to church on Sunday morning.
Going to an orthodox catholic church was a very grim and scary experience.
There is no joy and laughter, not even smiling in an orthodox church.
I don’t know if joy was considered a sin – pleasure was a sin for sure – but I remember being scolded for having fun in the church.
God was not supposed to be fun. God was supposed to be feared.

Then I remember going to school.
I remember distinctively being asked to wipe of the smile of my face.
“Stop smiling / laughing / like an idiot!” they would say, the implication being that only mentally retarded people can have that kind of unconditional joy.
Normal people needed a reason to be happy.

Some how, in time, that idea become embedded in my mind.
Happiness was not something that you are. Happiness was something you were supposed to find and to get from outside.
That meant that you are not in control of your own happiness, that your happiness is controlled by external factors and people.

Once you give up that control you are bound to spend the rest of your life in spiritual misery, at the mercy of other people and institutions.
And that my friend is the short version of how we got to sell out our happiness in exchange for being accepted into the club of civilized and unhappy people.

The Unbearable Happiness

You are just as God intended you to be
(Or 15 million years of evolution, if you are so inclined to believe :)
By any account: YOU are PERFECT!

You were born totally and absolutely free.
No fears, no anxieties.
No hatred no bigotry.
No low self esteem no negativity.
No bad experiences no regrets.
No pain and no suffering.

All the negativity, the hurt and suffering you are experiencing right now; it is not YOU.
It is luggage you have accumulated growing up.
It is behaviors and habits you have learned, not the essence of what you truly are.
And the only reason you continue to feel less than PERFECT, is because you are holding on to that baggage, like a precious heirloom.

For the last two weeks I’ve been living the “enlightened” life I’ve been preaching about for almost a year.
For the last two weeks I’ve been waking up with a smile on my face and going to bed with the same smile.
For the last two weeks I’ve been living the illusory “happiness” I so hard tried to capture.
And I did it without meditations, drugs or any effort.
I just took a two weeks vacation :)

But now I am back to work, to the old routine, to the “serious” business of life and I just realized something very important:
Unadulterated, spontaneous happiness is not socially acceptable.
Happiness is bad form and manner.

Try to laugh without any reason tomorrow when you go to work.
Or at least try to spend the whole day with a smile on your face.
You will be reprimanded or at least looked upon with suspicion.
You are not on vacation, you are at work and you are not supposed to be happy.
(Well, theoretically you were supposed to be happy but at the same time not to show it :)

We all say that we want to be happy.
Happy like children, genuinely and unadulterated.
We all look for that truly and profound inner happiness they have.
But at the same time we are repressing all that innocent joy we have, every day of our life.

We want to be professional, serious, and appropriate.
We want to be happy inside but proper outside.
We want to be what God intended us to be and what the society wants us to be at the same time.

We want the cake and eat it too.
And that my friends is something not even the enlightened Buddha can accomplish.
(Well, unless you are ready to take a permanent vacation from life :)

Vacation

As you can see I am back from my vacation and ready to pick up my “blogging” experiment.
But first let me thank you for allowing me this departure and for keeping the “flame” burning while I was away.

I love vacations.
Not only for allowing me to recharge my batteries after months and months of continuous work, but also because a vacation in a far away place is truly a spiritual experience.

When you go on a vacation you get removed from the “known”, the mundane and predictable, and in a matter of hours you are completely immerse in the “unknown”.
Your mind opens and expands instantly.
The further and more exotic the destination the more shocking and profound the transformation.

That is of course if you are the “adventurous” type.
If you like to explore the place and meet and talk to the people.
If you just want to stay into a nice resort far away from the “natives” you will get only the relaxing and recharging part of the vacation :)

Four years ago I took a ship cruise to Alaska.
The departure was from Seattle Washington so we had to fly to Seattle to catch the boat.
It was my first ship cruise so I did not know what to expect.

The whole trip was an extremely frustrating experience for me.
As one of the “mates” on the ship put it:
“Ship cruises are for the newly wed and the nearly dead”
My adventurous spirit was crushed by the tight schedule imposed by the ship.
We spend too much time on the ship and very little off shore.

I vouch I would come back one day, and explore the North West coast on my own terms.
So this year I took my family back to Seattle WA for one week and further north to Vancouver BC Canada for another week.
Next summer – hopefully – I will go up to Alaska for a week or two.

That is the only way to do it.
I mean ship cruises are nice if you want a convenient all you can eat buffet open 24/7 but at the same time they too big to get close to the glaciers and to slow to get close to the wild life.
They are more interested of you spending your money on the ship’s casinos and restaurants than to explore the shores.
So if you really want an adventure with no strings attached you have to do it yourself.

Guided Meditation

One of the most powerful and useful tools in meditation is the “guided meditation”
If you believe that we exist on parallel universes or if you just believe that the human mind can conceive infinite outcomes of a certain scenario, is up to you.
The cert fact is that if we pose a certain question or quest to our subconscious mind, we will receive the optimum answer each time – some how :)

This is also the most difficult of the meditations techniques to perform.
It requires that you have already mastered the “relaxation” and the “contemplation” meditation.
(So you may have to wait a year or so before you try this :)
But I want to finish this series of posts on meditation, so here it is my final advice to you.
(Anything beyond this point would be for you and I, yet to be explored.)

Let’s say that you are a physicist working on the grand theory of unified physics, or whatever you are working on.
You go into your regular meditation and when you reach the state of contemplation with a good, clear visual, you gently start “guiding” the scene to the following scenario:

You are in Sweden at the Nobel Prize Ceremony and you are announced to be the winner of the Physics award for the work you have done.
You get to the podium and start explaining to the audience how you have solved and discovered whatever you want to discover.
You repeat this scenario until you are able to clearly see and understand everything.
(Incidentally many of great scientific discoveries have been made during a dream state.)

But you don’t have to be a scientist to use this method.
You can be a musician imagining the debut of your first symphony.
Or you can be a painter at the opening of your first gallery.
Or even you can imagine yourself on your first date with your future spouse.
The uses to this technique are limited only by your imagination.

Like I said before; these are my own “experiences” and this is how far I have come in my practice and understanding of the spiritual world.
There are many practices and techniques out there and you can experiment and find your own path.
I put a great deal of emphasis on practicality and not that much on religious side of spirituality.
Like my relationship with my physical father, my relationship with my spiritual father is intimate and personal.

So let me know how your practice and journey goes.
By this time I should be back from my vacation.
So I am curious of how is everybody doing?

Intern Net

I was studying to get my hypnotherapist license.
(This was about 16 years ago.) And part of the program was hands on practice.
We – the students – were encouraged to practice on anybody that would volunteer for “experimentation” – which is a really bad idea; do not volunteer!

So I was working with a friend of mine that had a strange affliction:
She was afraid of cats.
Nothing major – I thought.
Some early childhood drama involving cats that had left some buried trauma in the subconscious.

I did an induction and then started a time regression.
I asked her to regress – to go back in time – to the first time she had experienced that feeling of anxiety towards cats.
And she did.
The only problem was that she did not go to her childhood, she went to antique Egypt.

She told me this strange, and very elaborate story, of being a girl in a temple.
She was in charge of cleaning after some holy cats and she was being punished for not doing a very good job.
She could name the priestesses and describe in great detail everything in the temple.
I was completely perplexed – they did not teach us that in school.

The way I understood – up to that point – the inner workings of the human mind was like this:
The human mind is like a computer.
We have the I/O cards – eyes, ears, nose, mouth and touch.
We have a RAM – the short term memory – and we have a Hard Drive – the long term memory.
And of course we have the CPU – the part of the brain in charge of reasoning.

According to this model we are born with a BIOS – the human instincts and whatever abilities and qualities we inherited from our parents through our DNA – and everything else is programmed – learned – as we grew up.
Inside of our memories should be nothing except that, but as I was exploring this strange new world I discovered more and more things that were not supposed to be there.

So the only conclusion I could deduct is that there was something else about the brain we didn’t know about.
We are connected to an “intern net”
We are getting outside “information” in ways we are not aware of.
Here is a very interesting VIDEO for you to watch