How to find Happiness – Not in 7 steps but in Millions of Moments called Life.

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 at 5:30 pm

Everyone without exception enters the adult life in a pursuit of happiness. Some believe to have found it only to have lost it again. Some might taste it in pleasures of a moment. For others, the pursuit of happiness remains a mystery, a faint memory of their youth, a vague dream yet to be fulfilled.

It has been estimated that only 5% of humanity is capable of living a truly happy and joyful life. What is the secret to happiness and where does humanity go wrong?

We might find those rare moments of great joy or an overwhelming sense of great beauty and those occasional outbursts of happiness that fill our whole being. But they somehow seem to linger only for a while. Why do we seem to lose them and get caught up in life again? Is it possible that our thoughts might hold the answer for us?

These moments of pleasure are experiences that have come into being out of a union between our senses and our thoughts. The more open our senses are, the more attention we pay to the them, breath them in one by one, the deeper the feeling can reach. But how much do we truly understand about this interplay of thoughts and senses?

The senses cannot help but operate in the now. You cannot smell a rose that has bloomed last week. You cannot hear a bird’s call from yesterday. You cannot feel the touch of a person that is not here. You cannot taste the sweetness of last year’s strawberries. You cannot see the face of your loved one when he/she has gone. What remains is a memory of the past.

And as the senses work in perfect union with our thoughts we can use our memories to activate our senses. The more we allowed ourselves to fall into the experience, the more vivid the memory has become. But sadly our thoughts do not have the capacity to bring the past experience back to us in its full innocence, in its absolute rawness, in its realness. We are left with a byproduct of a bittersweet yearning that has the potential to draw us into depths of despair and loneliness as well as to take us on a lifelong journey of inquiry into the realms of love, happiness and joy.

Either way, whichever way we chose to go, the same thoughts that opened us up to experiences in the first place, good or bad, have now become our worst enemies. If thoughts are the sum total of who we are and if the journey through the maze of our life does not provide us with any answers any longer, then we must move beyond the story and examine the very nature of thought.

Instead of focusing on happiness per se and trying to make sense of this world, we shift our inquiry towards the mechanism that prevents it: our very own thought. We can think our thoughts beyond recognition but we cannot fail in observing thought. And if we observe closely we will recognise that with each thought that arises there is a potential sensation attached to it. I hear people say I don’t think about anything – I just have this feeling. And when we go into this feeling, what do we find there? A thought. When we observe the interplay between sensation and thought we can befriend ourselves in a new way. We can become friends with our thoughts, so to speak. And in that journey we can find our truth, our fear and our anguish.

Each time a thought arises, it carries within an inherent element of past and future. Happiness and love lie beyond thought, it has been said, beyond our values and beliefs that limit our world. I don’t believe there is such a place that has the capacity for experiencing happiness and joy as we generally search for.

Rather I would describe it as another dimension that co-exists with the realms of thought. How many people turn to meditation and mindfulness to go beyond thought? I was on the same path for years. What I have found, however, is that on the journey to that place beyond thought, beyond time, before we truly arrive, there is a place of tremendous beauty and stillness. When we walk in that space, our senses are fully open and by inviting ‘thought’ to notice that, you enter the realms of immense gratitude and a deep sense of connection. Happiness as we imagine it, belongs to life and, thus, to thought.

I completely agree with J. Krishnamurti when he said: “Out of the understanding of what brings about disorder naturally will come order”. And where there is order, there is love and there is happiness – what is and what should be are one. The feeling of happiness is not found in the destination but in the journey.

At the bottom of every feeling lies a thought – a long forgotten thought. It influences every feeling we experience now and ever will. A thought awakened through our senses: a sound we hear, a face we see, a rose we smell, a hand we touch or a strawberry we taste. One thought alone has the power of our world to make or break the experience that our senses so gently and innocently invite us into. Each moment anew we are faced with a choice. But choice is only presented when there is a conflict. If there is union, choice does not seem to enter our mind.

I also once believed that going beyond thought might be a portal to the sensation of happiness and I published it in an article written some time ago. Something though kept nagging in me, as if I have missed something, and I found it difficult to find it’s source. For an experience to happen we must give our attention to our senses and our attention comes through the properties of thoughts. It is true, there lies peace beyond thoughts but happiness and joy is the experience that belongs to life as we breath it. The sensation that lies beyond thought is yet another chapter to be explored

For happiness to be experienced there must be understanding. Life is not order and never will be otherwise thought would have no meaning at all. Thought, however, is a vital component of how we experience our world through our senses. Left to its own devices, it can exert the greatest power imaginable that a human being can experience. It can draw us into vicious cycles where sensations and thoughts play the game of life and we seem to be always just that one step behind. The invitation to enter the game, though, lies in each moment anew.

Freedom lies in the understanding of the game called life that our senses and our thoughts love to play, and in the awareness of the naked truth of the experiences created. Whose truth – you might ask. For the sake of happiness I believe that your truth will be more than suffice for now.

And one last thing, to confuse you altogether, if you are trying to catch the now, then you will be on a lifelong fruitless journey, oops, there goes another one, and another one, and another one….

Life as we know it, is movement, made up of all the ‘nows’ of the world. Happy is the person who uses wisdom to create a dance. Steps we can use for understanding but for dancing we need to be part of the flow. Our thoughts have wings and in order to live we need to learn how to fly.

By Halka Beseda

PS: Can I fly? I wished, but by now I love to dance.