When the mind is locked into a search for something more, the beauty, love, and simplicity of this moment is obscured, isn’t it?
No matter what is happening, the mind says, “so what?” Thought looks at this moment and sees it as totally ordinary. Then it goes back into its fantasy that some future moment will bring something much better and much, much more than this simple, mundane little moment.
True happiness never comes as long as the mind is locked into a search for more. Have you noticed how few people are sincerely happy? When thought stops buying into its own dream that something else needs to happen for happiness to come, then it is realized that happiness is your true nature. You are it. It is not found in anything you do or in our job, roles, self-images, achievements or accomplishments. Those things can be wonderful. You can play with them, enjoy them fully. You can move up the corporate ladder, enjoy vacations, enjoy setting goals and attempting to reach them. Nothing wrong with any of that. But happiness is not found in time. Time means mind. “Future” is only a presently arising thought. So happiness is not found in thought. Thought is self-centered. Thought will always tell you that this moment is not enough and that “you” do not have what “you” need to be truly happy. That lie is obscuring your true nature as happiness. It cannot show you true happiness, nor can it lead you there. It is always pointing your attention away from this moment, the only place where true happiness is or could ever be. Attachment to these presently arising thoughts of future is attachment to a dream of happiness that has nothing to do with life. Life is only now. The dream is all about you, your sense of lack, and your search for more. In seeing through that dream of self, happiness is realized.
True happiness is realized only when ‘This’ is seen. What is ‘This?’ There is nothing that ‘This’ is not. There is only One Life and you are it. Look around you right now at whatever is happening. Feel the alive energy within your body. In the total presence of this moment, it is realized that you are not separate from happiness and therefore there is nothing to seek. ‘This’ is none other than paradise. As soon as you believe your happiness is outside of you or in the future or in some other person or event, the search begins again. That search obscures ‘This.’ It obscures happiness. The search is self-centeredness. It is about you and your sense that you do not have enough yet (e.g., enough love, enough money, enough friends, enough success). That dream of thought is custom designed to obscure true happiness. Let the search happen. Just notice it. You are not even doing the searching. The searching is arising involuntarily because of your conditioning. Your conditioning is essentially nothing more than a story of lack, a story that you are separate from life and that you need something to be whole. That story cannot see the truth. The truth is that there is already wholeness right here, right now. You are that wholeness. That wholeness is the happiness you have been seeking.
True Happiness and the Search for Something More
