Keys To Happiness - Looking Within
The key to happiness lies within the learning of your true Self. By stilling your mind, you learn that happiness is within your very being. When you start to see what happiness really is, then when you become miserable you’ll move in the right direction and establish happiness. You will then look for it where it is rather than where it isn’t. Looking for it where it isn’t causes you to drop down from beingness.
What Is Happiness?
But what is happiness? Most people call it pleasure, but for most, pleasure is only escape from pain! Most people call themselves happy when they get away from their pain through socializing and entertainment, but this is really only an escape! Unable to be by themselves, with their own thoughts, they run to a movie, a nightclub, visit someone, or just get some action going so they are not facing their own thoughts. A truly happy man does not need those escapes in order to be happy. He is content. Once you become free and have an understanding of this, you can enjoy entertainment far more than before because you are free from the hunger-need for it.
Finding the Joy Within
The happiness that Lester Levenson taught, a physicist and engineer who held seminars in his quest to enlightenment, wasn’t the escape-from-misery kind. It was the joy that results from being your own real Self. Once you begin to let go of attaching happiness to people and things, you will begin to see that the joy is only in you, abiding as your very own Self. Once you discover this, you will no longer look for joy where it is not. You then finally reach the place where you need no one and no thing to be happy — you are just happy — all the time!
Some lessons to help towards your quest are:
- Sitting with yourself, perhaps in meditation, in nature, yoga etc, and learn to quiet your mind of all external thoughts for a period of at least 20 minutes once or twice each day. Once you learn to let go of all your thoughts, you will discover that you are an infinite Being with infinite happiness and God-given powers.
- During this period, learn to move toward happiness in the direction of your inner Self, and see that happiness is your Self’s basic nature. It’s this basic nature that never changes. You will see that this world cannot touch you, and no one and no thing can disturb your basic and natural infinite peace.
- Learn that true answers cannot be found externally, for they always lie within. If you can learn to seek within, your Self will always lead you to the truth. Therein lies your true essence and happiness.