To Be, or Not to Be Happy
The highest spiritual path is life itself. If you know how to live daily life, it all becomes a liberating experience, but first you have to approach life properly or it can be very confusing. To begin with, you have to realize that you really only have one choice in this life, and it’s not about your career, whom you want to marry or whether you want to seek God. People tend to burden themselves with so many choices, but in the end, you can throw it all away and just make one basic, underlying decision: Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy? It’s really that simple. Once you make that choice, your path through life becomes totally clear.
Most people don’t dare give themselves that choice because they think it’s not under their control. Someone might say, “Well, of course I want to be happy, but if my wife left me…” In other words, they want to be happy, but not if their wife leaves them. But that wasn’t the question. The question was, very simply, “Do you want to be happy or not?” If you keep it that simple, you will see that it really is under your control. It’s just that you have a deep-seated set of preferences that gets in the way.
Let’s say you’ve been lost and without food for days and you finally find your way to a house. You can hardly make it to the doorstep, but you managed to pull yourself up and knock on the door. Somebody opens the door, looks at you and says, “Oh my God! you poor thing! Do you want something to eat? What would you like?” Now the truth is, you really don’t care what they give you. You don’t even want to think about it. You just utter the word “food”, and because you really mean it when you say you need food, it no longer has anything to do with your mental preferences.
The same goes for the question about happiness. The question is simply, “Do you want to be happy?” If the answer is really yes, then say it without qualifying it. After all, what the question really means is, “Do you want to be happy from this point forward for the rest of your life, regardless of what happens?”
It’s the comparisons, judgments and complaints that typically get in the way of happiness. Once you fully accept where you are, then you now have room for change. When you don’t accept your reality, you can’t have change. Non-acceptance is a vibration of lack, which means it’s the same thing. You’re asking for more lack because what you put out is what you get back.
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