Question: I heard you say happiness is impersonal, and my question is, how dare you be happy?
Answer: What is behind that is “The world is a mess. How dare you be happy in this…?”
And you would have a point if it were true that happiness is dependent upon the world.
So, if happiness has to be found in the world, good luck with that.
You never do it.
So, how dare you be happy is predicated upon the belief that the place to find happiness is the world, the world, the body, the mind, and because obviously there is no happiness in the world, you cannot be happy because of the world, because of the body, because of the mind. Well, then I agree with you completely.
It’s something I discovered a long time ago. But what is missing from this is that even when we understand that happiness is not brought about by phenomena, nevertheless, happiness exists. Why? Because we have encountered it.
So then, if happiness cannot be found in the world, in the body, and in the mind, and if it exists, it must be found somewhere else. And if we look at our human experience, there is only one possibility left. Once we have eliminated thoughts, bodily sensations, and sense perceptions, being the place of happiness, the only left possibility is consciousness.
Because that’s all there is to our human experience: thoughts, bodily sensations, sense perceptions, and consciousness.
So, I often mention or paraphrase this Conan Doyle saying, he has Sherlock Holmes say, once the probable has been eliminated, the improbable becomes certain.
Question: I just feel like in the presence of my happiness, that’s what people are saying to me, is “How dare you be happy?” I feel like happiness is what I, in a way, it’s what I am.
And I always feel like I have to squash it to interact.
And yeah, I guess that’s what we, it’s speaking to the Consciousness rather than the one who’s basically saying to you, how dare you be happy? They’re really asking, “How can I be happy?”
Answer: Yes, how can you be happy? But we have to understand that the same very people who say that, they imply, instead of being happy, you should be miserable and help people who are not happy. The problem with that is that how can you convey happiness to others if you are not happy yourself? How can you give others that which you don’t have?
That’s the example I chose of some guy who is depressed, going to the psychotherapist who is even more depressed than he is.
How can he get cured by this guy? This guy has no solution to offer, nothing. So, it’s the same here. And what is the most important thing we can give to the world is happiness, because we can not give eternity or immortality, we cannot do that, right? We cannot really prevent the people from physical suffering and to getting healed and the body getting old, etc.
But we can alleviate the psychological suffering, we can remove the psychological suffering, and that we can do it only to the extent… we can make happy campers around us only to the extent that we are a happy camper. An unhappy camper cannot create happy campers.
So, there was my teacher, he was giving every year a two-day seminar near Paris in an ancient abbey called Royaumont.
Every year, there was this young couple coming just for this event. We didn’t see them in other retreats or whatever, but he would come year after year, and they were young, they were dressed in black, he had long hair like that, and the hair was like tears dropping, you know? They were both in an age of misery, of despair. They were pale, whitish, you know, very skinny, and the way they spoke, he never spoke, he was only the one asking.
And every year, he would ask the same question, why is there misery in the world? Why is there misery in the world? And my teacher always pointed at himself: “Don’t worry about the world, worry about yourself.” Why are you miserable? Because if the misery in the world makes you miserable, I have news for you, you’ll never be happy. Because one thing you can be certain of is that there is misery in the world.
So, if that’s what makes you miserable, if you’re miserable, because there is misery in the world, you’ll be miserable all your life. And that’s what happened to this guy. Every year, he would come back, ask the same question.
They were stuck, both of them. So, yes. But, you know, these people who are miserable, are because they are attached to their belief system.
They would rather be attached to their belief system than be happy. That’s the extraordinary thing.
(…) There is a willingness to be miserable. There is a pride in being miserable. “I’m not like you.
You are an inferior being, because, how do you dare being happy? You’re not one of us. You don’t get it. You don’t understand.”
Question: It just brought to mind the idea that our happiness or our true nature is not under threat.
And so, it is okay to be that in the world, because it’s simply not under threat.
Answer: Yes, you have been invited to that. And the party pooper is the belief to be separate.
The moment you leave this party pooper, you become a force of freedom, a force of happiness in the world. You cannot make people unhappy around you. They can make themselves unhappy, yes, but you cannot make them unhappy through whatever you do that comes from this place of truth and of love.
They may kill you because they don’t like what you are revealing to them about themselves. They don’t want to, they are too attached to the lie they have been living with for so long.
