Sadness Hides within Happiness

6 minute read

A moment comes in life when you ask what you truly want from it, and you begin digging into the depths of your being.

This is actually very simple to examine. Imagine that you have already achieved everything you intended to achieve: a home, a family, love, children, a good job or a business that satisfies both your needs and whatever passions you may have. Whatever you imagine could make you happy in this world, you already possess. Nothing remains but to enjoy what your desires have obtained.

Dream with your eyes open and watch what happens in your heart. For a while, you will be content. You may even believe more deeply in the dream than in reality, because what you achieved in the dream may never be yours in real life.

Dream for as many days as you wish, following one dream after another, because your dream will become your reality. Yet the same process happens in ordinary life. Day by day, you will notice yourself wanting more. The car you desired no longer satisfies you. You will want to alter your home every day because, remember, in a dream you can do anything, far faster and in far less time than in reality.

At first, the only problem will be how deeply you can enter your virtual world. Believe me, in very little time you will surpass anything now achieved through online games or virtual worlds. Eventually, you will perceive the fragrance you desire, or become like Superman. Nothing will be able to restrain your imagination and, at some point, you will no longer want to live in the real world. You will have entered so deeply into the skin of your character.

After a long time, or perhaps very soon for some people, this dream world will begin to bore you. You will add a little salt and pepper by bringing some suffering into the dream, though not for long. As in films, suffering will not form part of your final choice because it reminds you of real life.

Eventually, nothing will satisfy your dreams. You will begin to value your real life, then return to the dream, then back to life again, until you awaken asking what life is for. In your mind, you will already have passed through every possible scenario and every hidden or imagined desire of your "sick" mind. This may take years, or in the worst case, your entire life.

When you begin to meet yourself - the self you could not see through the thoughts you had exhausted with your imaginings - you will realise that life must contain far more than what you read in books or what society manipulates you into believing.

This method of autosuggestion is used by certain "secret" services to spy upon enemies or see what is happening at a distance. Our thinking is extremely powerful and conceals powers and energies we do not suspect are within our reach. This is one of the greatest reasons why the society in which we live manipulates our thinking.

This is how I spent my childhood, from the first moment I became conscious of my existence until adolescence: I lived more in dreams than in reality. I also suffered terribly, because in my dreams I was genuinely happy and everything I wanted was within reach. Reality tormented me because it brought only hardship and suffering.

One day, I decided that I must possess in reality what I possessed in my dreams; otherwise, I could not accept living in the reality around me. Yet nothing was as easy as it had been in dreams. Before long, I was so empty that I was happy neither in dreams nor in reality.

From this emptiness emerged the need for prayer, at first as an experiment and then as a necessity. Unlike either my dreams or the reality in which I lived, prayer became a shield even though it was not accompanied by lived experience. It became the final hope of my life, because nothing else made me happy.

Year after year, I hoped that the emptiness might be filled. With each passing day, I became more attentive to what was happening within me, a realm I had never perceived so closely in my dreams. Love was around me and achievement was available for me to choose, but nothing could make me choose them instead of prayer. This was not because prayer offered an additional advantage, but because I had already lived every dream I might have wished to realise in my life. After years of suffering, I understood the nonsense of chasing cardboard happiness.

Then, at some point, it happened. My prayers were answered because, in a single instant, the eternity of the lived experience of love happened to me. That was when the inner search truly began, along with a hunger for knowledge belonging neither to the body nor to thought, but to the soul.

Year after year, more knowledge reached my heart than I could carry. The very things I had once read without understanding, when I was empty, I now lived. Nothing made me happy or fulfilled me except the inward search to understand what I was experiencing and why my heart sometimes burned so fiercely.

While everyone around me lived amid the pleasures adolescence offered, I pursued what I was experiencing. I was sad, although everyone else appeared happy with the lives they had. Many of them would awaken later because they began to dream about reality. This is why so many people wish they could return to childhood and adolescence while keeping the minds they possess today. They do not realise that they would not be equally happy, because in those days they did not think; they lived.

The army awakened me to reality. I suffered greatly because my heart could not endure the robotic treatment imposed upon us, while stupidity ruled everywhere. In the army, you must not be human, but a machine. You must carry out whatever you are ordered to do, even when it leads to your destruction, even when you must kill or destroy other people's lives. That is what happens in war, but the training is planted within us without our noticing. In my ideal world, armies and weapons have no purpose.

After the army, I awoke again, but I was as empty as I had been long before. The one thing the army gave me was the ability to mingle more easily with those around me. Purity was no longer simply a quality, but a choice.

In the end, love awakened me. I felt happiness again with such force that I never wanted it to end, yet I still had to stop dreaming. What existed within me possessed no reality outside. In my suffering, I wanted to live neither in reality nor in dreams. I waited to disappear. I died within the body, burned by love. Everything burned until nothing remained but the lived experience itself.

Then I understood that nothing made me happier than the lived experience of love, not because it depended upon the outer world, but because it was reflected within. In this way, I realised the existence of love itself. From that moment, love became the God within me.

I still hope that reality is only a dream, because ever since then I have tried to bring love into the dreams of my waking life. Beyond its existence within me, however, it has failed to take flesh in the world around me. Is the woman to blame? Or the man? Or our dreams?

The path towards the lived experience of absolute love begins with a dream. The dream then becomes reality within you and later offers miracles around you so that you may believe completely in its existence. Throughout this process, you also experience sadness because you realise that the world is not ready for this "dream".

The world is accustomed to suffering; it does not want happiness. People speak meaningless words in defence of human love, yet constantly run after the lies of thought - dreams. Although the society in which they live sometimes makes them nauseous - manipulation - they treat themselves with pickles - entertainment - and inject themselves daily with achievement, in a desperate attempt to understand what they are fighting for: life.

First published in Romanian on 19 April 2011. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Tristețea se ascunde în fericire.