Happiness Has Roots within You

6 minute read

In life, we seek happiness by fulfilling a dream or by hoping that someone else will bring happiness into our lives.

At some point we come to experience love, yet we continue to suffer because of the actions of those we love, or we believe that we owe our inner experience to them. In reality, they have merely played a role in this play called life, just as we play the role appointed to us from birth. From the moment we are given the experience of love until the first moment of suffering, it depends only on us whether we will struggle throughout our lives to become conscious of its existence within us, or whether we will give up living and fulfilling it. The experience of love is not conditioned by those around us, by those towards whom we live it, or by those who struck the spark that later awakened the fire. Love is a quality of our soul. It is what gave the soul existence and what gives it consciousness of that existence. At the same time, it gives the soul a purpose in this life and makes it happy simply by existing within us.

Living love is, in fact, the awakening of the soul, just as you awaken from sleep after the exhaustion and activity of an ordinary human day. Love gives us consciousness of our existence and essence, of the fact that we are more than thought and animal instinct, that we are made in the image and likeness of God - God is Love! At least in this respect, all the great religions agree. Wash the eyes of your heart and awaken from the eternal sleep you have lived since the birth of your body. Otherwise, whether your body dies after its allotted time or whether you had died at birth, there will be little difference. The difference will be made by living love and by the path you follow throughout your life.

In time, we come to realise that our actions which caused suffering may have served the good of those involved, while we in turn received the consequence of those actions through later suffering. This happens because we cannot separate inner from outer, detach ourselves from feeling and thought, or suffer without an object, and so we identify with what provokes us and makes us act unconsciously. Throughout our lives, we should also be the observer, the one who watches and takes note of what unfolds within. The Trinity occurs in the depths of our being too, not only in the Kingdom of Heaven.

You suffer because what you live inside finds no fulfilment outside, yet you should already be happy because love is taking place within you. The rest matters very little. Human love is only the impulse given by divinity so that the soul may become conscious of its existence, of the road it must travel, of the path it must follow to free itself from the chains of thought. You believe you cannot escape the world in which you live because you are bound by feelings, habits and the routine you learned or had instilled in you by family, tradition and the preconceptions of others. Yet in a single moment you can escape the world you live in and throw yourself into the unknown. The only problem is your mind, and the barriers it places before your soul so that it cannot see the light guiding it on its path. Love is the compass that guides the soul towards freedom from the slavery in which it has lived since this world was created. This is why you see happy families living simply and taking joy in the small, suffering-filled world they inhabit: their dreams centre upon what they feel, not upon thought. They do not fight, nor do they wish to trample upon what they feel, merely to accomplish some grand dream or professional fulfilment that they will later discard once they recognise its lack of value. Those who do this will sooner or later feel upon their own skin how ugly the environment they created and chose as their compass has become.

Since the birth of the world there have been two camps weighing free will against the power to take life into one's own hands without the intervention of divinity or of higher forces governing us. I am among those who do not believe that we possess decisive power over our destiny. We have a margin of choice which merely gives us the impression that we are free and can move mountains. I agree with those who, after many sacrifices and trials, said that nothing happens without God's will, that not even a hair moves without it. Those people truly were free. They could have done anything they wished because they had reached the source of existence, yet their love and dedication to what they lived led them finally to sacrifice themselves for the liberation of other souls who felt within themselves a hunger for divinity, for the nature of our existence. Perhaps this is why many people feel and act as they do: within ourselves we are certain of the power lying there. We feel that with enough faith we could move mountains, but we do not understand that this does not happen by our will. It happens by the will of God, who planted the seed of that power within us.

Through its unconsciousness, our ego speaks without meaning, because there is a long road from words to deeds. I see people who act and believe that everything is owed to their intelligence and their power to make things happen. They are unconscious and blind, and in a moment the empire created by their minds may collapse like a sandcastle taken by the water. They are only examples left by life in our society to make people hope, create and dream of a better world, so that they do not lose their minds if they awaken and see the misery and lie in which they live.

We therefore look at the 'wretched' around us and move on, telling ourselves that they do not fight or work hard enough, that they do not sacrifice their lives to live better. At the same time, we have the example of those who trample everything underfoot to fulfil the material dreams of the ego. The absurdity is that these 'monkeys' lead intelligent people, who then work for the prosperity of the empire of stupid and deranged monkeys. For them there is only one God: MONEY. It governs their lives and existence, gives them the power to purchase the lives of capable people, and allows them to profit from the intelligence and faith of those who might otherwise awaken and change something in this world. Dirty business has become clean. Although it appears no longer to trample spiritual purity, and seems to let the soul give itself and break free from the chains of thought, it actually binds the soul even more tightly. In fact, this is a world more dangerous than our present one, feeding the mind with dreams because anything is possible in the virtual realm, while still changing none of our existence for the better.

Only dedication to love, to what makes us happy without requiring an investment or demanding that we become something before we can rejoice in what happens within us, can give us the chance of a better life. It can lead towards an existence in which we are all equal, because that spark exists in everyone: good or bad, foolish or intelligent, evolved or still at the stage of a monkey. We need only become conscious of the source of our experience and understand that the divine empire lies within, while the outer world is merely a reflection of the wonderful world hidden in the depths of our being. Then we will no longer destroy the world in which we live. We will want to live in harmony with nature, so that the soul is not deprived of the environment in which it is happy, closer to its own world and essence.

Stop searching for happiness outside yourself, because the seed of its existence lies within us. Whether we make it blossom depends on us. The seed already contains the flower within its existence; what remains is in our hands: to help it grow and be fulfilled.

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

Original Romanian article: Fericirea are rădăcini în tine.