If you are happy not because of what you have, but because of who you are, then you are in a great position. But I do not think that this is as easy as many people would think, for I do not think it is as easy to know who you are as many people think it is. I think, rather, that it is the hardest thing we can do, and it is the most important and far-reaching thing we can do, for it is all-encompassing in terms of our whole lives.
It is also a process, not a place or a thing, and so it is not something that one can say they have “done,” for such a thing is never really done (past tense of “do”), as much as it is being done. But I do think that the more you try to know who you are, the more you make the right efforts to do so, the more happy you will be. The less you do them, the less happy you will be. And while I do think it is impossible to be happy alone, I think that it is impossible to not be alone unless one first begins to truly and honestly make (the) right efforts.
In other words, he/she who remains a child, who stagnates in the swamp of ego-based delusion, will necessarily be alone (whether or not he/she is physically “with” someone or not). Only when we begin to awaken, when we have the courage to truly begin questioning the illusions of our conditioned existences, can we be in a position to not be alone. For we must see the reality of the illusory nature of the ego in order to see that it is precisely this ego-based understanding of life, of reality, that necessarily makes us separate and alone.
As such, pursuing real happiness is so much harder than people think it is, not because of the path itself, but because of our willing (yet often unwitting) acquiescence to our conditioning and our conditioned system of a society. An illustration of this is that it is much easier for us to feel “happy” when we do have things and it is harder to feel happy when we have no things, not just material things, but emotional things as well. This is because we humans have a very difficult time separating material, transitory happiness—let alone emotional happiness/”security”—from real happiness.
Many people who think they are really happy are being held up by their material/emotional happiness; it is not who they are but what they have (whether it be another person, or money, or actual material things) that is making them “happy,” and they are essentially kidding themselves without even realizing it. They are seeing/living an illusion, not reality.
Perhaps this is why it is so hard for people who seem to have everything to really be happy, because all of the stuff they have is getting in the way of them having to confront and deal with who they are; for it is very hard for people in this society to differentiate who they are from what they are and what they have. Most people are very confused and ignorant when it comes to identity, and have not really given it enough thought. The more honest thought they give to this subject, the more they will realize that they don’t know as much as they think they do.
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From my personal notes, 6/15/00
