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Understanding Happiness Really all there is… is life. It’s just a continuous, flowing experience. But because we impose our own mental structures to break it down and categorise it, we make up all these different labels for different experiences. Trying to categorise, and make sense of what are unique, never to be repeated experiences takes up an enormous amount of energy. If you can free yourself from this, in other words if you can think outside of the cultural box, you have a great deal more mental energy to enjoy life as it comes. For centuries, people have agonised over what Love and Happiness are. They are the uninhibited experience of life. You cannot understand them through words. You can only understand them through experience. Love and happiness are the same feeling from different perspectives. Happiness is the experience of loving life. Being happy is being in love with that momentary experience. And love is looking at someone or even something and seeing the absolute best in him/her or it. Love is happiness with what you see. So love and happiness really are the same thing… just expressed differently. Yet people think of happiness, or love, as a rare limited experience. They worry that it may never pass by them again. When they experience it they are so focused on keeping it that they cannot fully enjoy it. They think that if they can trap it, and cage it… they can keep it forever. But life is change. The river of life is the constant and continual evolutionary force of change. Without continual cellular renewal every living thing decays. As the experience of happiness becomes trapped it loses its nourishment. And so it decays. So what once was the picture of beauty and joy is now a decaying, rotting ugliness. Not because of the cruelty of life… but because the source of the beauty (the life force) got cut off. There is no Puppet Master manipulating the world to antagonize or test you. There is only yourself. Do you let yourself enjoy the beauty of the world? Or do you try to force it to fit in with your expectations and demands and end up holding a decrepit corpse of life? Happiness or love cannot be achieved or orchestrated. It can only be enjoyed. Once you try to force or manipulate life to fit in with your beliefs, you distort it. Just as if a tree is allowed to grow, it will grow into a thing of beauty and strength. If its light is cut off, if its way is blocked it will grow distorted. It will always grow… either in beauty or ugliness. It’s the same with your life. You either trust in life or distort it. It always feels better to love; than to hate. We prefer to see beauty; than ugliness. It feels better to praise and appreciate; than to criticize and blame. So the more of your life you spend praising and appreciating beauty… the more of your life you will love. But what if what you see is not beautiful? If what you see is not beautiful… it is because you are not looking deeply enough to see the beauty. Crumbs from a cake look messy, but the full cake is beautiful. Parts of life look messy only because we don’t see the bigger picture. We often look through blinkers at what is in front of us. Yet behind what you observe, there are layers and layers of life to see. Find the thing to appreciate and choose to put your focus there and life will seem beautiful.
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