Here's a great book available to read online ...
http://www.spiritual-happiness.com/
Hard 2 pick out one section -
Ultimately, happiness is elusive due to misguided ideas about what happiness truly is, and how it can be nurtured. After all, how many of us have really contemplated what happiness is? We put so much time and effort - first into years of schoolwork, and then into toiling long hours for our households and workplaces. Yet, how much time have we actually put into contemplating what thoughts and actions will create greater happiness in our lives and in the world? When is the last time you really sat quietly and contemplated what happiness means to you?
Enjoy!
I always felt uncomfortable thinking about happiness, salvation, enlightenment, or however named. It makes me feel we are cheating the actual experience of life when we are yearning for tomorrow, hurting from the past, which blinds us to the present.
For example, if I really want to go to a party with my friend in a week, if I keep thinking about it, 100 percent every time I think about it too much, it never goes through. It's not magic but it's the law of something. To me, it tells me not to expect heaven and happiness but to make what you have a journey and appreciate the journey to
no where.
For example, I am creating a drawing journal. I never done that before. I've always thought journals are for writing, like writing diaries. As I'm talking with my therapist, we are doing art therapy, and he says "everything is not going to solve itself overnight." When we think "I want to be happy" that's exactly what I think we are doing, hoping that our passion for this happiness will happen overnight regardless of what we think, the point of having the passion for that goal/happiness is saying-I look more to the future than now.
So, I don't see comfort in happiness. That reflection and going through the Christian faith and SGI, etc, made me think of how happiness is perceived by other people not just in these respective religions, but as a whole. It was somewhat of a psychology class to show me that people "really do" want paradise.
I like "traditional" Buddhism because it is realistic in that even enlightenment is not paradise but free from suffering is
understanding the nature of life. It's by this understanding that our suffering is addressed. It isn't changing the laws of nature. The Buddha taught there is cause and affect in life. It's just to expect perfect understanding by relief of suffering is like breaking the laws of nature to bend to our will and purpose.
Maybe that's why religions that focus on "happy endings" don't work for me. I thought a bit about happiness and it made me depressed. I think my thoughts would be how to deal with this life and even more so how to be comfortable with change, responsibility, and dying. How to understanding suffering and pain not to bypass it to relieve it magically. Of course, we want to end suffering and we translate that as happiness. I don't see end of suffering as happiness because it's saying that we want nature and life to be how we want it to be.
Life doesn't work that way.
