46: Are you happy?

Dictionary.com defines happy: “1. delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing: to be happy to see a person. 2. characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy: a happy mood; a happy frame of mind.” Even though this definition doesn’t say it, happy is the opposite of sad. You can tell that two opposites relate to each other when you can you use one to describe the other, for instance; happy is not being sad and sad is not being happy. Within the definition of a thing you breed it’s opposite. This should be visualized as a yin yang symbol as opposed to a line with two ends. A line with two ends implies a gradient value between the two points on its extremes and can make the mind believe that points in the middle, and end have different values when in reality all of the points are flavors of the same value. The moment that you ask me/yourself if I/you are happy, we need to figure out where we stand in between happy and sad (not happy). Can you explain happiness to someone who doesn’t know what it is to be sad (not happy)? In the end you would have to do it through example, for instance: “Happiness is the feeling you have when it rains after a drought so that your crops may grow.” At that moment you have just, and if they agree with you, they have just, defined sadness as: “The feeling you have when you want it to rain during a drought, and it doesn’t.” That fact, is generally overlooked by western thinking, and is one of the reasons that Buddhism contains allot of value. Now Buddhism focus’s on a ‘middle road’ where the practitioner combats sadness by reducing happiness. You can’t feel sad if you don’t feel happy because you can’s describe sad without happy. This makes sense to me, and it is a logical solution for them since thought is of priority to feeling, in Buddhism. My experience of nirvana/enlightenment showed me a beautiful potential where thought and feeling have equal value. That said, it is not a goal of mine to not feel. My goal is to feel ‘correctly’ and ‘absolutely’ at any given time, for example; if someone does something that I believe is wrong to me, there is a delay in time between when I think they should be forgiven and when I feel that they are forgiven...Or when a challenge comes my way there is still a delay from knowing I need it and feeling I need it. I want to reduce those delays so that my mind and my heart are as one like they were during my experience of Nirvana/Enlightenment.

Now to answer the question, sometimes I’m happy and sometimes I’m sad. This is because I know I have to be sad in order to be happy. After my experience I made, and continue to make, mistakes. There were things that happened that caused me to withdraw and burry my feelings again. Wow, I was really good at that! I lived in a ‘grey’ world for about 4-5 years. I’ll never forget when I realized how grey my life was, I was on a rooftop in New York watching the sunset, getting ready to leave the country, with a new found love. The colors in the sky made me cry because of the amount of time I spent without seeing them. I wasn’t ‘sad’ during that time, I beat sad at the cost of happy. I vowed to never allow myself to be in the state again. That state that was brought about by denying sadness. (In my response to an earlier question, “How do you remain so positive?” When I talk about choosing happiness I’m talking about a choice of focus, where as here, I’m saying that what we choose as a factor in happiness is also a choice in a factor of sadness, for its opposite.) Now, the reason that I say sometimes yes and sometimes no, is because whether or not I’m happy at a given time depends on what the specific thing I’m focusing on is. Am I happy about where I’m at now? No. Am I happy about my efforts to move forward? Yes. Even though I want to feel, there is no reason to focus on the ‘no’ (non happiness), rather use it, and the feeling that it creates, to inspire improvement. My life is an act of doing, sometimes distractions are annoying and sometimes delightful. ☺