Happiness; Here And Now By Wiese Christian

Happiness; Here And Now 

An old Chinese Zen Master once said, “From birth to death it’s just like this, we always imagine that there’s got to be somewhere else better than where we are right now; the great ‘somewhere else’ we carry around in our heads. We believe ‘somewhere else’ is out there for us if only we could find it. But there is no ‘somewhere else’. Everything is right here.”

Dr. Gabor Mate had a curious compulsive habit. Working with drug addicts in Canada, whenever the negative energy of his job got too much for him, he went to the local record store and bought expensive classical CDs. This may seem like a trivial expensive hobby to you, but to him it was a compulsive habit that he wanted to break, especially with his wife complaining about his recklessness, and with the credit card bills piling up. So he decided that he wanted to write his book, ‘In the realm of hungry ghosts’, not only to help his patients, but also to show to himself that he can beat his own shopping addiction. Well, he sheepishly had to admit in the end that—at least by the time he had finished his book—he would still purchase way too many classical CDs for his own liking.

This may sound odd, but there is no spiritual path! Yet, looking back most of us would conclude that we Awoke to something, that we learned from our mistakes, that there must be a better future for us in store for us, right? I almost made the same mistake as Dr. Gabor Mate as I was brainstorming on my next book project, ‘On Breaking Free’, a description of our spiritual journey of healing, transformation and self-discovery. Maybe I had my own spiritual evolution in mind. Perhaps I secretly hoped that I still could become a little wiser, a little freer and slightly more enlightened. Well, it doesn’t work that way! The opportunity to break free is here and now. The opportunity to express what we are truly all about is today, just as tomorrow, or the day after. Do you understand?

Compare the elusive hunt for enlightenment with Dr. Gabor Mate’s quest to rid himself of his compulsion to buy expensive CDs. Who knows, perhaps it is gone by now without him having to do anything. Thanks to the internet his favorite record store likely closed down in the meantime. Maybe it didn’t give him as much pleasure to order expensive CDs on Amazon, or downloading the data on the internet without having a flashy box to store it away with. The mental mistake he made, he was judging himself for his uncontrolled exuberance. Yet, it came with the job description. He lived the destructive energy of his clients day in, day out. Strange as it sounds, he lived what he was all about at that time, just as one day he would be likely to break free from all that.

Likewise for our spiritual journey, as long as we still have a desire to do something, or a pain-body to dispose of, we still have a job to do on this beautiful blue planet. Why do you want to wish your life story away? Do you want to be perhaps more special than the friend next door? Just do your job and enjoy the here and now as best as you can! Here is an ‘enlightenment’ story of Czeslaw Milosz that perhaps doesn’t sound quite as sexy to you than those of an Eckhart Tolle or an Adyashanti, but it was as real to him when it happened as it was to them:

In advanced age, my health worsening,
I woke up in the middle of the night
and experienced a feeling of happiness
so intense and perfect that in all my life I had only felt its premonition.
And there was no reason for it.
It didn’t obliterate consciousness;
the past, which I carried, was there,
together with my grief.
And it was suddenly included,
was a necessary part of the whole.
As if a voice were repeating:
“You can stop worrying now;
everything happened just as it had to.
You did what was assigned to you,
and you are not required anymore
to think of what happened long ago.”
The peace I felt was a closing of accounts and was connected with the thought of death.
The happiness on this side was
like an announcement of the other side.
I realized that this was an undeserved gift and I could not grasp by what grace it was bestowed on me.

One day peace of mind will be ours just because it is our birthright. The inner assurance the Course in Miracles talks about when it says, ‘Nothing Real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the Peace of God’. Who knows when it will kick in and under what circumstances. We are all have a history and we are all on a journey towards the Light. We all have worked hard to make it to this point. Why don’t we stop the heavy lifting and enjoy the here and now and see where it takes us. I feel fulfilled with what my life mission is all about. Do you?