what is happiness

Believe it or not, even though the thing we want most is happiness, and even though almost all, if not all, our activity in life is about increasing our share of it, the strange fact is we know very little about it. We seldom reflect on it deeply. We seldom have it.

There are many things in life that purport to be happiness, but most of them are something else. We can easily experience ego gratification, pleasure, novelty, joy. But even that last one is not the same as being deeply and lastingly happy, if you want that.

Do you want that? Are you interested in being deeply and lastingly happy? The inquiry into what happiness is begins with that question. It's almost disconcerting how infrequently we ask it point blank of ourselves. Instead we tend to proceed blindly.

Our tendency, it seems to me, is to operate again and again from a conditioned sense of how to reach happiness. A conditioned sense. Meaning: there are ideas about happiness woven into the structure of the world around us and we align with them as our own.

It's perfectly natural to do that. It's a normal wish that maybe we can make it to happiness by following whatever our current inkling happens to be, and to leave it an inkling. We want the inkling to pan out with huge dividends, but in today's world it can't.

I know some of this information sounds harsh. I know a few of these paragraphs may raise some resistance in you that no way, bud, no conditioning here, or that the world doesn't work the way I'm describing, but don't let those objections sour you.

Stick around for a few examples of conditioned approaches to happiness. There are some very basic ones that many people are already seeing through as snake oil. For instance, excessive material wealth, fame, power, the surgical fountain of youth.

All these things will get you something: wealthy, famous, powerful, artificially young. But none of them will bring you deep and lasting happiness. In fact, most of them will disappoint you for not bringing it and then an avalanche of upkeep eats you alive.

If you think there's any real happiness in those starter examples, that's conditioning at work. In you. The world you live in is pitching those ideas at you as paths to real happiness, and you are buying into them deeply as your own. If you believe them.

You don't have to believe them. You won't be able to believe them. Not forever. They don't deliver what they promise to. They don't deliver real happiness. Because they don't, we all find them out as frauds eventually. By getting them, we sicken of them.

Trial and error is a big part of wisdom. We have to chase to stop chasing. We have to learn for ourselves, generally by getting what we thought we wanted, that we don't really want it that much if it doesn't amount to the real happiness we expected from it.

Not everyone needs to go through this process of discovery, but most people do. I did. I do. I do it over and over. I admit that behavior because I want it to lessen. I want to be lastingly happy, not lastingly snapping at the carrot before my nose. Whoa there!

That image of a horse chasing a carrot unearths the next examples of conditioning. The next examples are more subtle than the first batch. The nature of unmasking conditioning is that the layers become more and more subtle and mysterious as you go.

At the next layer in, for those of us interested in genuine happiness, the discussion changes its focus from specific examples to their shared methodology. What matters at this point is not what we're after, but the disposition of being after something at all.

It pays off to remind ourselves at this point, what are we after? We're after genuine happiness. How does genuine happiness work? Is it something you can arrive at by striving after it or is that disposition another level of conditioning, and equally untrue?

The world around us is showing an endless parade of specific things that we're supposed to confuse with happiness and pursue. But underneath the parade, and the reason it continues, is a notion we don't question enough that happiness involves pursuit.

Does it? Is pursuit really the path to happiness? Asking this question of ourselves is absolutely essential if we really mean it that we want to be genuinely happy. We have to be willing to think about how happiness works or we'll misunderstand it and miss it.

It's only conditioning that posits happiness as a pursuable. That's how conditioning perpetuates itself. That's how conditioning stays alive. By passing off the idea to inadvertent believers that in order to be happy there's something you have to do or become.

Amazingly, even those among us who know better tend nevertheless to give up our happiness in the driven pursuit of something. For better or worse, we lapse into letting the thing we are pursuing take the reins over us and coerce us into pursuit mode.

It's a slippery slope. You may think you know better, but once the pursuing begins, it's very easy, owing especially to deep and ubiquitous reinforcement from social conditioning, to mix up your happiness with the thing you are striving to accomplish.

But your happiness isn't there. That's not where you'll find it. Our happiness in this life is not bound up in what we can make happen and what more we can become. Our happiness in this life has nothing to do with emphasizing circumstances in any way.

On the contrary, the emphasis on circumstance is the surest way to perpetuate unhappiness in this life. It may sound counter-intuitive, but that's only from mixing up intuition with a history of conditioning. Be careful you don't call conditioning intuition.

When you don't call it intuition, you see for yourself that nothing you've ever done from your conditioning in today's world has amounted to the happiness you wish for, which is precisely why you're still doing those things, and always will until you expire.

You may even see, and I certainly hope you do, that your expiration, and by expiring I mean relenting in the happiness pursuit mode, is a sign of a true new intelligence dawning within you, that giving up the pursuit mode is your birth into real life.

The outcome of that birth is a new understanding of happiness. I call it a first understanding of happiness because all previous notions were misleading and wrong. But the understanding that comes after expiring from pursuit mode is the real thing.

At that point we are ready to see how happiness works. We're ready to understand it is not a pursuit, but a presence, that brings it about. We have to be present to be happy, and the more consistently present we are, the more happiness too.

In retrospect pursuit mode becomes funny because we see it could never have worked. We see that pursuing fosters a psychological orientation toward the future that is exactly the opposite of abiding deeply in the present, our new angle on happiness.

These insights are how we overcome the continuing momentum of former conditioning. They surface spontaneously to remind us we can never go back. We can never return to the old way of framing happiness. Each attempt to fails more quickly.

So here we are in the present, the only place where happiness is. Here we are in the present with a new understanding that happiness exists only here, as do we. Here we are with the sole requirement of not pursuing, not if we want to be lastingly happy.

Do you want to be lastingly happy? Join me here in the present experience of your life. Let it serve as your home. Never abandon it for anything. And every time you do, let yourself stop once you realize, over and over, that life carried you into pursuit mode.

We all have the grace and intelligence to reflect on our lives. We all have the right to and the sacred responsibility to. Think long and hard if you need to about the things you are chasing and why. If the reason is happiness, ask yourself has it worked.