Astrall
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Happiness has nothing to do with success, happiness has nothing to do with ambition, happiness has nothing to do with money, power, or prestige. Happiness is related to consciousness, not to character.
What is happiness? It depends on you, on whether you are in a state of consciousness or unconsciousness, on whether you are asleep or awake. Murphy has a famous aphorism. He says that people are of two kinds: people of the first kind always divide humanity into two kinds, and people of the second kind do not divide humanity at all. I belong to the first: humanity can be divided into two kinds, into the sleeping and the awakened – and, of course, a small intermediate group. Happiness depends on which area of consciousness you are in. If you are asleep, happiness for you will be pleasure.
Pleasure implies a sensation, an attempt through the body to achieve something unattainable – to force the body to achieve something it is not capable of. People try in every possible way to achieve happiness through the body. The body can only give you momentary pleasures, and each of these pleasures is balanced by pain in the same proportion, to the same degree. Every pleasure is followed by its opposite,
because the body exists in a world of duality... Just as night follows day, and life follows death, and death follows life – it is a vicious circle. Pleasure will be followed by pain, pain will be followed by pleasure. But you are never in a relaxed state. Being in a state of pleasure, you are afraid of losing it, and this fear poisons it. And when you are drowning in pain, of course, it causes suffering, and you make every possible effort to get out of it – only to fall back into it again.
The Buddha calls this the wheel of birth and death. We continue to spin with this wheel, clinging to this wheel... and the wheel continues to move.
Sometimes pleasure is at the top, sometimes pain, but we remain crushed between these two boulders. But a sleeping person knows nothing else. He knows only a few sensations of the body – food, sex; this is his world. He is constantly moving between them. These are the two ends of his body – food and sex. If he suppresses sex, he becomes addicted to food; if he suppresses the addiction to food, he becomes addicted to sex. The energy continues to move like a pendulum. And all that you call pleasure is at best only a release from tension. Sexual energy gathers, accumulates; you become tense and heavier, and you want to release it. For a sleeping person, sexuality is nothing more than a release, it is like a loud sneeze. It gives nothing but some relief – there was tension, now there is none. But it will accumulate again. Food gives only a small sensation of taste on the tip of the tongue; it is hardly worth living for. But many people live only to eat; very few eat to live.
What we call "happiness" depends on the individual. For a sleeping person, happiness is pleasurable sensations.
A sleeping person lives from one pleasure to another. He simply rushes from one sensation to another. He lives for small excitements; his life is very superficial. It has no depth, it has no quality. He lives in a world of quantity. There are also people who live in the intermediate state, people who are neither asleep nor awake, but are in a state of anticipation – a little sleep, a little wakefulness. Sometimes you experience something similar early in the morning – you are still in a dream, but you can't say that you are asleep, because from all over the house you hear sounds, you hear your partner making tea, the kettle boiling, or the children getting ready for school, you hear all these sounds, but you are still not awake. These sounds reach you vaguely, hazily, as if there is a great distance between you and everything that is happening around. This gives a feeling that it is still part of a dream. It is not part of a dream, but you are still in an intermediate state.
The same thing happens when you start to meditate. A non-meditating person sleeps, dreams; a meditating person begins to move from sleep towards awakening, but remains in a transitional state. Then happiness takes on a completely different meaning: it becomes more of a quality, less of a quantity; then it is more psychological and less physiological. A meditating person enjoys music more, enjoys poetry more, enjoys creating something more. These people enjoy nature, its beauty. They enjoy silence, they enjoy things they have never enjoyed before, and this enjoyment is much longer lasting.
Even when the music stops, something of it still lingers and continues within you.
And this is not relief.
The difference between pleasure and this quality of happiness is that it is not relief, but enrichment. You become more filled and as if you begin to overflow. When you listen to good music, it triggers a process in your being, and harmony arises within you – you become musical. Or, dancing, you suddenly forget your body; your body becomes weightless. Gravity loses its power over you. Suddenly you are in a different space: the ego loses its density, and the dancer melts and dissolves in the dance.
This is much higher, much deeper than the pleasure of food or sex. There is depth in it. But this is also not the ultimate.
The ultimate happens only when you are completely awake, when you are a Buddha, when all sleep has disappeared – and with it all the dream, when your entire being is filled with light, when there is no darkness left inside you. All the darkness has disappeared, and with the disappearance of this darkness, the ego has disappeared. All tensions have subsided, all anxieties, all longing have disappeared. You are in a state of total contentment. You live in the present; there is no longer any past or future. You are wholly here and now. This moment is everything.
Now is the only time, and here is the only space. And then – suddenly – the whole sky descends upon you. This is bliss. This is true happiness...
Osho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF5pcIGAy5w - And how would I live a little longer, How would I stretch out the bliss...[/b]. (Agata Kristi _Astrologer_)
What is happiness? It depends on you, on whether you are in a state of consciousness or unconsciousness, on whether you are asleep or awake. Murphy has a famous aphorism. He says that people are of two kinds: people of the first kind always divide humanity into two kinds, and people of the second kind do not divide humanity at all. I belong to the first: humanity can be divided into two kinds, into the sleeping and the awakened – and, of course, a small intermediate group. Happiness depends on which area of consciousness you are in. If you are asleep, happiness for you will be pleasure.
Pleasure implies a sensation, an attempt through the body to achieve something unattainable – to force the body to achieve something it is not capable of. People try in every possible way to achieve happiness through the body. The body can only give you momentary pleasures, and each of these pleasures is balanced by pain in the same proportion, to the same degree. Every pleasure is followed by its opposite,
because the body exists in a world of duality... Just as night follows day, and life follows death, and death follows life – it is a vicious circle. Pleasure will be followed by pain, pain will be followed by pleasure. But you are never in a relaxed state. Being in a state of pleasure, you are afraid of losing it, and this fear poisons it. And when you are drowning in pain, of course, it causes suffering, and you make every possible effort to get out of it – only to fall back into it again.
The Buddha calls this the wheel of birth and death. We continue to spin with this wheel, clinging to this wheel... and the wheel continues to move.
Sometimes pleasure is at the top, sometimes pain, but we remain crushed between these two boulders. But a sleeping person knows nothing else. He knows only a few sensations of the body – food, sex; this is his world. He is constantly moving between them. These are the two ends of his body – food and sex. If he suppresses sex, he becomes addicted to food; if he suppresses the addiction to food, he becomes addicted to sex. The energy continues to move like a pendulum. And all that you call pleasure is at best only a release from tension. Sexual energy gathers, accumulates; you become tense and heavier, and you want to release it. For a sleeping person, sexuality is nothing more than a release, it is like a loud sneeze. It gives nothing but some relief – there was tension, now there is none. But it will accumulate again. Food gives only a small sensation of taste on the tip of the tongue; it is hardly worth living for. But many people live only to eat; very few eat to live.
What we call "happiness" depends on the individual. For a sleeping person, happiness is pleasurable sensations.
A sleeping person lives from one pleasure to another. He simply rushes from one sensation to another. He lives for small excitements; his life is very superficial. It has no depth, it has no quality. He lives in a world of quantity. There are also people who live in the intermediate state, people who are neither asleep nor awake, but are in a state of anticipation – a little sleep, a little wakefulness. Sometimes you experience something similar early in the morning – you are still in a dream, but you can't say that you are asleep, because from all over the house you hear sounds, you hear your partner making tea, the kettle boiling, or the children getting ready for school, you hear all these sounds, but you are still not awake. These sounds reach you vaguely, hazily, as if there is a great distance between you and everything that is happening around. This gives a feeling that it is still part of a dream. It is not part of a dream, but you are still in an intermediate state.
The same thing happens when you start to meditate. A non-meditating person sleeps, dreams; a meditating person begins to move from sleep towards awakening, but remains in a transitional state. Then happiness takes on a completely different meaning: it becomes more of a quality, less of a quantity; then it is more psychological and less physiological. A meditating person enjoys music more, enjoys poetry more, enjoys creating something more. These people enjoy nature, its beauty. They enjoy silence, they enjoy things they have never enjoyed before, and this enjoyment is much longer lasting.
Even when the music stops, something of it still lingers and continues within you.
And this is not relief.
The difference between pleasure and this quality of happiness is that it is not relief, but enrichment. You become more filled and as if you begin to overflow. When you listen to good music, it triggers a process in your being, and harmony arises within you – you become musical. Or, dancing, you suddenly forget your body; your body becomes weightless. Gravity loses its power over you. Suddenly you are in a different space: the ego loses its density, and the dancer melts and dissolves in the dance.
This is much higher, much deeper than the pleasure of food or sex. There is depth in it. But this is also not the ultimate.
The ultimate happens only when you are completely awake, when you are a Buddha, when all sleep has disappeared – and with it all the dream, when your entire being is filled with light, when there is no darkness left inside you. All the darkness has disappeared, and with the disappearance of this darkness, the ego has disappeared. All tensions have subsided, all anxieties, all longing have disappeared. You are in a state of total contentment. You live in the present; there is no longer any past or future. You are wholly here and now. This moment is everything.
Now is the only time, and here is the only space. And then – suddenly – the whole sky descends upon you. This is bliss. This is true happiness...
Osho
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rF5pcIGAy5w - And how would I live a little longer, How would I stretch out the bliss...[/b]. (Agata Kristi _Astrologer_)