Here, happiness is different from pleasure. Pleasure is something we seek to fill our emptiness, our boredom, to escape from pain and the rest. Happiness is the state of being when we are complete in ourselves and no longer seek happiness nor pleasure.
Psychologically, we are incomplete. Have you ever been complete in your entire life? Have you ever been truly present in whatever you do? Have you ever done something without any motives, without expecting anything in return? No, sirs, you haven’t. You may say, "I did something without expecting anything." Sirs, if you watch and look at yourself deeply and carefully, you will find out that all your actions, you, and your life have been driven by fears and desires only.
Someone with a fear of abandonment may keep holding on, sacrificing, adjusting, and forgiving all hurts and misdeeds, even getting nothing in return, due to that fear. Anyway, afraid, incomplete, and self-centered as we are, we can never do anything without motive.
We are afraid human beings. We have fear of trusting, fear of opening up, fear of being rejected, fear of not being enough, fear of abandonment, fear of getting left behind while everyone is moving ahead, and so on. Ask yourself, what is driving you? What is driving your life, your so-called ambitions, goals, dreams, and deepest cravings? From where do they arise? Find out. Look deeply, passionately.
Find out who are you? Why you are the way you are. Why you seek a certain type of partner, a certain type of career. Look at your thoughts, your choices, your feelings, your ideas, your desires and everything. Are they yours? Are your choices, your moods, your feelings truly yours? If someone claps for you, or someone curses you, do you notice something happening in yourself? Is that mood really yours? But you act on those moods, on those ideas, on those choices, don’t you? Do you really choose anything at all? Find out from where you derive your moods, your feelings, your ideas, and your choices.
If I cheat you, you will get hurt. Now you will crave a loyal partner as a result of that hurt. Now you will have a hard time trusting someone new, right? You will carry my hurt and project it onto someone else in the form of insecurity. This is our life. We carry the past and project it into the present. Your fears create a wall between you and others. You are hurt, wounded, hidden behind the walls of your fears. And you seek relief, comfort, and escape from it. You crave the loyal partner, the safe zone, and the secure house to fill up that hurt and fear you carry.
We lose innocence once we get hurt. And this loss of innocence is the reason why we are not happy. We say this is maturity. But what we call maturity is just childish. You get hurt, you learn a lesson, and now you develop a fear regarding it and call it maturity. You say maturity is not trusting people, not getting attached, and blah blah. Is this maturity or fear? You are afraid and you are escaping from fear, from pain, like a baby. You are unable to face something, and you call it maturity?
Simply, we are stuck in Moh (past, attachments) and Maya (future, imagination). We project our past. Unless you heal your wounds, let go of your hurts, and die to your fears, happiness cannot come. Happiness is not anything to be achieved. How do you achieve sunlight? Let the clouds that are blocking it move away, and it will naturally be there. Happiness is natural; it is what remains when you strip yourself of your past.
But there’s a catch. Wanting to end fear or pain is exactly the doing of fear and pain. It is like a dog chasing its own tail. As I mentioned at first, happiness is such a state where you don’t even want or seek happiness. You cannot go to happiness, neither can you invite it. Happiness must come to you on its own. The sunlight must find you when the clouds move, when the walls shatter, when there is no barrier in between.
Your past is the cloud that is blocking sunlight. Your avoidance or inability to face pain is the cloud blocking sunlight. Now, what is one to do? Since one is not the doer, and one can only chase one's own tail, what is one to do? You must do nothing. And this is the hardest thing of all. By "do nothing," I do not mean lethargy, suppression, or closing your eyes. I mean you must stop the movement of escape. You must simply observe.
When you observe the pain, the fear, or the hurt without judging it, without trying to change it, without naming it as bad or wishing it to go away, then you are no longer the doer trying to achieve a result. You are just pure observation. When you look at a flower without naming it, you see the flower as it truly is. Similarly, you must look at your fear. Stay with it. Don't run to a distraction, don't run to a theory, don't run to a solution. Just be with the fact of what is.
In that intense, passive alertness, the observer and the observed become one. The conflict ceases. When you stop feeding the fear with your resistance and your escape, the energy of the fear dissipates. The cloud dissolves not because you pushed it, but because you stopped holding it together with your attention to the past.
Then, there is space. Then, there is silence. And in that silence, when you are not looking for it, the sunlight enters. That is the only way maturity is born. Not from the hardening of the heart, but from the total, vulnerable openness to the moment. But, if you start following these words and try to observe or be with the fact, try to do nothing, try to be silent or open or vulnerable, it will again be like a dog chasing its own tail. You must come to the discovery of these words yourself. You cannot follow it. The act of following is doing of your incompleteness, the insufficiency you try to avoid.