By Coach Cary Bayer www.carybayer.com
People gamble on lotteries, on slot machines, on football games. Rarely, do you hear someone gamble on happiness. And yet, every day most people actually do.
Most people derive happiness based on what happens that day. If they get a massage, a new client or a raise at work, or their child or grandchild gets a prize they’ll be happy. Conversely, if they lose at tennis, lose a client or a possible promotion at work, or their child or grandchild gets sick they’ll be unhappy. Said differently, their happiness is a function of what happens to them and those they care about. It’s outer-dependent and usually out of their control. Hence, my expression “gambling on their happiness.” Like a roulette wheel, if it shows up red they lose, if it shows up black they win. It’s a tough way to live.
The good news is that there’s a deeper happiness that’s inner-dependent, and even better news is that it’s possible to connect to that happiness daily to live from that state, as well.
Outer-dependent happiness comes about through the senses, your arms, legs and the rest of your body. Inner-dependent happiness doesn’t involve them, and arises when they’re completely at rest. The yogis of India call this inner happiness Ananda, Sanskrit for bliss. Ananda exists in abundance–infinite in fact—at the deepest level of your mind, where your individuality and your universality meet.
Meditation is the primary path to this concentrated happiness; the yogis of India call this brief experience of the inner Self Samadhi, which translates from the Sanskrit as “steady mind.” In other words, when the mind is steadiest, when it comes to rest and your conscious mind becomes consciousness, no longer aware of any thing in particular but awake within itself, Samadhi is achieved. Even the word “achieved” is a misnomer, because Samadhi isn’t something you can achieve like writing a book, cooking a meal, or even walking to the mailbox. It’s a state of Being, beyond the doing of your everyday actions, beyond the perceptions of your five senses, and beyond the thoughts of your thinking mind. It’s a fourth state of consciousness, as distinct from waking, dreaming, and sleeping, as each of them is from each other.
This is the knowledge elucidated by the yogis, and I can vouch for it from my own personal experience of having meditated since the age of 17 and taught Transcendental Meditation since three years after that until 2010 when I began teaching Higher Self Healing Meditation.
A fleeting experience of Samadhi that lasts for maybe a second or two or a minute or more brings a concentrated download of happiness into your mind. So when you come out of meditation your mind is infused with this happy state, making it so much easier to derive happiness out of the simplest things that you may see or do immediately afterwards. In an hour or so, almost all of that happiness fades out of consciousness; that’s not a bad thing, per se, it’s just the way of things. A little of it, however, still remains.
Regular exposure to the experience of Being within enables more and more of this precious bliss to habituate itself into the nature of your mind. Over the course of years of such exposure, the individual mind becomes saturated with that happiness; in fact, the mind comes to live in a state of happiness. The yogis of India have a name for this as well: Moksha, or liberation. In English, we call this Self-Realization, when you have come to identify yourself as both an individual being, who the world knows you as, and one with the Universal Being. This state of Enlightenment enables you to bring a truckload of happiness with you wherever you go and to whatever you do. This makes the activity of outer-dependent happiness, of course, much easier to achieve.
In the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz everyone wore green glasses, so that everything appeared to be green. When you wear happiness glasses, it’s awfully hard not to see happiness, AND your gambling on happiness has ended.