The place of “happy without a reason” is not what your mind imagines it to be – it’s not a state of constant exhilaration but one of “stability”, it’s calm and yet alive. Happiness is just a term we humans have coined to describe the “feeling” of experiencing the natural vibration of life that happens every time we let go of resistance.
However, the natural vibration of life need not be a fleeting feeling in you, it can be your permanent resting place – when you become stable in the natural vibration of life, you are always happy without a reason. The mind has no clue what this state of being is like unless it has really tasted it, till then it can only have some imaginations about it, and it’s never like what your mind imagines it to be. When you are stable in your natural vibration, there is no “pull and release” feeling within you which you refer to as “exhilaration” rather it just becomes “ordinary” because it’s so permanent – but it’s not “dull” ordinariness, it’s an “alive” ordinariness.
(Of course it’s not possible to be 100% permanent in your natural vibration as a physical being, due to physical processes in the body, but you can easily come close to 95-98% abiding in natural vibration by letting go of all the psychological resistances. So when I use the term “permanent” in this context I mean 95-98% abidance in natural vibration)
Why is happiness a fleeting feeling in most humans?
First it’s important to really get it that happiness is the natural vibration of life, in that this energy called life is always vibrating at this frequency. Who you are is life energy, so happiness is your natural vibration and the only reason you don’t abide in this natural vibration is because of the “resistances” that are present in you, which you are unconsciously holding onto. Once you consciously start letting go of resistances (by detaching from them), it takes a few months (or may be even a year or two, depending on how allowing you are) before the resistances can ebb away fully so that your natural vibration becomes your permanent resting place.
Most humans follow this below pattern in their life
Step 1: Create resistance through unconscious/unquestioned thought patterns
Step 2: Find a way to release this resistance through an “external” distraction and feel liberated/happy in the moment.
Step 3: Become addicted to the source of distraction associating it with happiness. Usually the source of distraction is a person (colloquially called “falling in love”), job, achievement, sensory entertainment, physical activity or drugs of some form.
Step 4: Go back to step 1
So basically we keep creating resistances and then find ways to release the resistance temporarily through some “outside distraction” and feel liberated in those few moments, terming it as “happiness”. This pattern of living is what induced the coinage of the term “pursuit of happiness”. Wisdom dictates that if you find a way to stop creating resistance then you won’t have to keep finding ways to release it and thus you would no longer have to “pursue” happiness, rather you would be stable in it.
Watch for this pattern in you and you will realize how your mind has made it into a way of living. However, this does not have to be the way you live life, it’s possible to live life differently, where you are not occupied with pursuing happiness, but are stable in it, and your movement is purely out of inspiration/joy than out of “neediness”.
The process of letting go of resistances
It’s really simple, all you need to do is stay in a place of relaxed detachment with the constant stream of thinking in the mind. If you can simply stay this way, the momentum of the mind will keep ebbing away because it’s no longer getting the fuel of your attention. No matter what arguments, questions, clarifications and insecurities, the mind throws up, just stay in a place of this relaxed detached (which I also call relaxed awareness). Some teachers have called this place “abiding in self”, resting in the unborn, dwelling in the now, staying in surrender etc ultimately it’s all the same place of being, where you simply stay as a relaxed presence allowing the mind to run out of its fuel.
As the mind movement ebbs away in intensity, resistances automatically lose their grip on you, and you can sense your natural vibration coming up more and more. With time, the mind becomes very subtle, without much intensity, this is the place of no “inner resistance” – in this place you will be able to abide in your natural vibration without any “push and pull” from the mind. The actions that come forth from you, in this place, are not motivated from a place of “neediness” or “seeking, but purely from a place of intelligence/inspiration or wisdom. You are no longer chasing happiness, no longer chasing anything, just moving from a place of stability. The paradox is that this place of “no resistance” is the perfect place for allowing the smooth manifestation of your desired realities, though there is no longer any craving for it.
As long as you are working on the outside to release your inner resistance, you will be stuck in the cycle mentioned above (step 1 to step 4). The outside cannot permanently release your inner resistances, it can only temporarily give you taste of release. To permanently release your inner resistances you will need to let go of your identification with them simply by letting go of your “focus” on them in the place of relaxed awareness. It’s really simple and that’s why the mind does not trust it, it wants some complicated techniques. But all techniques eventually keep you a prisoner to them. The state of dwelling in relaxed awareness is not a technique, it’s simply a place of “letting go” with no techniques, just a total surrender – which allows the wholeness of your being to burn through all the inner resistances with ease. No inner resistance implies permanent abidance in your natural vibration – this is the end of the cycle of seeking happiness.
How do you know which thoughts you should trust? If I’m operating in a state of relaxed detachment, distancing myself from the thoughts that arise, how do I know when to engage with a thought that has some wisdom or will be of some benefit?
You will notice that as you stay in the state of relaxed detachment, you will become tuned to “inspiration”. You will need to trust the intelligence of life, that as you stay relaxed it will move you into action every time its required and the energy for the action will come through in the “Now” moment. You don’t have to decide which thought to engage with and which thought to leave, just stay in a stay of relaxed awareness allowing the mind complete freedom to run itself, rest assured that you will not “miss out” on any action that’s truly needed in that moment – you will find your body automatically responding to a deeper inspiration that comes from the wisdom of this state of being rooted in a relaxed awareness. Just practice this for a couple of hours and see how the body effortlessly takes actions that are required on a moment to moment basis, and stays in rest when no action is required. With time, as you start trusting this state of being and see how it effectively starts resolving your life, it will become natural to you to stay in this place of relaxed awareness.
It’s not your responsibility to decide which thoughts to engage with because your mind cannot know at any moment which thought is relevant and which thought is not. If you just stay in this place of relaxed awareness, allowing thoughts to keep passing, without worrying about which thought to engage with, all the required actions and insights will come through automatically. You can see this for yourself, in your experience, if you just stay as this relaxed awareness for a couple of hours – it’s not a “dumb” state of being, but a highly intelligent state of being because you are in total “allowance” of the wholeness of you to operate through your body. It does take some level of “trust” to stay in effortless way allowing life’s intelligence to take charge of you completely. It’s a state of total surrender to your life stream, without any resistance. Your life stream is highly dynamic and intelligent, and it’s constantly moving in the direction of manifesting solutions and desired realities – you just need to become a channel that’s allowing of this force to operate.
Initially, you will find that your mind keeps doubting this state of being – asking questions about how, when and why. Just let these questions pass without getting sucked into them, just stay as this space of awareness and see how the insights come from within (sometimes without even forming into a wordful thought), how actions are automatically taken, how everything seems to happen exactly at the right timing. In the end, this is what is boils to down, this simple state of surrender. All the pointers and insights and understandings are so that you can finally let go and rest as awareness, allowing life to move you in its intelligence.
But to take for example the current pressing thoughts I have about the need to get a new job, and settle on a career path yet not knowing which particular career I want to take. How should I approach this using a state of mind of relaxed detachment? How do I know that these are valid thoughts to listen to?
In the waking state, there is “awareness” of all the thoughts produced by the mind, even when you say “I was lost in thoughts”, there is still an awareness of the thoughts you were lost in. However, not all thoughts get registered in the long term memory because not all thoughts have a personal significance, and only thoughts with personal significance actually get loaded into the long term memory of the brain – all this happens automatically though all your waking hours. So “who” is aware of the thoughts? In essence, the wholeness of your being is “Aware” because the energy that you are is an “aware energy” and it’s aware 24/7, that’s why its also called “conscious” energy (that’s why there is awareness of dreams even when the body is asleep).
So when you ask, how should “I” approach this or how do “I” know what thoughts are valid, this “I” is just your mind/brain asking questions. The “I” in these questions is basically your “brain” that’s wanting to “know” what to do. And the pointer for this questioning brain is to relax and stay in a place of surrender, allowing life to inspire the right action/insights at the right time. The conscious energy that you essentially are is already aware of all the thoughts that come up in the brain. You are not just the “brain”, but the wholeness itself, you are this aware energy. Of course, all these questions are coming from the brain – the “I” being the brain, and the pointer to stay in relaxed awareness is also for the brain. To just stay in state of allowing without worrying too much about “figuring out” the next thing.
Your brain has identified certain requirements/desire in your life at this moment – a career that feels aligned, a good financial state of being etc. A non-physical reality has already been created with the desired reality that your brain seeks and your life stream is moving in that direction (you can read my post “The science of manifestation”, if want to know the exact physics behind how a solution gets manifested for every problem, or how a reality gets manifested for every desire). Two things you can do to allow a swift manifestation of this desired reality is to 1. Stay relaxed 2. Visualize your desired reality. In fact, if you just stay relaxed, the right thoughts will keep coming up in your brain automatically – there is no need to do any “effort based” visualization.
The thoughts “how will I get a new job”, “what is the type of career I should get into” are questions in your mind and your life stream has the solutions/answers, and the manifested reality that meets the answers. Now that the solution has been formulated in your life stream, it’s your job to “allow” it in. If you want to allow it in “swiftly”, you will need to let go of focusing on these questions. The more you focus on these questions, the more you are focused on the “problem”. When you are focused on the problem, your vibration is not a match to the solution – and hence you stand in resistance to the solution manifesting. You will need to let go of focusing on the problem, to really allow the solution to manifest swiftly. That’s why I give the pointer of “relaxed detachment”, this basically means that you let go of “focusing” on these problem based thoughts so that your vibration can be free of resistance and thus become a channel that allows the solutions to manifest.
Even if you do this only for a week, you will see positive results – you will see answers coming into your life. Just ask your brain to relax and let go of focusing on these questions – the totality of you has already received your desire and its already in the process of bringing the manifestation in physicality, the only reason this process is getting delayed is because your brain is constantly focusing on the “problems”. When you focus on the problem you take on the vibration of the problem, which makes you a mis-match to the vibration of the solution. When you relax, you are always a match to the vibration of the solution. You’ve been having these questions for several months now, I am sure you’ve reached a point where you are tired of figuring it out. So just let go of trying to figure it out, relax and, if it makes you happy, visualize the desired reality you want (you don’t even have to get into any details) – just do this for a week, spend a week in total relaxation without “efforting” to figure out and see how a solution starts manifesting, how answers start coming in from different avenues.
Thank you sen. I appreciate very much your insight
I have been trying to let go into the natural movement of life, but I get this horrible feeling inside of me. Maybe I can call it doubt or fear. Frankly, I have no idea how long this process will take and it’s really hard to “just believe.” All my life, I have made great effort in trying to get what I want but I always ended up getting close to the goal I set out to do and not wanting it or fear of having it. I have been searching within myself the joy of being but nothing seems to come up. Do you have any suggestion what I should try next?
As you stay in this space of relaxed awareness it’s natural for a lot fears, and negativity in general, to come to the surface. The load of negativity in your mind (or it’s momentum) depends totally upon how much of it was unconsciously created during your past. When you become a conscious being, you will not be creating more negative energy with you but that’s does not mean that your mind does not hold old negativities. You must understand that your mind has a huge momentum of negativity owing to your past “unconscious” attention to it. Your “Attention” is a highly powerful force, and when you bestowed it to the negativity that came up in the mind, you gave it a lot of fuel/momentum – sometimes enough to manifest into a negative reality. This momentum is a “physical” thing and its very real, and it needs time to ebb away in force and intensity. You will need to give yourself this time without coming to any hasty conclusions about this process – if I have to give you a realistic estimate, I believe that it takes close to 8-10 months for the intensity of this momentum to reduce significantly (in a human who has an average amount of negative momentum), and it can take 15-18 months before the negative momentum of the mind dwindles away to a point where it does not “influence” your vibration. This is provided, that you are committed to staying in a relaxed detachment from the mind’s negative momentum without getting pulled into totally believing its projections and stories – even though they would seem very convincing and real in the moment.
This is not a “dumb” state of being because a lot insights, understandings and inspired actions will automatically come from within as you stay in this space. It’s a highly intelligent and wise state of being which connects you with the wisdom of the totality of who you are.
Stop “searching” for joy, that’s not what I mean by relaxed awareness. As long as the mind is stuck in the loop of “searching” for joy, it will constantly seem to elude you. Relaxed awareness is just a term I use for a total letting go of “trying” and just resting as awareness. As soon as the cloud of negativity clears you will sense the underlying joy of your being. If you’ve not tasted it yet, it just means that there is a thick cloud of negativity on the surface of your energy which requires to ebb away. Scientifically, you just need to stay as this relaxed space, and the negative momentum will start ebbing away on it own – nothing needs to be done, you don’t have to figure out anything or sort out anything, it gets done automatically in the intelligence of your wholeness. You only have access to the intelligence of your wholeness when you stay as a relaxed space, because only then do you let go of resistance.
This relaxed awareness should not become a means to resist the negativity of the mind. You need to allow the negativity of the mind to arise in this space, don’t resist it. The normal tendency of the mind is to resist the energy of negativity that arises within, but this would cause the negativity to stay within instead of coming up to the surface so that it can touched by the intelligence of your awareness. Allow everything to come up, don’t fear it, just stay as a space of awareness. If you find it difficult to stay as a space of relaxed awareness in the middle of the “agitation” in your mind, rest assured that it will keep becoming more and more “stable” with time. Awareness will become stronger and more stable in you as you stay committed to staying in this space of awareness instead of being pulled in “totally” into identification with the mind – even if there is 10% of your awareness that does not believe the negativity, it’s enough. This part of you will keep growing and the negativity of the mind will keep ebbing away. The results become obvious in a few months time where there are more spaces of joy, and by the end of this process you will feel rooted in your natural vibration. This is a “process” and it needs “time”, all the pointers in some of my posts is so that you can trust this process through a “scientific” understanding of what’s going on and give yourself this time for it to unfold.
Very true my friend.
Would you explain what is the natural movement of life? I could use some example because it seems this concept is too abstract to understand. I have been reading the art of letting go too and if life can take care of me, how can I gradually place my trust on life? The way I understand it is jumping into a swimming pool when you are not sure if you can swim and hope that I can somehow survive and learn how to swim. Thanks.
Life, in the physical form, is constantly changing shape through the formation of new realities. Old forms dissolve, new forms come into place. Old realities dissolve and new realities get manifested. This is the dynamic movement of life which is always in a forward direction, there is no regression or going back.
An “intention” always precedes the creation of a form. And any form that’s created with an intention is limited to the boundaries of that intention. This universe solidified into form when the intention for this universe was held in this conscious energy, and this universe is made from the same energy – there is only one space of energy, it’s formless and takes the shape of forms through the condensation of its vibration in response to an intention in it. There is no separation between forms and formless energy, it’s all the same energy. To understand this basic science of life is quintessential to understanding your wholeness because you are this energy – even though you look at yourself as this body alone, in truth there are no boundaries. A body is made of billion cells, each cell is made of lesser matter and if you go deeper than that you will finally reach “emptiness”, just an energy vibration. Buddha was enlightened enough to understand this, so he said “form is emptiness and emptiness is form”. Albert Einstein, was physicist, who made this correlation as E= Mc2, where E is energy and M is matter/form, so basically he was just implying the truth that Matter is just energy vibrating at a frequency. This energy is all there is, it’s an “aware energy”, it’s intelligent and everything this universe came forth in physical manifestation from the intention held in this energy.
You, as this body, got created through an intention in totality of life to experience life in a unique way. The intention that brought forth the manifestation of your body is prior to this body, and so your body is limited to the boundaries of this intention – this is what I call the natural make-up of your mind/body, which is unique, in some way, in every human being. This natural make-up got created through the intention that led to the manifestation of this body – it defines your aptitude, talents, proclivities, preferences, sexuality and natural personality. Your limitation, physical and mental, are your boundaries which define the direction of your life in a way that allows for your intended expression to unfold, that’s the natural movement of your “personal” life stream which is connected to the totality, or the wholeness of life. If you just try to see this information from your heart you will notice that something within you already knows this to be true, but if you try to analyse it with a skeptical mind you will just enter into philosophies.
Your mind has a certain unique make-up that allows the unfolding of your natural expression, but owing to several limited external conditioning that you recieved during your upbringing and several misplaced interpretations that the mind is bound to make in an unawakened state, there is a tendency to disconnect with our natural physical make-up while trying to live up to some external standard of expectation. When you “let go” of trying to figure out things through the part of your mind that’s programmed through limited external conditioning, you fall back into your natural movement without any resistance. As long as you keep trying to figure out things from the limited external conditioning of your mind you will be stuck in mediocrity and misalignment with your true potential. As soon as you let go, there is no resistance to this natural movement in you and so your reality starts becoming congruent as you become congruent with yourself.
The part of your mind that’s afraid of letting go of its negatively conditioned (fear/hate/lack based) thought patterns is basically what I would call the “negative ego” which is basically rooted in fear and doubt, which does not trust the wholeness of life that’s the creator of this body. As long as your external movement is rooted in effort, struggle and competitiveness, it’s all coming from the energy of the negative ego, which always moves from a place of fear. When you awaken enough to see through the patterns of this negative ego, you are willing to let go of identifying with it and rest in the awareness, allowing life to inspire the right actions through you at the right time. In this state of being, understandings and insights arise from within, right actions are inspired in the body through the energy of the moment and power is taken away from the negative momentum in the mind allowing a smooth unfolding of your desired realities.
To use the analogy of swimming pool which you used, the pointer is to simply dive in and see that all your mind’s fears about drowning were baseless because you always float when you let go of effort and struggle. It’s only when you are efforting and struggling that you seem to drown, as soon as you let go the body floats up on its own. This the simple secret of aligned living. You can stay all your life wondering if you should dive, asking several questions about what’s it’s like to be in the swimming pool, or you can dive and experience it for yourself. When you let go, make sure you give life enough time to bring your reality back into alignment (it can take a few months or a couple of years depending on how misaligned you’ve been and how allowing you are to the inner transformation that starts taking place) – the more out of wack your reality presently is the more time it takes for it to be dissolves so an aligned reality can come in place, every day will be a progress in this direction. A process of inner transformation automatically starts taking place as awareness keeps deepening in you, this happens automatically as you stay in a space of surrender to life. “Letting go” simply means to let go of struggling, figuring out, efforting and negative thinking of the mind, which automatically makes you free of resistance and thus open to the intelligence of your wholeness. This intelligence of your wholeness is what I refer to as “awareness” force, it penetrates through all the aspects of your human consciousness and dissolves the patterns of resistance within. When there is no conflict within, there will be no conflict in your outside – leading to a harmonious reality.
If you’ve never experienced the intelligence of this state of “awareness”, I would suggest you try this simple practice for a while – just sit with your eyes closed, without trying to do anything, and sense how the awareness shift to the inner space of your mind, just stay this way for 30 minutes without making any effort to control anything – just like the mind be as it is, let your awareness of the mind come and go (awareness never goes, but there are spaces when your mind will not have the “I” thought which makes you feel as you lost awareness for a while), let the breath happen naturally without trying to control it, this is a simple state of total letting go. If you just sit this way for a while you will get a sense of how this silent intelligence resolves conflicts within and inspires insights, you will also notice that the body automatically makes some movements or takes action if necessary. Slowly you will be able to integrate this simple place of surrender into your natural way of living life.
Thanks, that helps a lot.
I am definitely moving into stage 3 now and experiencing a lot of what you have described. Content within without any external changes.
I am looking forward to seeing my way through difficult times with this new mindset. Life is just flowing and I feel satisfied experiencing the tiny things. I was always striving for some outward change or experience to make all of this happen, but it has happened without that.
This is what it means to get in touch with your inner wholeness, the more rooted to you become in this place the more harmonious and congruent your external reality starts becoming. The evidence of the inner alignment will be manifested outside through positive shifts in your present reality and a swift movement towards your desired realities. When you’ve become stable in this place of inner alignment as the momentum of negativity ebbs away to a huge extend, you will be able to feel more powerful as a deliberate creator of your reality as it would be easy for you focus on the thoughts you desire (without doubts/resistances coming from your being), this focus greatly expedites the manifestation of your desired realities, and most importantly you experience life consistently from a place of wholeness.