河东女有话要说
想啥说啥
I have been living in this world for a while, not too long, but long enough for me to save up tons of garbages that make me upset, mad, be bittered about all the time. These garbages are things that happened to me in the past, horrible memories of the evil teachers who put me down, friends that betrayed me, parents that didn't listen to me, business partners that fucked me over at the end, you name it. I woke up in the middle of the night, I was angry; I woke up in the morning, I was still angry. The worst thing that I realised later on is that I was actually feeding off my anger and bitterness, so I felt sorry for myself. However, feeling sorry for myself didn't make me feel better at all. So, how can I just be happy and forget about all those shit?
I tried to seek happiness just like everybody else, and one thing I did is remembering good times in the past. One night, I cooked some fired ground pork with noodles for me and a good friend. When we were eating, I started to remember the ground pork with rice that my grandpa cooked when I was 2 years old. I said to my friend , "You know, the ground pork that my grandpa cooked for me was so delicious, eventhough I was young, but I can still remember the look and taste of it. It tasted better than what I cooked tonight. I wish I could have that again". My friend looked at me and said, "You are just creating illusions for yourself. The taste that you remembered was just a feeling that incured to you then. Do you really think that your taste now is the same as then? How do you even know that the pork then tasted better than now? Your judgement on which is better is solely depended on your memory of a two-year-old! Therefore, please be happy and enjoy your food now." I couldn't argue with my friend, because he was damn right! I realized something that is very important at that moment: Enjoy this moment and have peace with yourself bring happiness. Not the past, because it is already gone; not even the future, because it is unkown; only now that you have total control of. How can I be mad at something that I have no control of? So, I decided and chose to be happy from that moment and from now.
I want to thank my friend who shared with me a wonderful speech by Werner Erhard, the founder of Lanmark Forum who talked about how to achieve happiness in the following artical. I hope it would benefit you as it did to me.
Happiness
From a presentation Werner Erhard gave at Masonic Auditorium, March 15, 1973
Happiness is almost not worth talking about because the instant you turn happiness into a goal it isn’t attainable any more. In other words, happiness isn’t something you can work towards. It isn’t something you can put someplace and overcome barriers to get to and so it makes a kind of difficult subject to talk about.
The thing which I think needs to be talked about is at the other end of the spectrum, the barriers to realizing happiness. The barriers to realizing happiness are a lot of very unhappy things. And they are the things which almost nobody talks about because very few of us are willing to confront those things.
It is a fact that an enlightened being wakes up in the morning feeling bad from time to time, especially if that enlightened being has had too much to drink the night before or something like that. You see, it doesn’t make any difference how enlightened you are. If you’ve got a body, it responds to the chemicals in alcohol. And maybe the chemicals in the smog and maybe the chemicals in whatever is going on in your life. People get the idea that enlightened beings never have bad days. If you’ve got that idea, you’ve got a false standard against which to measure the quality of your life. One of the things that can keep you from happiness, very assuredly, is false standards. If you’ve built up a set of notions about someplace that you ought to be, that it isn’t possible to be, simply because it isn’t real, then you can only be there by concept. That’s a way of making sure that you’re unhappy.
If you set up a standard for your life, if you say that in order for life to be really good, it’s got to be this way and the standard that you set up for yourself isn’t attainable to experience, then what you’ve done is to make a standard which makes happiness absolutely impossible. Because you’ve given yourself something to accomplish which is un-accomplishable. You can’t realize an illusion The only thing you can do about illusions is to illusion them or to disillusion them. But you can’t attain them. You can’t attain to illusions. What’s happened for most of us is that we’ve set up some kind of illusions against which we’re measuring the quality of our life, and when you measure the quality of your life against an illusion, then your life is eternally unhappy, or at least it isn’t really happy.
Happiness is not a disease. It does not creep up on you slowly. It is something that happens in an instant. And the truth of the matter is that you can alter your state to a state of happiness, by simply choosing to be willing to have it be the way it is. In other words, if you walked in here tonight troubled, or if you’ve been sitting there troubled, or if you’re troubled in any way, in the next instant you can be totally untroubled, and it comes from a simple willingness. I’d really like you to get this. It comes from the very simple willingness. It is the willingness to look at what is as what is. It’s the willingness for it to be the way it is. Now, it may take you some days, or years to move through all of the circumstances of life and move from a resistance to them, an unwillingness for them to be the way they are, to a willingness for them to be the way they are. You can do all that. You can spend your years moving through all of it happily. You don’t need to do it unhappily. Happiness isn’t at the end of the rainbow. Happiness is at the beginning of the rainbow. Following the rainbow is happiness, not getting to the end of it.
Be Happy Now.
Thanks!