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“I read some where that studies of people who described themselves as happy also revealed that those people felt that they were in charge of their lives and in control….. I thought that this was a very fragile kind of happiness, because it was based on the illusion of control.”
So very true. Even our conception of what happiness actually is turns out to be a delusion. People confuse the absence of worry and presence of optimism as happiness. But that is all about the future. Happiness is not something based in the future. Basically these people are describing themselves as happy, but not only is their happiness fragile due to its predication on a deluded belief that they are in control of their lives, but on top of that, what they are calling happiness isn't even happiness to begin with. It is, of course, possible that they are also experiencing true happiness in addition to the optimism and productivity they feel about their ability to make their future according to their desires. It's just that one has nothing to do with the other.
“I feel a little sad, to let that go.”
I sometimes feel sad in thinking about this also. There is a disillusionment we must all go through when we think about the meaning of life. It's an existential issue we all face. Life truly has no purpose other than being alive. We have succeeded as much as we ever will as soon as we are born. The rest is just a series of happenings and experiences of those happenings to which we apply meanings we create. We use various standards to manufacture those meanings, such as social conditioning and lifetimes of karmic conditioning, but ultimately the significance of anything that happens in our lives is all made up by us. There is no ultimate judge somewhere deciding who lived a good life and who did not. All life is equally good, to anyone other than the person living it. We are the only judges and so we must value our own judgment enough to seek no other.
That can be a lonely feeling, and even a hopeless one. That's just it. There is no hope. We really have to be hopeless. The sadness that comes with hoplessness, however, is just a phase. As my lama says, it is always frightening and very painful if we only go part of the way towards letting go. It's like you jump out of a plane with a parachute but you keep holding onto a rope attached to the plane. The parachute can't open and meanwhile you're getting banged against the underbelly of the plane. Ouch! And pretty darn scary. But to let go all the way is freedom. You can't fly free so long as you remain on the plane. You have to jump, and you have to completely let go. What happens next isn't scary or painful, but you can only know that once you get there, because it isn't a story.
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