Why sadness is the real key to everlasting happiness

The first and most recognised tenet upon which the United States of America was founded is the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But what if the pursuit of happiness was the one and only thing that was actually keeping us from finding true happiness? What if that principle that the world’s most influential nation has based its entire values on was not the most perfect gift of freedom that it has long been held to be, but instead its greatest bond to slavery?

Everywhere I look I see people who are pretty happy… maybe it’s just the place I live now, but it’s a theme I’ve seen most of my life – despite all the pain, fear, monotony and futility of human life in the modern world, an awful lot of people somehow manage to maintain a state of relative happiness.

But is it real? Well no. Though many will disagree with this, even those who have mastered the art of personal development; have mastered the art of manufacturing happiness, only ever experience a degree of happiness that pales into insignificance compared to that which is our birth-right. We maintain it of course because we never read stories like this, we never question our happy state, we believe in it and in so doing cement that happiness into our reality framework.

So what is wrong with that? Nothing of course (well expect the fact that one need only switch on the news to see that this model doesn’t actually work) … and if you are one of those people who fits this description and you are genuinely satisfied that you will die a fulfilled wo/man if you continue along this path well-trodden, then time to stop reading.

If however you, like I, have always felt that there is something deeper, something more, then maybe this story will help you find it!

I was actually one of those people – from the moment I was born to the moment I realised there was a difference between spirituality and self-realisation, I was one of the happiest people you are ever likely to meet. This natural quality of my personality saw life roll out a red carpet before my feet. By the time I was in my late 20’s (and about to recognise the illusion in which I had been living), I had it all. Friends, family and all those around me believed I was downright lucky; that I was somehow ‘graced’ with endless good fortune. In a certain respect they were right – I was grace with good fortune, but it was a co-creation I was participating in, albeit with little real conscious knowledge of how I was doing so!

I’ll share my secret, should anyone simply be looking for a life like this – it was gratitude. Though I would never at the time have described it like this, not necessarily feeling ‘thankful’, what I was actually doing was looking back on each day, each month, each year and saying “wow… that was awesome.” And this natural law of gratitude is really true – I’m not suggesting that we should stop being thankful for things – quite the contrary, because there was another aspect to my success… an unfailingly positive disposition. It is this that limit’s us…

Nowadays there is an entire industry existing to help people develop and maintain a positive attitude to life – it’s called the self-help industry, and it has helped millions of people live happier lives, so I’m not beating on that either, but it is a philosophy that was relevant for an age gone by, doing nothing to fulfil the promise of a transcendent state of happiness which many are now waking up to the experience of. Ironic as it may be that our society has only just begun to master this art en masse at the time when it also needs to let go of it in order to evolve, there lies before us an opportunity to rise to such heights of exalted expression that we need to do so nonetheless.

When I was shown that there was a massive difference between self-realisation and spirituality – that the former had nothing to do with any kind of mystical experience, or any other state that a lesser human might envision, I took the choice to commit to Truth – I HAD to know it. I had to question everything to find out what was true and what was not, until enough of the detritus had burned off that reality could at last reveal its majestic colours to me. Gratitude, as a natural law, never fell away from my experience, but probably the greatest and most challenging thing I had to face on this particular journey was the illusion of my own positivity… for, as an unrealised man, accepting the illusion of my own positivity would see me embrace, to a certain extent, negativity – which was not the Truth either! Nonetheless it was a path that needed to be walked.

Ironically, were a society to have as its founding tenet the right to life, liberty and the experience of sadness (or better founded on nothing at all), it would lead naturally to a more happy society – for happiness, true happiness, is a natural state once all of the manufactured ideas and beliefs we have built up throughout our lives are recognised for what they really are. And what is left when all those ideas and beliefs have fallen away is an experiential sense that we are truly emotional creatures and that there is nothing natural about supressing anything that naturally arises within.