When Happy?

I'm sorry, I couldn't not do it. When Moon? When Lambo? They're both just way's of saying "when happy?" This is because we've been fooled into believing the ridiculous idea that we can consume our way into happiness.

_{Image by marcisim - source: Pixabay}

I wish it weren't so, but in all the craziness surrounding the crypto bear market, we're continuously confronted with modern society's greatest addiction; money. And not just money, but the promise of more money in the future. We're raised into a society that that promises, that if you work hard today, you'll reap the benefits later on in life. We've been spoon-fed this mechanism of always longing for the next step up in the completion of our own happiness, thus making it an enduring carrot that's dangled in front of us, always just out of reach; tomorrow never comes...

We are on perpetual probation and we learn that very early, starting with school. Of course we learn from or parents, aunts and uncles, but they also are caught up in the same structure. In school we supposedly how to be a person, how we will eventually fit into the existing society; to do well in school is to be able to reproduce what the authorities, the teachers, tell you. You learn that there's a strict schedule to adhere to, indicated by school-bells, a conditioning that will prove useful later in life when you obey the clock for starting, taking a lunch-break and going home. If you work in a factory or in construction you never really get rid of that bell, although maybe replaced by a horn or a whistle...

As an important side note, consider the origin of the word "person":

In ancient Rome, the word persona (Latin) [...] originally referred to the masks worn by actors on stage. The various masks represented the various "personae" in the stage play.
_{source: Wikipedia}

According to other sources, which also admit that the origin of the term is not completely clear, persona could possibly be related to the Latin verb per-sonare, literally: sounding through, with an obvious link to the above-mentioned theatrical mask, which often incorporated a small megaphone.
_{source: Wikipedia}

In Latin, "per sonare" means "sounding through", which is related to the mouth-holes in those ancient masks; they were cone-shaped as to amplify the voice that's spoken through it. It's kind of telling that through time we've started using the word for "mask" to describe the real individual behind the mask. We're all just actors on society's stage.

_{Three pictures of the same nō 'hawk mask' showing how the expression changes with a tilting of the head. The mask was afixed to a wall with constant lighting and only the camera moved. - source: Wikimedia Commons}

Each grade, each year in school prepares you for the next one, and afterwards, if you really do well in this perpetual probation, you get to go to college, and some of the very best become professors who then help prepare the next wave for chasing the carrot. Most don't make it that far though and are supposed to start chasing the future while contributing to society. You go to work every day, doing your best to rise higher in the company's hierarchy. And when you're 50 years old, you may have scored some managerial role which makes you think that retirement is going to be a feast; finally you'll get that carrot and really start enjoying life.

Only problem is that by then you're old, you're tired and you're still caught in the conditioning that says you're just preparing, probation isn't over yet, so are you really happy? Your whole life "happiness" was associated with a future promise, and making more money was your ticket to get there. But along the way, however much money you've earned, it never seemed enough; take away the carrot and suddenly something essential is missing... We've learned to always go for that next thing, but to never be really satisfied.

When happy? I'll tell you when happy: NOW happy! And it doesn't start with school, a job, a business or money; it starts with introspection, with a basic understanding of who we really are. It starts with unlearning the lessons of society and take of the mask it has given us to wear, and shake the addiction it has forced upon us. Happiness isn't found in past or future or "out there"; it can only be found right now, inside yourself. It needs you to ask "who am I?" We are all experiencing beings that experience the universe externally as well as internally. We're born into this universe just as much as out of this universe. We're a creation and a creator of the universe. And "I" is the one that experiences.

Or I should be. But society prohibits that, because, you know, we're on probation: our minds are constantly projected forward into a dreamed up future, and we flee into the past when that future dream fades away in the distance. Constantly aiming at that little bit more, occasionally retreating in the past, we're almost never fully in the now, the only place where real experiences happen, including happiness. I think it's an old Buddhist proverb that says that when you've managed to live only one full moment in the now, then you're ready to die. The tribes of the Amazon eat mushrooms and drink ayahuasca to reach a state of complete being, Buddhist monks meditate for hours each day to bring about the now. In ancient societies, in the rare cases that they could see someone's death coming, they gave hallucinative plants or mushrooms to the dying, to prepare them for death, to take away the fear of dying.

_{Mother Nature gives a hand to earth...Mosaïcultures de Montréal 2013
source: Wikimedia Commons}

Our society, that's always been shaped at the whims of the religious and financial elite, blinds us from who and what we really are. It consumes our energy in a never ending rat race with no finish line. So... just stop. Take the time to be amazed by existence. Occasionally be completely selfish in the sense that you meditate on what it means to be yourself. Pause and take some time to just be. Try to look behind the person, take off the mask, because when you do, all other masks are off to, and you realize that we're all equally beautiful, we're all essentially that same thing trying to get in touch with and understand itself. You'll begin to see how much we're the same instead of only seeing the minuscule differences... And maybe, just maybe, when we realize that we're all in the same boat, we'll learn how to respect each other more, as well as the boat.

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