The Seeker’s Manual

There are two kinds of happiness, and, for that matter, too kinds of sadness: big and little. The big kinds are existential; the little kinds are conditional. Small happiness over a good meal, ego-sadness over a failed opportunity – making ourselves feel good or bad depending on the circumstances of the moment. Existential happiness comes from a place beyond good and bad, a sense of being content with the overall perfection of balance, free from judgment. Existential sadness, like Satre’s “Nausea,” is really the ego or small personal self’s intellectual reaction to the proof of its own irrelevance. The emotional content is loneliness, in the void left as the imprint of the self-important vanishes. Is there another polarity between these larger forces of happiness and sadness with existence itself? Again, they are unequal forces to begin with, as the intrinsic state of perfection is happiness itself; while the affected sadness is but a remnant of the nostalgic ego, as it mourns its own passing. There remains a dual challenge, however: to disidentify both with the mournful ego looking for meaning or company, and the self-satisfied dweller in the Garden. It is a hidden secret of “The Secret” that if our desire to manifest our own happiness (or our success in doing so) leads us to feel proud and happy about our powers and good fortune, our opinion will change when our prayers go unanswered and our fortunes change; but the more genuine and lasting manifestation is neither a material prize nor a feeling of personal success. Rather it requires a humbler respect for the truer powers we may tap into once we let go of our conscious or unconscious agenda for social status and ego-gratification.