Are you implying that you have a better grasp of reality than I do Soup?
All I know is that in “my world”, I was happy when my W loved me and I loved her. Life was no bed of roses before I met her, and she didn’t transform it into a bed of roses, but it was good.
One could argue that the happiness I derived from her love wasn’t real because it came from “external sources.” I simply don’t care where it came from. It was there, and that’s good enough for me.
OK. So now I don’t have that anymore. I have the choice of waiting on the eventuality that I get it back, or stopping myself from wanting it.
To answer your questions:
So, in the context of DBing, what things do you think you need to do to achieve either of the above choices?
Quote: One could argue that the happiness I derived from her love wasn’t real because it came from “external sources.” I simply don’t care where it came from. It was there, and that’s good enough for me.
with the exception of finding another to love you and for you to love...what other outside sources can you find to make you happy??
yes, I'd love to feel loved (on a regular basis and not just when it's convenient) by h and to feel free to love him...but while I wait for that to happen with regularity I need to keep me happy myself...some may say it's just empty busy stuff...well then if it's empty stuff then it's the wrong stuff...so what am I doing?? painting rooms...learning to be an emt, becoming a part of a community larger than that one residing in my home...makes me feel good about me...makes me feel alive...then I need h less and less and it is more a choice to spend time with him.
your post seems rather down, I know it's hard to find positive when you are down, maybe take a few min to list some positives even if they are not in relation to w might bring you some needed peace.
Everyone wants to be happy (loved) and no one wants to suffer, but very few people understand the real causes of happiness and suffering.
We tend to look for happiness outside ourself, thinking that if we had the right house, the right car, the right job, and the right partner we would be truly happy. We spend almost all our time adjusting the external world, trying to make it conform to our wishes. All our life we have tried to surround ourself with people and things that make us feel comfortable, secure, or stimulated, yet still we have not found pure and lasting happiness.
Even when we succeed in fulfilling our desires, it is not long before our desires change and we want something else. We may find the houe of our dreams, but a few months later we feel that we need a bigger kitchen, an extra bedroom, or a larger garden, and we think of moving.
Or perhaps we meet the "perfect" partner, fall in love, and move in together. At the beginning our partner seems to the most wonderful person in the world, but before long we begin to see faults in him or her. We discover that we are no longer in love, and soon we are looking for someone else to fulfill our desires.
Throughout history human beings have sought to improve their external conditions, yet despite all our efforts we are no happier. It is true that from the point of view of material development many countries are making progress. Technology is becoming more and more sophisticated, and worldly knowledge has increased dramatically. We know so many things we did not know before and can do things we never even dreamt of. Superficially, it looks as if our world is improving, but if we look a little more deeply we see that there are now many problems that never existed before. Terrifying weapons have been invented, our environment is being poisoned, and new diseases are appearing. Even simple pleasures like eating or lying in the sun are becoming more dangerous.
The result of an unbridled pursuit of happiness from external sources is that our planet is being destroyed and our lives are becoming more complicated and dissatisfying.
I believe it is time we sought happiness from a different source. Happiness is a state of mind, so the real source of happiness must lie within our mind, not in external conditions.
If our mind is pure and peaceful we shall be happy, regardless of our external circumstances, but if it is impure and unpeaceful we can never be truly happy, no matter how hard we try to change our external conditions. We could change our partner countless times, but until we change our restless, discontented mind we shall never find true happiness (love).
If we have to walk across rough and thorny ground, one way of protecting our feet is to cover the whole ground with leather, but it's just not very practical. We can achieve the same result in a much simpler way... by covering our feet with leather. Similarly, if we wish to protect ourself from suffering we can either try to change the whole world to make it conform to our wishes, or we can change our mind. Until now we have been trying to change the world, but this clearly has not worked. So controlling our mind seems like an alternative.
The first step towards controlling our mind is to identify which states of mind product happiness and which produce suffering.
In Buddism, states of mind that are conducive to peace and happiness are called "virtuous minds", whereas those that disturb our peace and cause suffering are called "delusions". I've learned these last couple of years that my mom had one of the most virtuous mids I've ever come across. I'm convinced that she left this world a happy person. She was forever cherishing all others rather than always thinking about herself.
We have many different types of delusion, such as desirous attachment, anger, jealousy, pride, miserliness and ignorance. These are also known as inner enemies because they are continually destroying our happiness from within. Their only function is to cause harm.
Delusions are distored ways of looking at ourself, other people, and the world around us. The way a deluded mind views these phenomena does not accord with reality. The deluded mind of hatred, for example, views another person as instrinsically bad, but there is no such thing as an intrinsically bad person.
Desirous attachment, on the other hand, sees its object of desire as instrinsically good and as a true source of happiness. If we have a strong craving to eat chocolate, chocolate appears to us to be an instrinsically desirable object. However, once we have eaten too much of it and start to feel sick, it no longer seems so desirabel and may even appear repulsive. This shows that in itself chocolate is neither desirable nor repulsive. It is the mind of attachement that projects onto it all kinds of desirable qualities and then relates to it as if it really did possess those qualities.
All delusions work like this Andy. When our mind is under the influence of delusions we are out of touch with reality and are, in a sense hallucinating. Since our mind is under the influence of at least subtle forms of delusion all the time, it is not surprising that our lives are so often filled with frustration. It is as if we are continually chasing mirrages, only to be disappointed when they do not give us the satisfaction for which we had hoped.
