So the student said to the rabbi, "Rabbi, why are you always teaching with questions?" And the rabbi said, "So what's wrong with questions?"
What's the biggest question we can think of? In my book, it's how to be happy. How to be happy? How to be fulfilled? How to be satisfied? How to be content? How to look upon this world with pleasure? How to be secure? How to be alive? How to perceive the deep peace inside the essence of the world? How to be in love with the way things are? However we want to put it.
Well, there it is, right there in that next-to-last sentence. The deepest truth I ever came across was that happiness equals love.
Equations can be very powerful. It is because of equations by Maxwell and Einstein and Bohr and Shannon and countless others that you are able to read this message on an internet computer at the moment.
Well, I would like to propose my own modest equation:
Happiness is a function of love.
What does that mean? It means that our happiness is entirely a function of the love that we feel in our heart at any given moment. Just that. It doesn't depend upon anything else at all.
It looks sometimes like our happiness depends on a bunch of external things, especially certain external things going our way, or going "right." It's just my take on things, but I don't think that our happiness depends on anything going however we define "right." It only depends on love.
Imagine yourself in the worst possible circumstance that you can imagine. Perhaps you're homeless, lying in the gutter and freezing and starving tonight.
Now imagine yourself in that situation but with total love in your heart. You look up at the moon and you're totally in love. You think of all the people you've known and you're totally in love. You think of the times you were kind, and the times you were mean, and you're totally in love. You look around you at the barren street and you're totally in love. Not only do you love anyone you think of, but you're so in love that you feel the presence of the ungraspable, breathing inside you as you. Would you be unhappy in that circumstance?
Or imagine you're being tortured tonight, but your heart is completely filled with love anyway because you're totally surrendered and you're filled with gratitude because you feel the love that is the infinite.
Or imagine that you're in a hospital bed, wracked with pain and lying there weak and dying. And now imagine that as you lie there your heart is filled with unbearable love—just imagine it. Would you be unhappy? No, you'd be filled to the brim with happiness.
These examples, and others that you could readily supply, show that happiness does not fundamentally rest upon circumstances. It rests upon the love in our hearts, just that. In any given moment, if we feel love we are happy, and to the extent that we don't, we're unhappy.
Love for who or what? Well, there's the thing. Because whoever or whatever we leave out, and that can be a pretty long list, is contributing to a feeling of unhappiness.
If we see the complete connection between happiness and love, then the question becomes how to love that person or that thing or that situation that we don't love. And wouldn't that be being false?
If our love comes from a deep realization, then it won't be false; it will be true. On the level where we think of ourselves as separate beings making decisions, one way of understanding that realization is to perceive that each person is doing the very best they know how to do.
If you need proof, just look inside yourself. Isn't it true that at all moments you're doing the very best that you know how to do? Oh sure, maybe down the road somewhere you can say, "Oh, but I could have, should have done better in that moment." But no, you couldn't have done better, because in that moment you were doing the absolute best you knew how to do.
And everybody else is doing the same. We're all doing the absolute best we know how to do in each moment. And, in each moment, we can't help being who we are.
Can you help being who you are right this second? I can't either. I just am that way. You just are that way. We just are that way. The world just is this way. We could say that every particle in the world is doing the best it knows how to do, each moment.
To see that is to see the innocence at the core of everything. Everything has to be the way it is at this instant, and the next moment it will be however it has to be then. And on and on.
To see the innocence at the core of everything is to forgive everything and everybody. Nothing can help being the way it is. It just is that way.
To see that is to let go, surrender, give up trying to control it all. At each moment we do the best we know how to do—which we're always automatically doing—but we've let go of the outcome. We turn over the outcome to that which is vast and infinite.
And we understand that we can't understand with our rational minds how things actually work. That there are dimensions that we just can't reach with our thoughts and actions, no matter how hard we try.
What can reach there and does reach there is love. With love we can understand. We can understand why "we" are here. We can understand why there's suffering in the world. We can be fulfilled. We can take great pleasure—no, much more than pleasure, gratitude—in this world and the universe and you and me and the grain of sand and the blade of grass being exactly the way it is.
Then love pours in at you from all directions. From all directions you feel it, even if a dragon is breathing fire on you. And in all directions you send it out, not from "you" personally, but from nobody, from non-existence, from that which is ungraspable and non-locatable but which is always present as you, as the love in your humble and thankful and gracious and unbearable heart.
—jim sloman, 4/6/01 for Apr 6
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