It could be said that the cause of human suffering is mis-identification—the idea that we are separate entities each of whom is conducting a "personal" life.
Inevitably this becomes an intolerable burden because there are too many loose ends, life is too messy, it's never turning out quite the way we envisioned, we never live up to our own self-image.
Because of that we think we're doing it wrong somehow, and so we redouble our efforts, thinking that that will make it go a little more "right." But it never can. Life itself can never keep up with our mind's model of how it should be going.
Some years ago, quite by accident, I found myself in high-society circles in New York. I rubbed shoulders with the rich and famous, went to the balls and dinners and parties for two years. (Incidentally, I found out that high society runs on the principle of fait accompli, that is, if you're there often enough everyone assumes you should be there.)
Anyway, I was fascinated by this for awhile and kept asking myself the question: "Are these folks happier than other people?"—since they seemed to have what everyone else in the world was trying to get.
And the answer was No, they weren't. "Money doesn't buy happiness," the French say. "It just calms the nerves."
And that was how it seemed to be. The people who were rich and famous weren't worrying about the rent, for instance, but they still had all the usual potpourri of jealousies, pains, setbacks, losses, etc. that seem to go with being human.
Though circumstances of one kind or another can "calm the nerves," they can't make us fundamentally happy, because that fundamentally comes from inside, regardless of circumstances.
All other forms of happiness are extremely fragile, because they depend on situations which, by their very nature, are subject to change.
But where does that inner sense of well-being come from? In my opinion, from surrender.
When we turn our life over, when we surrender, the burden of running our life is immediately lifted, and underneath that burden is freedom, lightness, light.
The funny part is, of course, that we were never running our life in the first place. It was always being run by Source, because there is nothing but Source; it is doing everything, and always has been.
When we surrender, when we deeply surrender to life and how it wants to go, then it goes however it will. It doesn't mean we don't have preferences, or the illusion of making "choices." It's just that we're holding on very lightly; we're not insisting that life has to go in some particular direction.
And in that surrender, if it's genuine, gratitude inevitably arises. When we slow down enough to surrender, to turn our lives over to that which is already running it, gratitude just for being here arises. Gratitude for everything being just as it is arises.
Just looking at the hands of an animal or the hands of our loved one, or the "hands" that float across the sky is more than enough, as the river flows and as we go about doing whatever it is we do.
—jim sloman, for 8/24/01
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