About happiness
What is necessary to be happy?
"The sage looks on what is deemed necessary therefore is not at war in himself.
The mass of men deem what is unnecessary to be necessary
and therefore they are often at war in themselves.
Necessary is a solid ground under your feet."
Tswang Tse
The Earth is a solid and necessary ground under our feet.
Taoists have always followed what is natural.
Tswang Tse reminds us to stay 'rooted in the Earth'.
We need a solid ground otherwise our life-tree will not grow well.
Tai Chi Chuan:
"Stay rooted in the Earth".
"Reach up as high as you can to see the interconnectedness of all things".
Love is truly necessary.
(Harmony is truly necessary).
'Love' is perhaps the closest equivalent for the Taoistic term 'Harmony'.
Love is the interconnection process of all things.
(I-Kuan Tao: Unifying and nurturing love).
To live in love is to live in life. To live in life is to live in love.
(To live in harmony is to live in life. To live in life is to live in harmony).
Next necessity?
It's necessary to be happy with the person we really are.
It's so lonely when we don't even know ourselves
In other words:
It' s necessary 'to love ourselves', or 'to live in harmony with ourselves'.
Loneliness creates many illusions.
Loneliness creates many unnecessary conflicts.
Loneliness simply means to see our 'self' as separate from other 'selves'.
To see our self as something very special (un cas a part).
Happiness means to see our 'self' as not separate from other 'selves'.
Do you like a Taoistic Koan?
"In order to stop ourselves from seeing ourselves as separate from others,
we must see ourselves as separate from others".
If you are hurting and unhappy, a Taoistic advice will help you:
Why are some people happy and others not?
Read to learn more:
We all want to be happy
even when volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.
Taoists believe that nobody is perfect happy.
In Taoism happiness is the norm, unhappiness means sick chi.
Unhappiness can be a key to happiness.
Well then:
Be nobody.
Be unimportant.
All the world says I am important.
I am separate from all the world.
I am important because I am separate,
where I the same I could never be important.
Yet here are three treasures; the first is compassion,
the second is restraint,
the third is unimportance.
Lao Tse.
All great thinkers have left the definition of happiness in the vague
so that each of us could define our own happiness in our own terms.
Lao Tse thought that man would reach a relative state of happiness
by living in accordance with the Way of nature.
When man contradicts this Way, the consequence is suffering and pain
We are the world.
Every time a man changes his mind he changes himself
Every time a man changes himself he changes the world.
We are the world.
Happiness starts with our state of mind.
A man changes the world every time he changes his mind
In a Taoistic sense happiness is a skill
that can be developed not an emotion.
Happiness is not a situation we arrive at but a manner of travelling.
Fame is food that dead men eat.
At the end we all end up with nothing (Chinese proverb).
There is a Chinese tale about a man who loved tea so much that he decided to live in a tea pot...
The deeper meaning is to do what you enjoy in life.
What about feelings?
Our feelings -negative or positive- follow us. They manipulate us.
They grow and transform. They guide us trough life.
There is a law of relativity that states that if we apply a force to
an object it will continue until it meets an equal or an opposite.
This is how chi(energy)works. This is how feelings -negative or positive- work.
Our feelings are energy(chi).
In a Taoistic sense pleasure is a by-product
of happiness than as an end itself.
Pleasure relies on bigger and bigger demands.
Happiness on smaller and smaller demands.
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves
but it is not possible to find it elsewhere.
We can't feel happiness unless we feel connected
to something greater than ourselves.
All things are one.
Tai Chi Chuan is the art to feel connected
to something greater than ourselves.
A perfect Taoist would say:
"I am not Mister Perfect.
No, I'm not perfect, that means that I must decide to look beyond the imperfections.
I'm absolutely worthless to society, my life has no purpose,
no direction, no aim, no meaning and yet I'm happy.
I'm happy by nature,
because I' ill seldom have the chance to be happy by circumstance.
It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves but it not possible to find it elsewhere. I'm OK.
What am I doing right?"
Taoistic classics: about happiness and harmony