People gamble on their state lotteries, they gamble on casino slot machines, they gamble on football games. Rarely, do you hear someone gamble on happiness. And yet, every day most people actually do gamble on their own happiness. Allow me to explain.
Most people derive happiness on a daily basis based on what happens to them that day. If they get a massage, they’ll be happy. If they get a new client or a raise at work they’ll be happy. If their child or grandchild gets a prize they’ll be happy. On the other hand, if they lose at tennis they’ll be unhappy. If they lose a client or a possible promotion at work they’ll be unhappy. If their child or grandchild gets sick they’ll be unhappy. Another way of saying this is that their happiness is a function of what happens to them and to those they care about. In other words, it’s outer-dependent and much of the time out of their control. Hence, the expression that I’m using, “gambling on their happiness”. Like a roulette wheel, if it shows up on red they lose, and if it shows up on black they win. It’s a tough way to live life.
The good news is that there’s a whole other kind of happiness that’s inner-dependent. And the good news on top of this is that it’s possible to A) connect to that happiness daily B) to live from that state, as well. Outer-dependent happiness comes about through the senses and your organs of action, such as your arms and legs and the rest of your body. Inner-dependent happiness doesn’t involve any of them; in fact, it comes about when they are completely at rest. The yogis of India have a name for this inner happiness - they call it Ananda, a Sanskrit word for bliss. And Ananda exists in abundance - it’s infinite in fact - at the deepest level of your mind, at the junction point between your individuality and your universality.
Meditation is the primary path to this deep concentration of happiness; the yogis of India have a name, as well, for the brief experience of this higher Self within you; they call it Samadhi. Samadhi translates from the Sanskrit as “steady mind”. In other words, when the mind is steadiest, when it comes to rest and your conscious mind becomes consciousness, no longer aware of any thing in par ticular but awake within itself, Samadhi is achieved. Even the word “achieved” is a misnomer, because Samadhi isn’t something you can achieve like writing a book, cooking a meal, or even walking to the mailbox. It’s a state of Being, beyond the doing of your everyday actions, beyond the perceptions of your five senses, and beyond the thoughts of your thinking mind. It’s a fourth state of consciousness, as distinct from waking, dreaming, and sleeping as each of them is from each other.
This is the knowledge elucidated by the yogis, and I can vouch for it from my own personal experience of having meditated since the age of 17, and taught Transcendental Meditation since three years after that until 2010, when I began teaching Higher Self Healing Meditation.
A fleeting experience of Samadhi that lasts for maybe a second or two or a minute or more brings a concentrated download of happiness into your mind. So when you come out of meditation your mind is infused with this happy state, making it so much easier to derive happiness out of the simplest things that you may see or do immediately afterwards. In an hour or so, almost all of that happiness fades out of consciousness; that’s not a bad thing, per se, it’s just the way of things. A little of it, however, still remains.
Regular exposure to the experience of Being within enables more and more of this precious bliss to habituate itself into the nature of your mind. Over the course of years of such exposure, the individual mind becomes saturated with that happiness; in fact, the mind comes to live in a state of happiness. The yogis of India have a name for this as well: Moksha, or liberation. In English, we call this Self- Realization, when you have come to identify yourself as both an individual being, who the world knows you as, and one with the Universal Being. This state of Enlightenment enables you to bring a truckload of happiness with you wherever you go and to whatever you do. This makes the activity of outer-dependent happiness, of course, much easier to achieve. In the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz everyone wore green glasses, so that everything appeared to be green. When you wear happiness glasses, it’s awfully hard not to see happiness. Your gambling on happiness has ended.