#10 The Happiness Switch

Um, I'd rather stick to maybe, like, spiritual stuff.

Or is it philosophical or is it spiritual?

Spiritual.

Is it spiritual or is it philosophical?

And that is the topic of non-dualism.

My friends!

Non-dualism.

Oh boy! This morning I woke up really early again.

I woke up at 5 in the morning! 5 a.m.

God, that was too early.

And, um, as I often do,

I put a little Rupert Spira in my ear.

And that's what I did this morning, 5 a.m.

I stuck my earbud in and turned on some Rupert Spira,

which is one of my favorite non-dualist speakers as of late.

As of late, him and Ellen Watts are what I've been imbibing.

They're the speakers I've been imbibing of late.

So, little Rupert Spira this morning, 5 a.m., couldn't sleep.

Popped him in my ear, and he was talking about another...

It was good. It was good.

So, what he was talking about is how you can't derive happiness from others.

You cannot derive happiness from an object, or especially from a relationship.

And you need to separate your derivation of happiness from objects, from relationships,

because they cannot provide happiness for you.

And then the immediate question after hearing that is,

How do you get happiness? How does happiness come to you?

See, I'm just learning here.

My understanding is that happiness comes from within.

Or more accurately, happiness is always there.

It's always there behind the clouds of your mind, the clouds of your thoughts.

And it's just there available to you to experience at any time.

And it is just your own pathologies, your own mental pathologies,

that are preventing you from achieving it or from experiencing it.

But it's there for you all the time.

And he has a nice, beautiful metaphor for this.

I will not express it as beautifully as he does, but

he likens our thoughts to clouds in the sky.

And the blue sky behind the clouds is the happiness that exists in you at all times,

that exists, that is fundamental to consciousness itself.

So the blue sky is there for you at any moment.

And what most people experience is akin to a clearing in the clouds.

So every once in a while, the clouds will reveal the blue sky behind them.

And then the clouds will cover that spot,

and you'll go back to being depressed or anxious or whatever,

and the happiness will dissipate.

But I reckon it is within all of our control

to just do away with the clouds altogether.

Yeah, and one should not resist their circumstances.

And I'm very careful about the language I use here

and understand that I will use inappropriate language in describing these things.

Because there's another non-dual thinker that says that there is no should.

Should, perhaps, is a word that you shouldn't even use when talking about this stuff.

But I got off track here. What was I saying?

Right, so I said one should not resist their circumstances.

And the suffering that people endure or that they're often afflicted by

is a result of resisting their circumstances.

You know, whatever's going on in your life, whatever challenges you're facing,

the suffering is often in your own mind.

I'm not talking about physical suffering. I'm just talking about, yeah, suffering.

Maybe it's physical suffering.

Because he also says that no experience is...

I forgot what he said exactly.

But no experience cannot be endured, I reckon. Something like that.

Basically, there's no excuse for suffering, no matter how you spin it, because the suffering

comes from resisting your circumstances, rather than accepting them for what they are, and

just experiencing the happiness that is fundamental to consciousness itself.

It's within all of our capabilities to just brush the clouds aside and experience it.

And that's a quite useful philosophy.

I find it to be quite useful.

For mental health purposes, it's a useful philosophy, I think, and it makes sense.

It really does make sense.

And it's almost provable, because as I talked about, I think, in the last episode, people

pursue extreme experiences, like thrill rides and prostitutes, drugs.

People pursue those experiences to experience, just to experience the clearing of the clouds.

So it's there.

That's proof that it is there.

It's there for you to experience.

But you don't need outside forces.

You don't need to use such extreme measures to experience happiness, because it's there.

It's there already.

You don't need to use extreme measures to experience it.