ADDICTED TO THIS SELF-CREATED SPECTACLE

 
Truly happy people are rare in spite of the smiles which are usually the brave front for varying degrees of internal misery. Yet everywhere and in every walk of life, man is longing for happiness and searching desperately for some means of breaking out of the trap which his life has become.

It is not his fault if he assumes that the solution to his deep dissatisfaction lies in a sensual life, or in achievement in business or the social world, or in a life of exciting experiences. Neither is it his fault if life is not usually long enough to teach him factually that he would find even more profound disillusionment if these goals were to be fulfilled to the hilt.

If he would suspect that his ideas of achieving a successful and happy life were wrong, and that he must try some new way of living, then the stalemate might be broken. A new line in the divine picture is sketched only when some individual takes life forcefully in his hands, breaks up the old patterns and insists on creating something new by his own inner vision.

Progress in the inner life of the individual is accomplished by such a breaking with the old and venturing forth into new ways. True happiness can come only to one who will find the courage to strike free of the attachments which he has formed throughout a sterile lifetime.

If he will not do this, then he is shackled endlessly to the treadmill of oppressive action in which happiness is so transient that it has almost disappeared the moment it is experienced. After it has disappeared, there is left only the persistent, bottomless vacuity of mind which strangles life, regardless of repeated efforts to fill it with endless experiences.

Such suffering comes from blunt ignorance or persistent attachment to illusion. The average person plays with illusion as children play with toys. It is not easy for little children to give up their toys, and it is equally difficult for adults to relinquish the mental and emotional toys to which they have become habituated.

The mind of the individual is very old, and through the ages it has become deeply engrossed in playing with illusion. It has become addicted to this self-created spectacle, and has had no thought other than to go on watching with fascination through cycles and cycles of creation.