Today I was watching the news. Actually I shouldn't say that, I was reading the news. I found a not very interesting article about a famous person from 30 or 40 years ago. I hadn't heard or read anything about that person for such a long time that I started to read the article out of curiosity. This person was famous and evidently rather wealthy.
The article is about him getting married to a woman as young as one of his daughters. There were a number of pictures with the article I scanned about four lines and had enough. But I wanted to look at the pictures because that was very easy. I saw pictures of this guy in very nice situations. He was wearing fancy clothes. He was in a party situation playing drums. He was laughing and smiling. He had his young fiance smiling and holding on to him. There were swimming pools and lavish environments. Yet my first thought was it was all empty. I wasn't looking down at him or on him. He probably felt quite happy, after all one doesn't smile like he was smiling if one is unhappy.
But I looked at those environments and I thought that probably wouldn't make me happy. Rather, I thought that would make me feel like I'm supposed to be happy, which is quite a different thing. To some extent we have been conditioned to believe that this or that should make us happy. As I lower my attachments, some of these conditioned thoughts and feelings are leaving me.
On the other hand, I'm feeling happier than I have for quite some time. It's a kind of a low-key deep steering happiness that's not connected to anything in my environment. It's a result of those feelings that I thought the rich, luxurious and lavish environment wouldn't make me happy. I'm starting to feel a kind of happiness from inside that is not connected to my environment.
The only way I know how to achieve this is by dropping my attachments. And the only way I know how to drop my attachments is through the sleeping breath. Remembering all my experiences and breathing away the attachments is having a transformative effect on my life. I think I wrote in another blog somewhere that the more attached you are the less connected you are. The less attached you are the more connected you are.
I can't see what it is that I feel connected to, but it sure increases my feeling of well-being. I'm beginning to understand the meaning of a shallow life. And I'm beginning to understand the mystery of a deep life. There's nothing you can look at in my life that can indicate the depth or the source of my happiness. It's invisible.