When someone speaks of having a happy life, what does that look like? Are you currently happy right now? What are some perspectives of what it means to be happy?
I come from a good lineage.
I am intelligent.
I am physically healthy.
I have good looks.
I have wealth.
I have an invaluable family.
I have good friends.
I have a meaningful job.
I have interests or activities that I am passionate about.
It may be nothing special, but I appreciate each day as I live it.
I feel the joy of being alive.
There may be other responses, but these are often people's standards for happiness. Some people may not be satisfied until they reach several of these goals; others may be satisfied with just one. Everyone seeks to find happiness; everyone has the desire to become happy. And it is commonly understood that everyone has his or her own standards for happiness.
However, it is my belief that hardly anyone knows what true happiness is. Everyone comes into life because they want to become happy. Yet they all die without ever finding it.
I wanted to be happy but I was not able to succeed.
What do I need to do in order to find happiness?
What do I need to attain in order to become happy?
In order to find the answers to questions that lie in their hearts, people choose the environment most suited for them to learn in, which they are born into. And just as they had planned for themselves, once born, they choose what they believe will be their criteria for attaining happiness. At times, they may purposely provide themselves an environment that completely lacks in what they believe is required to become happy. This is all done in order to confirm that their criteria for happiness was not true after all.
In this way, people perform, or live their lives, in the environment and condition they themselves set. They use their physical form to express thoughts and feelings that they carry inside their hearts.
For example, perhaps you can think of life as theater. In the theater of life, people write their own plays for themselves to enact. They are not only the actors for their play, but the audience as well. In this sense, perhaps you can look at your life as a self-written, self-performed play that you are also watching?
What is the theme of your self-produced and performed play? The theme of your play is happiness and joy. That theme is always the same. Happiness and joy are the constant themes. The reason we change the stage setting but continue to keep the same theme is because we are never able to accomplish our theme. As actors who never succeed in receiving applause from our audience, we work hard, repeating numerous rehearsals before reappearing on stage. In these plays, you may at one time be born wealthy but end up completely ruined, or at another time, be born beautiful, having such pride in your beauty, but eventually destroy yourself with the beauty, and still another time, you may be someone different. There are varying situations, and with each, there are tears and laughter.
Seeing life in this way, can you think of your current life as one of these numerous scenes? And since it is a play, do you think that you should just enjoy it and continue on with it? You should just enjoy your role and do your best in it until it ends? Unfortunately, no matter how hard you work and enjoy performing your role, there will never be a final curtain call until you get the message of truth that is being communicated to you through this play.
With every play, the curtain opens entrusting you to deliver the message to yourself. And, of course, you are the main character until the curtains close. An actor who can continue to attempt to send the message to the audience is fortunate to have such opportunities. No matter how bad the actor is the audience tries its best to support the actor who is making their best effort.
Unfortunately, the supportive cheers do not reach the actor so easily. The actor always falls so deeply into their character that they lose sight of everything else in trying to perform their role well. Even when they are told, "You will be playing this role this time, please remember to receive the message that I will be sending you," once the character is decided, the stage set, and the costume put on, one falls right into character for their role in the play.
I make this analogy of comparing life to a play, but even at this very moment, there are people throughout this world whose lives are coming to curtain call, yet feel the challenges of not having reached their life's theme. I believe that a happy life means being able to accurately receive one's own message that one sends to oneself. This message does not differ between individuals. This message is the same for everyone.
It is a challenge, first in itself, just to simply come face-to-face with this message. Then, even if you were to eventually hear your message, there will still lay the challenge of whether you will correctly understand and accept it. However, even these challenging routes have become something of our past. We have come to the point where we have performed in our self-produced plays for so long, having gone through numerous curtain openings and closings, that we have finally gotten to a point where there are only a few trials left.
In fact, I am certain that the time of our final curtain call is very near. I came to realize that I am not really the "actor." I realized that my life was only a role that I was acting in. Once a person realizes this about their life, they will no longer be stuck in always turning their thoughts to their role. They will probably become less passionate about developing their character any more than necessary. They will probably live their role very simply while continuing to receive their message correctly.
I believe that having a joyful and happy life is to find the joy of getting to know oneself in this way through the character you have been given to play. And the greatest achievement for an actor is to share their accomplishment and joy with the one and only audience member, themselves. I am sure that you will end up feeling so grateful to have your role that you will feel like exclaiming: "Thank you, thank you!" It may be such great joy that you might unexpectedly shout: "Cheers to a life of acting!"
Let's set up the steps for us to be able to accurately receive messages from ourselves through our self-produced play, the key to a joyful and happy life.
I would like to introduce the steps to achieve this key. I am certain that if you follow the steps correctly, you will be able to see that life is a self-produced performance, and that through it, you can reach your true life, true joy, and true happiness. It is your true Self that will act as your road map.