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Is it Possible to Be Happy in this World?

John Dorner • Oct 14, 2021

It's said that the difference between pleasure and happiness is that pleasure is momentary and comes from external sources, whereas happiness is long-term, and rises from a deep well inside us, and that well is fed by waters that flow from beyond the human-created world.

We live in a culture that fuels itself on selling ever-changing forms of pleasure to a populace that has forgotten how to be happy. We are promised a pleasure that will momentarily quell the current fear (sometimes by replacing it with a new fear, or with a new rage - yes, rage, which is blame's less nuanced brother, can be a form of addictive pleasure, as we see all around us).

We create pleasures to expel the current fear, and we create ever-new forms of fear that evaporate the current pleasure. So, fear and pleasure are inextricably linked, and they need each other. Both are momentary energies sourced from the external, and both are addictive. An economy that is fueled by addiction to fear and pleasure doesn't actually want the populace to be happy.



The pleasures and fears don't just magically appear; we make them all, we "manifest" them, to use the popular term. On we go, on our self-created merry-go-round of miasma and ennui.

Even in our spiritual seeking, we often lurch between the two: seeking some new spiritual thrill that soon wears off, and underneath, always afraid that we will never truly "connect with spirit." The spiritual marketplace eagerly offers up products and items to keep you bouncing and spinning. But you know in the bones inside your bones that bouncing between fear and pleasure is not your truest life, and that seeking Spirit from fear of cosmic unworthiness or from desire to be thrilled bigly is not going to work.
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One of my teachers is fond of the phrase, "I am in my knowing." This is one of those simple phrases that, if used regularly, can help unbutton the daily costume woven from fear and pleasure. This is ridiculously simple, and the part of you that refuses to exit the addictive culture will scoff at this: sit quietly every morning before you begin your daily grind, and every evening before you go to bed, for 30 days, and work with the phrase, "I am in my knowing." Say it to yourself quietly. Ask yourself what you mean when you say those words. Wrestle with what comes up. See what happens to you.

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