Inner Out

Waiting for a Sign: Happiness and Fear Every death is a joyful birth into a higher dimension of being. —James Van Praagh I knew what I needed to do but was petrified to do it. I knew enough about what I had read to know working on your psyche or inner self was very difficult and painful. Hence, most people don’t try too hard to delve in and confront it. The period of time when you search for your inner being can be referred to as the dark night of the soul. It sounds ominous and creepy. The ego is on constant guard to protect you from the real you or your authentic self and essence. The ego is well aware of how powerful the soul is and therefore has an invested interest in seeing that all of its earthly needs get met. It’s directly correlated to the primal urge to survive. The soul is not fed by the ego or its desire for rank and judgment. When one begins to ascend, the ego becomes terrified of annihilation or extinction, as it instinctively knows that a conscious being that is fully aware of who s/he is rarely lives from the ego. The ego lies. Now, if you’re like me, you’re thinking, How in the world am I going to get rid of my ego? It’s firmly in place, and it’s what I always relied on to get me through the tough times when I felt attacked or threatened. Especially in my law enforcement career, my ego served me enormously. The ego’s job is to protect a person from attack. It is tied directly into living your physical existence by successfully navigating the earth world and keeping you from literal death. It’s the primal you. It’s that section of the person that exists exclusively when you’re on earth having a human experience. Therefore, no one ought to get rid of the ego. You can’t. It serves an essential purpose throughout life. However, I’ve learned that in order to live a more spiritual and thus conscious life, I must live from my heart and not so much my mind, which is so strongly connected to the ego. This section of the book is about my fear of getting to know myself completely and the doubt that I would be able to successfully do it. I had started believing in a greater force than myself when I quit drinking about a decade prior, but I hadn’t really delved any deeper than that. What was I hiding from myself? We lie to ourselves the very best. As soon as I retired from my law enforcement career, I began to search for answers to the truth of why we are here. Why am I here, specifically? What is this thing called life all about? What is my specific purpose? Where is happiness? How do you find it? When I was working, I always said I couldn’t wait to retire because I just knew that then I would be happy. I have done that projection of future happiness all throughout my life, always looking to the next best future idea, condition, event, benchmark, situation, circumstance, or anything other than where I currently was in each of those moments. I had it all backwards. “I’ll be happy when …” instead of “I’m happy now because of …” It went a little like this: I’ll be happy once I get into middle school because primary school is for babies. I got to middle school. Then it was I’ll be happy when I get to high school. High school came and went … still searching. Then I said I’d be happy once I graduated college (and have been wishing to go back ever since), but with graduating came the daunting realization, I now must become gainfully employed in order to support myself for the rest of my life. That was a reality check. The next big event would surely be the answer: getting married, having a baby, having another baby, wishing them the ability to sit up, crawl, walk, and then back to infancy again, getting divorced, getting promoted at work, again and again and again, finally being recognized for the honesty and integrity I brought to a career that is typically dominated by ego-driven men, retirement, then grandchildren. It’s always just one more event away—then happiness will no longer elude. Still, not a lot of happy in my life! Ugh! Obviously, future projection of happiness does not work and is not the answer to happiness. I could go on and on and on about the next “thing” that was coming that was surely going to be “it.” All of it brought periods of happiness, fleeting moments of bliss, but it never stayed around for very long. I’m not even convinced that happiness works like that, a final destination. Rather, I believe happiness comes in little pieces, periodically peppering the mundane. It’s that ever-elusive emotion that keeps us striving for more of it. People try too hard to be happy. Happiness rests in the present now moment. We put so much emphasis on and pressure to attain it that when it shows up during a nice early morning walk at dawn, we often don’t even recognize it because we’ve pumped up our expectations so high it eludes us in the moment it appears. Happiness is not a state of being but more of an experience or collection of experiences. We have many experiences of happiness throughout our lives. Maybe we need to start defining happiness as fleeting moments rather than a vague state of constant consciousness as a successful benchmark of attainment. I’m sure many more people would realize they are already truly happy and have been all along.