Book Title: Journey to Enlightenment Part 01
Author(s): Chitrabhanu, Chetana Catherine Florida, Nirmala Hanke, Raksha Penni Helsene
Publisher: Create Space
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September 1993: Happiness is Knowing Who You Are
Greetings and Blessings of Love and Happiness to everyone.
“I just want to be happy..." I have heard this statement many, many times during the course of my life and in the past I have also said it many, many times. Happiness is thought of as some thing” that is given to you just by wanting it. Waiting around for it to happen will be futile if you do not take the responsibility of making it happen. Often I have shared with others that it is their” responsibility to make happiness happen. There has been a varied and mixed response to this, from anger to wondering why it can't just happen; from frustration because of thinking it will never happen to questioning “How do I go about making myself happy?"
The people who are really angry about hearing that it is their responsibility, I leave alone until they are ready to take, first of all, responsibility for their own anger and work towards releasing it. Because before you can have the positive action of happiness in your life, you must be willing to give up, release, let go of your own anger, to have room for happiness to enter. A person, however, can be angry and frustrated but also open to finding out "how to" make happiness happen. These people I can work with by sharing the steps I have taken towards greater and greater happiness.
Before you can be happy, you must know who you are. Many people want to be happy but do not know who they are. When we want to make someone happy", with a birthday gift for example, we find what he or she want by who they are experiencing themselves to be. So if they are identifying themselves with music in this lifetime, then we buy them something to do with music, we give them at that time, a gift that makes them happy. So you need to find out who you really are. You can only find out who you really are when you stop searching outside of yourself and go within. When you go within yourself, you go through your conscious state of mind, your subconscious mind, and your unconscious mind to Divine Consciousness, to find out whom you really are. And then happiness is the experience of knowing who you are.
As the fall time of the year is the time of harvesting in the literal sense, when the farmer harvest what has been planted, so it becomes a time symbolically speaking of looking at what is happening in our lives. It's a time when we take stock of our lives to see what is or isn't there. We begin to think about what we want to plant for the future. The "New Year” then comes bringing us new hope, new life, and new beginnings. Let the “New Year” be blessed with your decision and commitment to fin out who you really are in order to have happiness!!
Namaste,
Chetana
24 - Journey to Enlightenment