kentonwhitman.com

This is it! After extensive research, I’ve finally discovered just what it is everyone is looking for!

Happily ever after.

Don’t you think that’s the answer? Take a look at your actions for a moment, and the truth will come clear.

We try, all our lives, to acquire more money. To nurture good relationships. To purchase a nice home and a fancy car. To become more healthy.

We don’t want to work all our lives. We don’t want to work on our relationships all our lives. We don’t want to do repairs to our house or have to struggle to get healthy all our lives.

We want ‘happily ever after’.

The Myth

Somewhere, inside us, lives the myth that if we work hard enough, everything will become good. If we eat well enough and exercise enough, we will reach the state called ‘healthy’. If we work hard enough, we’ll reach the state called ‘financially stable’. If we put enough effort into our relationships, we’ll have ‘true love’, and a ‘stable marriage’, and ‘good, loyal friends’.

In other words, we seem to be putting enormous effort toward reaching ‘Happily Ever After’. Why else would we work so hard, unless we felt that at some point in the distant future, we’ll get to rest on the fruits of our labors?

In a small way, we do this every week. We labor all week, waiting for the weekend when we can enjoy the rest and relaxation we’ve earned. But just when we start to enjoy the weekend, it’s over, and we’re back to the labor!

In the same way, we know that even if we have billions of dollars, our wealth can be lost. Even if we eat perfectly and exercise every day, our body will deteriorate. Even if we get the best counseling in the world and do relationship exercises every day, someone’s going to get in a bad mood and then everything will fall to heck.

We work our whole lives trying to get to a mystical state of enjoyment, and then we die. Plop.

Happily Ever Now

So what do we do? Maybe, instead of trying to get to ‘Happily Ever After’, we should see if we can find ‘Happily Ever Now’.

After all, ‘Happily Ever After’ is well-named. We’re only going to be happy after we get all the things we need to have a peaceful, relaxed, enjoyable life.

‘Happily Ever Now’ invites us to see how amazing this very moment is.

Of course, we can’t do this by trying to force ourselves to enjoy this moment. In this moment, I might be crabby and have a headache and have a pile of work on my desk!

No, we can’t force ourselves to enjoy this moment. Instead, we have to see the moment the way it really is, and that takes a special sort of awareness. That’s what non-dualism is all about – seeing the moment the way it really is. When we don’t attach our usual symbols to the moment, it becomes pretty magical. Suddenly I see that I’m just sitting at my desk, reading this. The pile of work isn’t something I’m doing right now, and I’m not really crabby when I’m reading – only when someone comes into the room. Even my headache isn’t really there when I’m reading – just when I break out of the reading and notice it. Unless it’s a really bad headache.

The point is that what we usually think of as Now is really just us sitting and thinking about all the ramifications of our past and future actions. Our worries and concerns and hopes. We’re stuck in the ‘happily ever after’ mindset, which teaches us that enough effort will someday pay off.

If we really pay attention to Now, we’ll find that there’s very little going on in any given moment. Our life slows down, and we discover that almost no effort is necessary to deal with the Now moment.

Wasted Energy

In the past, we thought we had to think and worry about things in order to get anything done. But Now, we see that all that worry-effort and thinking-effort just takes energy away from our ability to deal with the Now.

‘Happily Ever After’ teaches us that we need to put forth tremendous effort in every moment in order to attain some vague ‘happiness’ in our future. At the end of the day, we’re exhausted from the stress, and probably grumpy as well! And 95% of our energy was applied to things that weren’t even going on – just things we were imagining. We missed almost every moment of the day because we were worrying about other moments! And because we spent most of our energy on our imaginings and worries, and we didn’t really apply much energy toward today’s actual moments, we’re going to be worrying about today’s moments again tomorrow! It’s an endless cycle of effort.

‘Happily Ever Now’ teaches us that very little is going on right Now. In the midst of my headache and looking at all the papers piled on my desk, I suddenly realize that I’m just sitting here, and that’s all. I can pick up a piece of paper from the pile and work on it, and then I’ll be doing that. I’m really only ever doing one thing at a time. Since I’m not spending 95% of my energy in worry and stress, I can apply 100% of my energy to the task at hand, and tasks tend to be much simpler when we actually do them instead of fretting over them.

Believe it or not, you’re a miraculously competent person. In fact, you can deal perfectly with any given moment life will ever present to you. The only time you’ll ‘fail’ is when you leave the present moment and begin imagining all the consequences and ramifications of what’s going on. Then your energies will scatter, and life will become incredibly confusing.

So if you’re feeling stressed or out-of-sorts, take a moment to see if you’re living for ‘Happily Ever After’. Just taking the time to realize it can often help you slip comfortably into ‘Happily Ever Now‘.