Finding inner joy

There’s always a reason to be happy. Somebody says, “I love you,” and that makes you feel happy. You win the lottery and make a million dollars; that makes you feel happy. This kind of happiness is an expression of object-referral: You’re happy because of this; you’re happy because of that, but inner joy is independent of the situation, circumstances, people, or things. Just the mere fact of being alive to experience the beauty of this world, to be experientially alive in the miracle of life itself is your happiness. Everything in life is transient and changing because that is the nature of our world. But when you are self-referred, you enjoy the change instead of resisting it. People have asked me, “What about situations that are difficult to accept? If something bad is happening in my life, how can I be happy instead of negative? Every expression of the energy in its body is different. Nothing has really died; it has only transformed. The transformation after death is not a movement to some other place or time it is just a change in the quality of attention in consciousness. It is a state of vibrational quality of our awareness. The world that we are experiencing with earth, sky, plants and people, sun and moon, is a particular expression of consciousness at one particular frequency. Heavens and hells and purgatories, the earth and stars and galaxy, the elements and myriad life forms, are not locations in space-time; they are the projections of states of consciousness. These states of consciousness are vibratory, expressions of the infinite consciousness, in which the cosmos moves and has its existence. Infinite frequencies of consciousness coexist, so there is a simultaneous presence of many planes of existence. If we listen to a symphony with a one hundred piece orchestra, all of the instruments are vibrating at different frequencies, and yet the presence of one does not displace any of the others. If our ears could hear only one frequency, we would miss out on the rest of the symphony and perhaps hear only one instrument out of the hundred. Ninety-nine percent of the music would be unavailable to us because we were not tuned in to the other frequencies.
by -Deepak Chopra
courtesy: timesofindia