The Smile of the Wise

Things are Dismal?

Two kinds of people smile — fools and the wise. Unfortunately, I am a fool trying to become wise. That’s where it becomes difficult to smile.

So why not remain a fool?

Because the smile of a fool is shallow. I want the smile of the wise, I have been captivated by its depth and profundity. It is a whole different smile. It makes the fool’s smile seem like a drugged stupor.

Everything in the fool’s world annoys me. It shouldn’t be that way. It should inspire me, or at least I should be indifferent to it. And sometimes I come close to that level of vision, but right now I am just thinking about how annoying the fool’s world is.

Why annoying?

Fake.

All the smiles are fake. Everything is so fake, and it just keeps getting faker as time goes by. 400 years ago “fake” meant sitting in a meadow with a lover and looking at the clouds. Today “fake” means hunting prey in a nightclub at 3am. The fake of 400 years ago is so much less stressful and exhausting than the fake of today.

I guess I just miss the fake of my previous lifetimes. I miss going to sleep a little after the Sun went down. I miss eating good food that tasted unique. I miss eating things that people I actually know prepared, not that got mass produced in some awful mechanized factory and shipped in on a boat. I miss knowing the neighbors names. I miss hanging out outside. I miss working with real things instead of electronic blips. I miss hearing musicians play in the center of town, instead of having iTunes randomize my 5,000 mp3s. I miss seeing dramas, unique theater, instead of watching crap — absolute crap — on television.

I mean, the fake world of today is just… dismal. And the most annoying, fakest part of if, is that we think its all the rage.

What to do? Write a blog on a new text editor. Sigh. Eat some dark chocolate. Hope for a better meditation tomorrow morning, because todays sucked.

Nah, there is a better way to handle these blues. I actually realized something important. I realized that its impossible to be happy. And in the next instant I realized the reason… the reason is because we are happiness. While we are looking for happiness we have to ignore that we are happiness. Looking for something around us, we have to be blind to the fact that it is within us. Now, how do we realize that we are happiness? We realize that we are not recipients of happiness, we are fountains of it. When we try to be a source of happiness for others, that is when we feel happy — and all the fakeness of the world (past or present) disappears and the whole world becomes real and we smile the smile of the wise.

That is bhakti-yoga at stage 1: learning to change our perspective from trying to receive happiness to trying to give it.

Hari bol.