“DD” The Search for Happiness
(The Bhagavad Gita) Those who seek to find the One without ceasing, will find the Lord dwelling in their own hearts.
The vast majority of the world, including me for most of my life, searched for and searches out in the world for happiness. Everyone desires happiness. Everyone looks around for something to add joy to their life. The whole world, save a handful of people at any point in time, try to fix how they feel inside by coveting what someone else has or through buying something externally to alleviate an internal want.
The cold and hard truth for anyone desiring happiness, contentment, lasting joy, satisfaction with existence, or just a baseline of peace present more times than not, must know, is lasting happiness has never, and can never, be found externally, nor will it ever be found from another.
I looked everywhere - under every rock, within every attachment, between every romantic partner, and around every next goal to hopefully find peace within. The best I ever found was a momentary sense of accomplishment or a fleeting sense of contentment based on acquiring someone new or something new. Nothing new externally holds the lasting weight of replacing what feels broken inside. We don’t find God outside of the internal search for the One. We don’t find lasting truth or lasting joy from a new car, new watch, new house, new pair of Jordan’s, or anything we can wear, taste, smell, see, feel, or physically embrace.
The best something new to us externally can do for us internally is prolong the truth of impermanence not being the way to God.
In the program of AA and in the early days of my time there, my sponsor said to me, “Mason, everyone has a God sized hole within their being, and nothing but God can fill it.”
For nine years following the death of my father, I sought out God without ceasing. For twelve years after finding the One experientially for the first time, I found the Lord dwelling in my heart, not out in the world. I spent a total of 21 years in the pursuit of knowing God, over the course of my teens and twenties/thirties, only to realize innately that my search anywhere else but within had not been a waste of time, but 21 years of less-than time leading silently towards truth.
The truth you need to hear is simple: the shame and guilt that arises within, cannot be let go of or quenched through putting more riches from Earth on top of it. The God sized hole everyone has within them can only be filled with seeking the One without ceasing. At the end of the search the gift of seeking without ceasing is not more looking, but finding the Lord dwelling in your heart, ready to fill the hole inside of you where loneliness, despair, guilt and shame, remorse, resentment, anger, hate, and every other lesser aspect of life grows like weeds until the master gardener pulls them up for good.