Let’s think back about our childhood. Some people have bad memories about their childhood but most people say that they were much happier when they were kids than they are now.
It sounds natural. As a child with an innocent mind, without an ego as strong as a mature person, you were not as greedy as now and did not have complicated life conditions, such as money and a spouse. Therefore, your life would not have been complicated or agonizing. However, the most important reason is actually your ‘self.’ The self is, in psychological terms, referred to as ego. When you are young, ego is mostly weak. As you grow older, the ego becomes stronger and harder to change. Ego, in other words, can be referred to as selfishness that only knows about the self.
Young children are innocent. Of course, young kids also have stubbornness to some extent but they are not selfish or calculating like adults. There is a saying that as you become an adult, your mind becomes sickened. As the world is extremely tough and everyone lives in the endlessly competitive world where everyone literally competes, our mind does not have any room for thinking about others. Every one of us thinks only for ourselves, never looking back, and therefore, we become trapped within ourselves. In the modern society, it is overflowed with new kinds of mind sicknesses, such as loneliness and depression.
Moreover, people usually believe that the more materials they attain, the happier they become. However, happiness does not dwell in them. For example, someone had the life goal of entering Harvard University. Let’s suppose that this person got into Harvard University. He might be happy for a few years with a sense of accomplishment. However, as he lives out his life, another problem comes along. He then becomes depressed again. Say, someone wanted to buy a Lexus and he did so. He might be happy for a few years but that happiness cannot last forever. As soon as another problem faces him, he again falls into worry and suffers. It is the same when you marry someone you love and have children. In some sense, there can be instant happiness in life but life is also a continuation of worries: just like riding a rollercoaster.
Happiness exists in yourself. Speaking more straightforwardly, happiness is in you but in order to attain that happiness, you need to empty yourself. You have to empty your ego. You have to throw away the human mind you have, that is, selfishness, greed and all kinds of attachments for yourself. When you empty out yourself completely and return to your original nature, our origin, real happiness exists there. Thinking by common sense, if you can become happy by attaining a lot, rich men in the world should be happy by now. However, they are not, are they? There is no end to becoming happy by attaining things. Now is the generation of subtraction; the generation of emptying out yourself has come. All solutions are within yourself. Let’s subtract the self, that is false, and find the real, true happiness that never changes forever. Let us all live joyfully.
