Awareness of pleasure, happiness beyond...

The pleasure of food

Pleasure lies in consuming food when we are hungry. Wonderful!

Some of us get so enthralled by this pleasure, that we keep eating.

We accumulate fat, get overweight, obese and make ourselves feel not comfortable. We may even get sick and die early. The pleasure that lies in food is not unique to humans:

the fly in the sky, the fish in the sea, the birds in the trees, the chicken, the cow; all of them find pleasure in eating.

Other pleasures that help sustain life
There are other pleasures that are related to sustaining life too. They are wonderful too.

It is good to enjoy them at appropriate times, but if we make them a purpose by itself or get too excited about such pleasures, we may overindulge, which invariably makes us feel not comfortable and they may make us sick and even cause us to die prematurely.

Awareness

We are human. And as humans, we were gifted with pleasures and sources of happiness beyond those that are needed to sustain life. The key to experiencing the pleasures and happiness beyond those we share with the animal kingdom lies in AWARENESS.

Beauty

One such pleasure is beauty. We need to be aware of the beauty that is all around us, in order to experience fully its pleasure

My garden has thousands of flowers. Tens of them, I planted but hundreds, literally hundreds have grown spontaneously, in the wild. The very small flowers, half-hidden in the grass, the flowers on the clover, on the weeds, on the trees, on the shrubs, each of them displaying their own little bit of exquisite beauty.

And yet there are days, when I dash from my door to my gate, without paying any attention, without any awareness that there is so much beauty along my way for all of us to see.

Every morning, a chorus birds sings beautiful songs, but all too often we are too much in a rush, too busy with our small tasks, to stop and listen, to really become AWARE of it and enjoy the pleasure that lies in listening to these beautiful sounds.

Just this morning, I made a small walk on the beach and the sky was so amazing. Sun rays radiated over very dark background clouds and made the sea below them, white. It looked like a painting where they display an apparition of God.

Surely the beauty of nature, the beauty for our eyes, the beauty for our ears are a source of pleasure and happiness. Somehow, we have to make time for it, look for it, look at it, listen for it, listen to it, in order to consciously enjoy the true beauty. We need to be aware! We can consciously make time for beauty and increase our level of happiness instantly by enjoying the beauty all around us.

Beauty is only one of the pleasures beyond animal experience. Another one is…

Peace.

If we consciously experience the peace that we have, the peace at night, just before we go to sleep or the fabulous peace in the morning, just after waking up,… During these minutes or even hours just before or after sleep, do we consciously enjoy the peace that is within them? Right now even, it is quiet in my room and the rain and winds of the monsoon season are the only sounds I hear. I try to relax my body, to quiet my mind and to focus on the silence, on the rain. I close my eyes and experience peace, which is a joy to our soul, a pleasure to our body and bliss for our hearts.

Sometimes we pray for peace and expect it to come from someplace far away, to descend on us from heaven or from the skies. But peace is most of the time all around us. All we need to do is make it a bit silent within become aware and consciously experience and enjoy the peace.

Love

And then there is love, a truly big one, perhaps the most misunderstood source of happiness.  When I pray for love, I get sometimes the same feeling as when praying for peace. We expect it to come from outside, from somewhere far away, but if we truly look inside of our own heart, there are tons of love sitting right there. 

There are two kinds of love: the love we get (like friendship) and the love we give (like friendliness). We crave for true friendship, we crave to get love and appreciation, but it is not in our hands, not under our control. That is indeed depending on others, whether or not we get love and friendship.

But the other love, the love we can give, the friendliness, is really within our control. When we were born our heart was filled with love and we started to smile at our parents and give away our loving feelings. And what did we get back? Currents, torrential currents of mother’s love and father’s love. Actually, all the love and friendliness that was planted in our hearts at birth, is still in our hearts. It sits there and the more we give it away, the faster it gets replenished. It is as if there is a source, a well, filling our heart with love, as soon as we give a bit away. There is so much friendliness in our hearts. We give it away and poof, it is replenished by new and fresh friendliness. 

If we become AWARE of this huge reserve, this giant heap of love that sits in our heart and soul, and we start to give it away consciously, it is such a big source of peace of mind and happiness. Maybe the biggest source of happiness and joy that we can ever experience. Somehow we were programmed by our Creator or by the universe to enjoy this very special human source of true happiness. It gives us the greatest possible level of satisfaction and feeling good whenever we truly give away the love that sits in our heart, whenever we manage to genuinely help some of those around us, whenever we manage to make a positive difference and create a smile on the face of a human being. Love is here, it is here now and it is always easy to find, as long as we look for it where it sits: inside. 

While beauty and peace are joys we can experience passively, since they are like real presents, like birthday gifts, given to us by the universe or God, love is special in a way that it was planted in our heart and only if we give it away, we will experience the great human joy connected to it. And the love we tend to pray for most, the one we get, the friendship will flow like a natural consequence to us in great quantities. And even if it doesn’t, the joy of sharing the love in our hearts with others is always worth it by itself. I have personally experienced multiple times the great paradox: “it is in giving that we receive”. The most striking one when I visited my family at home in Europe, while I was working in Asia. (click here to see more about that story :) )

Creativity, growth, devotion, self-expression

I think love Is like a bridge between beauty and peace that we can enjoy passively on one bank of the river, and the other joys that needs our action, on the other bank. They include creativity, the joy of creating beauty and actively maintaining or even creating peaceful situations for our loved ones. They include also growth, personal growth, emotional growth, spiritual growth that we tend to obtain through sincere (prayerful) reflection about the challenges in our lives and ultimately the wisdom that comes from them and then of course the sharing of the wisdom in again creatively expressing ourselves. Self-expression and living a life of purpose are among the greatest sources of joy and happiness.

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If you are in need of something more than an inspiring quote but do not have time to read books or long pieces, the solution may be here: I have written a few short essays on good things. Please click here if you want to read them

If you feel OK with quotes alone, I have also a place where I keep some original inspirational quotes
https://quotesfromhans.blogspot.com/

Are your eyes hungry for some nice pictures of skies or/and flowers, I can recommend:
 https://hansvro.wixsite.com/mysite-1/skies-seen-by-hans 
or/and
 https://hansvro.wixsite.com/flowersbyhans