You are here to be happy

24 Jan You are here to be happy

by don Miguel Ruiz with Janet Mills

You are here to be happy, to live your life, and to express what you are. You were created to perceive the beauty of creation and to live your life in love. But if you cannot find the love inside you, the whole world can love you, and it will not make a difference in you.

Instead of looking to other humans for love, we need to align with our own love, because it’s not the love of other humans that will make us happy. What will make us happy is the love we feel for every human, the love we feel for all creation. When the love comes from somebody else, we can feel it and it’s nice, but when we feel our own love, it is the best thing that can happen to us. We live in heaven; we live in bliss.

Every human is an artist, and our greatest art is life. Humans perceive life and try to make sense of life by expressing what we perceive with words, music, and other expressions of art. We perceive life and then create a story to justify, describe, and explain our perception and emotional reaction.

Everything we believe about ourselves is a story we create that is based in reality, but is just our point of view. Our point of view is based on our experience, on what we know, on what we believe. And what we know and believe is just a program; it is nothing but words, opinions, and ideas we learn from others and from our own life experience.

Humans perceive truth, but the way we justify and explain what we perceive is not truth; it’s a story. I call this story a dream. The human mind mixes perception, imagination, and emotion to create a whole dream. But the story doesn’t end there because every mind of every human mixes together and creates the mind of the planet Earth — the dream of the planet.

The dream of the planet is the dream of all humans together. We can call it society, we can call it a nation, but the result of the creation of the mind, individual and collective, is a dream. The dream can be a pleasant dream that we call heaven, or it can be a nightmare that we call hell. But heaven and hell only exist at the level of the mind.

In human society, the dream of the planet is ruled by lies, and fear is the result. It is a dream where humans judge one another, find one another guilty, and punish one another. Humans use the power of the word to gossip and to hurt one another. Misuse of the word creates emotional poison, and all that poison is in the dream. It goes around the world, and that is what most humans eat: emotional poison.

For thousands of years, people have believed there is a conflict between good and evil in the universe. But this is not true. The real conflict is between truth and what is not truth. The conflict exists in the human mind, not in the rest of nature. Good and evil are the result of that conflict. Believing in truth results in goodness; believing in and defending what is not truth results in evil.

All human suffering is the result of believing in lies. To become aware of this is the first thing we must do. Why? Because this awareness will guide us to truth, and the truth will lead us to love, to happiness. The truth will set us free from all the lies we believe in. But we have to experience the truth to know the truth; we cannot put the truth into words. As soon as we start to talk about the truth, as soon as we put it into words, it is no longer the truth. We can perceive truth, but when we make the story, that story is only true for us. Everyone creates his or her own story; everyone lives in his or her own dream.

To recover awareness is to see life the way it is, not the way we want it to be. To be aware is to see what is truth, not what we want to see in order to justify the lies we believe. If we practice awareness, then the time comes when we master awareness. When we master awareness as a habit, we always see life the way it is, not the way we want to see it. Then we no longer try to put things into words and explain what we perceive to ourselves. Instead, we use words to communicate with someone else, knowing that what we are communicating is just our point of view.

Look inside yourself and awaken your love. Open your heart and love unconditionally — not because you want love in return, and not because you want to control someone. That is false love. When you love with no conditions, you transcend the dream of fear and become aligned with divine spirit, the love of God, which is the love coming out of you. That love is life, and just like the sun, it is shining all the time.

My greatest wish is for all humanity to gain enough awareness to awaken from the dream of fear and use the power of creation to bring heaven on Earth. The entire creation is a masterpiece of art, and just by perceiving the beauty of God’s art, our hearts can be filled with joy and contentment.

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Excerpt from The Circle of Fire: Inspiration and Guided Meditations for Living in Love and Happiness. Copyright © 2001 by Miguel Angel Ruiz, M.D. and Janet Mills. Reprinted by Permission of Amber-Allen Publishing, Inc., San Rafael, California.