When you are not feeling happy, you are an imposter. The reality of you is joy, regardless of what is happening and how you seem to be feeling. There is that level of joy within you that laughs at everything and knows folly when it sees it. Be an imposter no longer. Don’t believe in the supremacy of the world and its events over the joy that lies within you. Let the joy be dominant.

Even when you are in tears, there is a part of you that sees you in tears and knows better than to hold much stock in them. There is a part of you that watches and perceives greater, that perceives beyond your tiny perception at any one given moment. There is a thread of you that acknowledges you are an actor on stage. How well you have learned your lines. How well you have learned assigned emotions. You caught on so quickly. All your life you have responded on cue. Now you are supposed to be sad. Now you are supposed to be worried. Now you are to have anxiety. Now you are supposed to be angry. Now you are supposed to feel lost, abandoned, bereft. All this because you were taught well and learned well.

What if you had been taught different cues? Not to be brave, but not need to be brave. What if you had been taught to shrug off events and not make them star in your life? Even though you do not put your hand to your heart every moment, you know your heart beats. What if you knew that despite your lack of awareness of joy, that joy is a running stream within you that is your fountainhead? What if you could put your hand over your heart and feel the joy that beats within?

No longer buy into suffering. It has been imposed upon you. Buy into laughter instead. Life is funny, isn’t it? All that you hold important may not be so important. Beloveds, you lead two lives, maybe three. You lead the outer life. You lead the inner life you believe in. And there is a third secret life you live. It need be secret no longer. Abjure to the joyousness within that wishes to come out and be public. Joy is tired of being held back, kept secret, denied, as if unhappiness were somehow more worthy.

What if you put the shoe on the other foot? What if you choose happiness to surface, and let suffering disband itself, no longer to be welcome, no longer to hold a high place in your heart, now to be dismissed, shaken off like dust from a dust mop.

Beloveds, why do you hold on to suffering when it only makes you suffer? If you could only believe in happiness, and that it is long-lasting, eternal, that it outdistances suffering by a long shot, that you can substitute happiness for suffering if you but choose. Even at what you perceive as loss, you can have happiness. You did have the good fortune to have enjoyed what you now perceive as loss.

What if you did not perceive loss? What if you gave up on it? What if you did not sanction the concept of loss and the concept of a heart that can ever lose anything?

Is not suffering the mistake of the intellect you have heard about? Suffering is an error. It is always an error. You have believed there was a need for suffering. It has held a high place in your life. You have noted all the causes for unhappiness and overlooked the one cause for happiness. See the events of your life with less passion. No longer be an actor who performs on cue.