My Own Prison

How does it feel?
To be on ur own,
No direction no home,
Like a complete unknown,
Like a rolling stone....

When I am alone, I feel like I am free. But for how long? Till I feel I am not losing anything by not being with people or till I feel I am not gaining anything by being alone. Why should i feel free?

Happiness is a present attitude, and not a future condition, says Hugh Prather, in "My Struggles to Become a Person". Attitudes are shaped by external factors. If attitudes are shaped by externalities, then happiness is external too. We look for externalities to be happy. Someone has to tell me something to make me happy. Someone has to do something I like for me to be happy. I make an externality a precondition to be happy. When I am dependent on someone or something to come to a happy state of mind, I am placing it in the hands of an external factor, which may or may not respect my stakes, may or may not respect my terms and requirements in the whole thing. We have created a relationship between attitude and happiness.

When I say we have created the relationship, I mean that the conditioning we have been through tells us to be pleasing, to be good by someone else’s standards, and therefore to look for external criteria to satisfy. We never had a choice on this, because the relationship was made when for us the world was our family, when the mom and pop were Gods. My happiness lay in theirs. This relationship is ingrained in our mind, deep. To the point of being the only morally acceptable and known means to be happy.

Doesn’t every religion preach the ideal eternal bliss in the Self? What does it take to have nothing to possess and still be happy?

Every pit I am in, I have dug for myself. Every time I find myself in a pit, I find that I will not get out till I realize that I dug the pit. We created our own prisons.