Happiness is what?

I have been reading (rereading actually) Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now the last several nights before I go to sleep. Trying to find my center again, get out of my compulsive egoic thinking. I need to stop being so angry. That anger is born of living in the past in my head and obsessing on people and situations which have caused me harm (which of course bleeds into my now). It really does me no good to be so angry. Holding a grudge against someone (try several someones), is detrimental to me on several levels. Since there is nothing I can do to change the outcome of what others have dumped in my life, then it is fruitless to waste life on being angry. All I can do is use the only tool I have which is this moment now to figure out how to get myself out of the situation(s) other people so eagerly put me into. To do that I have to let that past go, take the lessons I learned from it and move forward staying centered in this only moment I really have which is right now.

Forgiveness is a big key here. I am hanging on to shit and don't know why I can't remember how to let go and surrender and just be. It is the anger and the inability to forgive that has brought me here to this moment right now where I feel miserable. It doesn't matter how I got here or who fucked me over really, yes, I got screwed (repeatedly), however, perseverating on what may or may not have happened or who did or did not do anything foul doesn't change the situation. It is what it is. All my anger and resentment does is keep me wallowing in the pain, it keeps me from healing and moving forward.

Here's the dysfunctional thought pattern that keeps me perseverating on the past, feeling miserable, and stuck in this past. I keep thinking that everything I did that got me fucked over I did to help others. People came in like vultures and sucked me as dry as they could. Once there was no more meat on my bones, they picked up and moved on, having left me feeling completely raped and depleted. Some of it was forced on me, just like being raped. Even when I had been pretty well picked dry of any meat on my bones, rapists came descending and sucked what was left of the marrow from those nearly dried bones. And then of course, as most rapists do, accused me of being the whore who's provocativeness forced them to take me (in my case they thought I had money they could rape me out of, unfortunately finding out when it was too late that there was no money for them to steal from me, someone else had gotten there before them to take what little there really was).

Parting of this "raping" was my inviting some of them in to work for me, thinking I was being a good person, giving them work in winter (which around here is a big thing since most of the income in this area dries up in winter). Of all those people, only one of them did exactly as we had agreed and was upfront and honest in his dealings with me. The rest of them and one of them in particular took serious advantage. It snow balled out of control and I was unable to reign in the situation. It became very apparent that as long as they thought I had money (or resources they could use), they were gonna suck as much of it out of me as possible. So my thinking went this way, I knew at that point that I was dealing with alcoholics (they were drinking on the job, a seriously good sign). These were people I knew, but obviously not well enough. So I vowed to myself not to ever deal with alcoholics ever again. Lesson learned right?

The real problem with that line of thinking was that every where I looked, everyone was an alcoholic or drug addict or both. If they weren't a drug addict or alcoholic, they were lost in such dysfunctional thinking that they might as well have been. It was virtually impossible to move through my daily life without having to deal with that kind of dysfunction in others. In the end, what it really boiled down to is that, there was no place to run or retreat to where I could insulate myself from such dysfunctional behavior. I had to find another way. My anger grew daily. Pretty much everyone I knew who wanted a piece of me had come and taken as much as they could come and get out of me. Like I said, once they had taken what they could, they evaporated and left me in an unfinished ruin. And of course, in their alcoholic dysfunctional thinking they justified their behavior (and still do).

My anger grew, seething inside me. When the last set of rapists finally left my life, I was left with so much anger and deep resentment that I became very ill physically. Yes, this is the end result of living in the past and not releasing the anger. It's the end result of not being able to forgive and surrender to what is. Now I don't have much of an immune system, so becoming ill can be life threatening for me. That only made me more angry.

The reason I explained (and not in detail) what happened to me was to make a point about how I got from being deeply at peace within my being to being so far off center that it has been extremely difficult to get back to where I once was. So this was not a "bitchfest" about how I got fucked over, but a story about how we all let our dysfunctional egoic thinking drag us back down into the pits of whatever we think despair is. Many of my friends like to believe that I got seriously "fucked over", and yes, on the surface I did get fucked over. But on a deeper level, very little of this would have happened or gone as far as it did had I been able to remain centered in the present moment. Had I been living in the present moment and not worrying about past or future events, the probability is it never would have snow balled so far out of control.

As soon as I was well enough to even think straight, I picked up The Power of Now and began rereading it. I thoroughly understand the power of the present moment on a deep level. But getting back into staying present in the moment has proven difficult for me at the moment. My dysfunctional egoic thinking has taken over again, and has been running my life once again. The reality is, 99.9% of humans alive today live in their egoicly dysfunctional minds and thinking, living in the past (a big contributor to substance abuse, alcohol and drugs being just one example of abusing substances to control emotional pain) and projecting their happiness onto some future date.

Here's the logic: the past was once the present moment, it's gone and you can do nothing to change whatever events occurred in that moment. You can learn from it, take those lessons and use them to function in the present moment, but you can do nothing to actually change what happened in that past moment. If you really did something super fucked up, you might be able to "fix" what you did to yourself and/or others in the present moment, but you can never change what happened in that past moment. Why? Because that past moment used to be a present moment, just like this very moment right now as you are reading this is the present moment. It truly is all you have. You cannot go back or forward even one second. So it is truly insanity to live in thinking about and dwelling on those past moments. Dwelling in that past is the root of resentments, anger and in my case, the rage I have been experiencing.

Conversely, thinking that some future date will "save" you, make you finally "happy" is also dysfunctional thinking. Why? Because the future is yet again, just another present moment that is not here in this present moment that is your real life right now. In this present moment, that is the only thing you really have, you can plan for things that may or may not occur at a future present moment, but waiting for happiness to "happen" at some future date is insanity. We will take me for an example. My happiness is not set on some future date when I "finally" achieve my planned for goal of transitioning. My happiness is right now. I will be more comfortable in my body once I transition, but my happiness is not derived from the belief that once I transition I will finally be happy. It would be insanity for me to believe that I will only find true happiness if I transition. Because the reverse thinking of that is that I will be miserable and unhappy for the rest of my physical life if I never transition. And that is not true, I will not be miserable and unhappy. I will just continue as I always have, with a brain that doesn't match the body. It would be no different than someone born with a clef palate and no money to surgically fix their issue deciding that they can never be happy if their face doesn't get "fix". You can be happy right now, in this present moment. Yes, you have to deal with dysfunctional people staring at you, and yes you can plan to "fix" your deformity, but that doesn't mean that once it's "fixed", that you are going to be happy. Happiness and joy is right now, in the only thing you really have, which is this moment right now.

Just so you understand this, like most of my writing, this is/was for me. I needed to hear what I already know again. I need to get out of my head and back into my being, my true and authentic self. My egoic thinking has caused me great harm, and now I have to "fix" that. If there is "evil" in this world, it is the human ego and the thinking created by that ego. It is the root cause of 99% of all human suffering. Dysfunctional egoic thinking controls you, owns you and will not release you as long as you dwell where it dwells, in the past and in the future.

And that is all I needed to say or hear right now.