A Simple, Happy, Ordinary Life

If we threw open our filters in order to experience life fully, we could experience the pure sense and joy that comes with just being alive.

Without categories, preconceived ideas, habits, and judgement, without doing anything else, we would see everything as it is - infinitely good and beautiful. 

All the people we met would appear as the non-threatening, gentle and benevolent creatures that they are at their core.

Helping one another without pause or thinking about it would become common, because it would make so much good, and would feel so normal.

Everything we ate would taste insanely delicious.

We would see all of nature as magical, and so precious and vital that we would do anything to protect it as part of us, and us part of it.

A sunrise or sunset would elicit an appropriate euphoria.

We would live each and every moment honestly and vibrantly. 

We would not let fear consume our hearts and extinguish the joy that is our birthright.

If we eliminated our filters right now, we would reclaim unparalleled experience of joy. 

How do we do this? I don't know, but people much smarter about such things have commented across the ages.

The Zen master Chuang Tzu shows us the way to the attainment of happiness. 

Who was he?

"A Chinese philosopher (ca. 369-ca. 286 B.C.), that was the most brilliant of the early Taoists, and the greatest prose writer of his time."

Basically, he tells us that it helps to grow quietly in the humility of a simple, ordinary life.

We don't do it by earnestly striving, because then we would be relying on our human and self-conscious deliberation.

Conscious striving would only get us farther from our goal. This is the taoist principle of wu wei, or action through inaction.

"My greatest happiness", he says, "consists precisely in doing nothing whatever that is calculated to obtain happiness . . . Perfect joy is to be without joy . . . if you ask 'what ought to be done' and 'what ought not to be done' on earth to produce happiness, I answer that these questions do not have [a fixed and predetermined] answer."

When the time comes, it will happen without our filters. It will be spontaneous, and it will be good.

We just have to trust and let it happen spontaneously, because we can't find happiness by looking. 

But if you live a simple, ordinary, humble life without filters, chances are happiness will find you.