...to enjoy your own company :) (Cute baby alert, below!)
SOURCE:
But How?
Do you know how much your nagging voice irritates me?
I'm just kidding you...I'm only kidding :)
OK. I'll tell you how. Are you ready for the answer? Here it is: stop running away from yourself, dammit! - that's how. That's it.
You are what you're searching for
You might think that you need money, possessions, sex, or drugs to be happy, but those aren't really what you need. You might convince yourself that you aren't that shallow of a person, setting your eyes on developing healthy relationships or pursuing knowledge instead of those obvious tools for escape - that's better...but still not what you really need.
What you really need is to make the right connection between your momentary experiences of wholeness (peace and joy) and yourself. You need to understand, at the level of experience, that you ARE the feeling of release, and the wonderful rush of peaceful energy that you experience in those moments. You are the wholeness and complete contentment of a mind that's silenced of worry/ anxiety programs.
You finally get the microphone that you'd been nagging your parent to get you for seemingly lifetimes
at the ripe old age of 5 years old. You feel so amazing as you tear the last piece of wrapping paper off of the box..."oh boy, it really is the Casio!" You're so excited that you nearly pee your Oshkosh B Gosh suspender pants. Have you ever felt so joyful, alive, and free?
Oh, this microphone must be magical! It's like crack cocaine, this Casio, I tell ya what.
Hold on, wait a second, no it isn't...
It's just a cheap Casio microphone. There isn't anything special about it at all.
The only reason it has the power to induce fairy-dust levels of enchantment is that you built it up to be that for yourself, in that scheming and overly imaginative mind of yours. You made it a subconscious condition that you must possess this Casio microphone before you would allow yourself to rest and relax.
What you experience when you open the package is a momentarily quietened ego, a short release from the habitual striving and searching for the next thing on the wants list. What you feel at this moment is the release from the tired search.
What you feel is yourself, without attachment to all the B.S. plans and goals that you have for yourself. You taste the real freedom that lies inside of you.
Back to the "wants" list
But you're just a kid in the candy shop, aren't you? Yeah. You're still convinced that it's the candy that's wonderful. After all, you always feel better when you get your hands on a lolly-pop, amiright?
Well, you don't feel so cloud-nine hours later, as your stomach cramps up like it always does after you've eaten too much sugar, and your face begins to turn pale as the candy starts to make a second visit to the mouth, this time from the other side.
Come on, now... you're smarter than this. You know that sugar-highs aren't the ideal way to release from the pains of the wanting and the searching.
Cocaine?
Dude....come on, really? You have to come back from the high, no matter how far away it takes you away; no matter how orgasmic that release might be. Tomorrow you're back to the grind, only now with an overly itchy body and an expensive addiction to the rock.
Sex?
You've been there already...many times. You already know that the answer doesn't lie there.
It's money, isn't it? It has to be the money...
Ugh. No, no it isn't... not even a little bit.
With money comes the ability to have more possessions, more vices, and, indeed, more political/ social power. All of this is great for a time. Each new trinket and every avenue that opens up will provide another release, but each release will have its inevitable come-down.
Worse yet, each come-down will have you wanting to get higher the next time, until, eventually, no amount of release will meet your expectations - that's when depression begins and apathy starts to set in.
Can't you see it?
Stop dodging the obvious fact. Stop these sadistic mind-games, already. You've bonded yourself to these conditions of inescapable suffering for far too long. End the torture now.
Just.let.go.
Be free right here and now.
Cut the life blood to the ego that wants, wants, wants, consuming more and more resources like a never ending game of Pac Man, leaving the world barren and full of its wastes.
Slow down a bit and allow the world to slow down around you as well. As your attention is now focused on the awareness field of your senses and sensations, both gross and subtle, you can finally say that you're with yourself.
Now, with thoughts moving in the background of awareness (oh so important) - faint voices, as if coming off from the distance, roughly half of the words being drowned-out by white noise - your mind can finally begin the process of purifying itself from its formerly clouded perceptions.