We cannot try to be happy. In this endeavour, trying is failing. What we can do is investigate why we are unhappy, to see how our dream of happiness depends on some person, situation or circumstance. Dependency is misery. True happiness comes from within. It already is.
We prevent ourselves from knowing ourselves with thoughts of who we think we are. ‘I am this. I am that.’ Self-concepts are entirely time-bound. Nothing more effectively obscures the real than the clock. Freedom is the recognition of our timelessness. Never born. Never died.
No one says, “I am a body. This is me!” And yet this is precisely what most of us hold to be true. Herein lies our suffering. All our problems are body problems.
When we die, we cease to identify ourselves with a body. We die before we die when we realize we are not the body. Then we are nobodies, the walking dead, absolutely fearless, radically normal.
The word philosophy comes from the Greek for ‘love of wisdom’. The question upon which all of philosophy sits is, Who am I? Jesus answered this question directly. He said, “You are the light of the world.”
And I thought I was a body.
Men's Work 