“Your true nature is happiness and bliss”
– Ramana Maharshi
Everyone wants to be happy. This is a universal component of the human condition, and may seem so self-evident that it does not bear noting. Even those who intensely hate themselves or do violence to others can trace the drive back to the deepest unfulfilled desire for happiness.
Why is it that so few are truly happy? If it is true that our nature is happiness and bliss, why has it been so rare for people to realize this about themselves and to live their lives in gratitude and love?
How is it that the universal quest for happiness has led to the full spectrum of suffering on this planet? Even the most extreme expressions of war, murder, rape, and environmental devastation can all ultimately be traced back to the human desire for happiness.
How can the desire for happiness manifest as ignorance, greed, and violence? The Enneagram offers an answer to this puzzle and points to the solution.
This inconceivable gateway of great liberation is in everyone. It has never been blocked; it has never been defective. Buddhas and Chan Masters have appeared in the world and provided expedient methods, with many different devices, using illusory medicine to cure illusory disease.
– Chan Master Yuansou
Passing through the gateway of liberation is the entrance to happiness, bliss, and the knowledge of one’s true identity. In the past, it has been the rarest of events. When a great soul passes through to liberation, like the Buddha, it is an event of such magnitude that it is remembered for thousands of years. Yet, these great beings then become objects of worship, as if it were something that happened to someone else a long time ago and does not relate to our present situation except as an object of prayer.
This gateway of liberation is in everyone. It is the fulfillment of our human potential to pass through the gateway. The human species is still evolving. It is a race against time. Will we evolve to the next stage of our potential unfolding or will we destroy the Earth’s ability to sustain us before we get there?
The ones who have awakened to their true nature as happiness and bliss were the forerunners, the harbingers of things to come. Now it is possible, not for just a few great souls but for everyone to awaken to his or her true nature. The seeds are being cast to the winds. The great gateway of liberation is open and all may pass through.
In our time, the Enneagram has appeared as an illusory medicine to cure an illusory disease. The disease is the egoic idea of separation. The cure is to look in the wisdom mirror of the Enneagram to see past all false identification to the truth of being.
excerpt from Fixation to Freedom. Eli Jaxon-Bear
