Happiness is hidden inside, behind and underneath the fear-ridden story that we tell ourselves. We are separated from eternal delight by a veil of ignorance and misperception, which is only a story. Where is this paradise that we search for so frantically, inconsistently and wistfully without? Pinpricks of light emerge through this veil and light upon objects and actions in the outer world, such as upon horses and cars, which fascinate and enchant us.

The first step in psychotherapy is to locate the pain, to locate the resistance to the pain, to identify our "solutions" to the pain. Pain is your friend and teacher. It holds the key to opening up the story and penetrating the veil to reach the "holy of holies," the inner light, the inner peace of infinite bliss. And so in essence we start with our solutions and with our search for consolation, then we move into awareness of our resistance, then to the pain itself, and finally to its message. What is the message of pain? If you inquire into the pain, you will discover the ways that are you out of harmony and out of balance with Reality.

In our fluctuating happiness/unhappiness story we imagine that love is limited to a certain kind of physical love experience, with a certain special person, but in Reality we are love itself. In our story, love experiences come and go, but in Reality Love Itself does not come and go. To know that we are love itself is the secret knowledge. The story is a mixture of fact and fiction, out of which emerges our symptoms and suffering. The pain that we must learn to regard as a friend and teacher will reveal to us that there is a vast difference between our story and Reality. Pain is based on the fact that the story is finite and Reality is infinite. We are committed to the story and unaware of Reality. Within the story we perceive ourselves as separated, lacking and stuck, and therefore we believe that we must have a support system, a special relationship, security and control, upon which we depend. These dependencies are to compensate for our own perceived deficiencies and inadequacies. But such dependencies are unreliable and create anxiety and manipulation, lest we lose that dependency and fall back into our assumed deficiency, guilt and fear.

So we must first decide that our symptom and our pain are not an enemy, not a nuisance, not incidental, nor accidental, but purposeful and meaningful. My client says that he does not have the words to grasp what I am saying to him. We are limited and confined by our brain dictionary. While it may be true that we can have experiences that are not within the scope of our mental dictionary, we will drop those experiences unless we develop language for them. A high percentage of people have extrasensory perception experiences or out-of-the-body experiences, but do not have the language to support these experiences and when they do not fit into the story that we live by, those experiences tend to drop out. While there are experiences outside the drama triangle, such marginal experiences do not seem powerful enough to free us from the victimization experience.

Some seeds fall into our mental landscape and sprout but the ground is too shallow and will not support experiences outside of the Drama Triangle enough to produce ongoing fruit. The victim experience, whether you are dishing it out, or taking it, or rescuing people from it, produces some secondary gains, but in the primary sense these experiences are associated with guilt, fear, pain, anger and other compensatory reactions. The perpetrator side of the Drama Triangle produces guilt and defensive anger; the victim side of the triangle produces pain, self-pity, and resentment; the rescuer side produces stress, overwhelm, inadequacy, manipulativeness, and anger. All three sides of the Drama Triangle produce self-protective anger, relationship problems, health problems, and other symptoms.

That inner state of uncaused happiness then is that Reality which does not depend on outside circumstances. In the ordinary Drama Triangle of our story, we experience pain and the relief from pain we call happiness, as dependent upon outward circumstances. We believe that such happiness results from luck, from manipulation, from fate, from special relationships and circumstances. Uncaused happiness is almost a foreign concept when we are still captive to our story. If we do not break through the veil into uncaused happiness, we will continue to feel hopelessly victimized by the fluctuations of our story