How to be Free of Sadness...

Watch your next arising of sadness, You will find that it connects in some way with remembrance of a past era that you consider more exciting, more romantic, or more rewarding than now...This sadness comes from the unnecessary tyranny of sentimental memory and nothing else.. The past gave us pleasure, but it is gone, and so we are sad... We want those pleasurable days back, but we know that all things change...Memory has its place in recording non-psychological facts, like the alphabet, but creates useless sorrow when misused in sentimental imagination...A sure way to detect harmful identification is the pendulum test.. Whenever we identify with anything we think is exciting, we sooner or later swing back to the opposite feeling of boredom...Identification with excitement is always followed by an unhappy reaction....All this is not negative..It presents you with a wonderful opportunity to find lasting values in self-liberty... By ceasing to place our trust in anything outside our True Self, we cannot possible be afraid of anything.. This is the secret behind the mystical teaching that the man who has nothing has everything.....