The modern life that we have built dictates that achievements can only be superseded by better achievements, needs by more needs, and expectations by new expectations. We have effectively reduced our lives to a struggle for a preferential position on a two-dimensional grid: a relationship between the horizontal and the vertical, which, when combined, define our position in space and time. We comprehend the horizontal line as points or positions in space e.g. my children are at school, I am the director of the company, or I want to buy that land. We treat the vertical line as a measurement of time e.g. I’m 50 years old, in five years I would like to own a house, or, when I retire I will travel the world. This, we have come to believe, is the reality of our world. To find happiness and be considered successful, we must efficiently manage our relationship between space, i.e. the horizontal, and time, i.e. the vertical.

The horizontal and the vertical lines share the same point of origin, but shoot off in perpendicular directions, effectively reducing our naturally acquired full-surround view to a narrow 90-degree angle. We spend our lives confined within the boundaries of this self-created limitation, striving for, and maintaining, the right balance between the horizontal and the vertical. We are continuously drawn outward and across the various situations, propelled by our needs, our attachments, our goals, and our illusory obstacles, all of which require resolution. As we strive to identify with these situations, we become absorbed by them; we become the situations, the problems, the desires, the expectations. We reduce ourselves to a marker on the grid. The value or meaning of our lives is measured not by the amount of happiness or wisdom we have achieved, but by our position, wealth, and time: where we are compared to others, how much we have accumulated in the process, and how long it took us, or to put it simply: how much time we have left before it’s all over.

But within the aspect of space and time there is also the dimension of depth. This dimension begins at any point, and stretches infinitely within, into the depth of who we truly are. In this dimension we co-exist with Nature, other beings, and situations in coherence and bliss. We understand that we are an inseparable unit within the completeness of the whole. There are no us and them, no positions to achieve, no obstacles to overcome or competitors to beat. Everything exists in balance with everything else. There is only the path of being, the path of purpose and meaning. Our search for happiness comes to end, because we realize how nonsensical it is to hunt for something which we are already.