Conditional vs. Unconditional Happiness
The difference between conditional and unconditional is that in conditional happiness you need to satisfy a condition to be happy which means you will often tell yourself that "I can be happy IF" the IF is the definition of conditional happiness. Unconditional happiness is all about being happy no matter what is going on in your life. Ultimately everyone should strive to achieve unconditional happiness.
The majority of people in the western world are searching for conditional happiness. Our whole life we think that happiness is from achievement or when all the right things happen to us. In reality we are just creating rule for ourselves, rules about when we can be happy.
We are pursuing the rule we create not happiness itself. We aren't allowing ourselves to be happy, because we are afraid of what will happen if we achieve unconditional happiness. We think to ourselves "If I am always happy how am I going to be motivated in my life?"
All of our motivations are improperly grounded, we are motivated for a burst of happiness once we achieve a task we set in our mind. We need to be motivated while still being happy in the moment.
Our whole motivational structure is based on carrots and sticks, we reward ourselves if we complete a task. We need to change the viewpoint we have on motivation to achieve happiness.
We all need to know that we can be happy even if something bad happens to us. Even if we find ourselves being lazy, or our business fails, we can still be happy with our life at any given moment.
We need to work towards enjoying all experiences in life even the not so good ones, and we can do that through meditation and self actualization. I am going to write more posts on these topics and go more in depth on this topic of happiness in future posts, so you will be able to learn more about the process to finding pure happiness and how meditating can help out your life.