"Happiness comes most strongly from making others happy." 3:00 mantra, 8:00 contemplation.

Happiness comes most strongly from making others happy.  What does it mean for someone else to make me happy?  It means to make be feel valued, to make me feel good and at peace with myself.  The DL would have you make people happy through compassion and peace.  My loving values are helping people with their well-being, their burdens, their growth and accepting them as they are.  Why is it making others happy makes me happy?  It means letting go of my pleasures and ego, letting go of the energy and resources I use for those  things and directing them to others to share my loving values.  And, it also means, making myself happy, by pursuing my loving values for myself in place of pursuing pleasures.  And, it doesn't need to be in place, but in priority over.  Pleasures are delighting in the universe which I think may really be our purpose instead of being happy.  Being happy enables us to delight in the universe.  When suffering arises, then it gets in the way of enjoying and delighting in the universe.  Going back, turning towards making others happy helps us to let go of commitments we've made toward what we think are the things we're supposed to want to do for ourselves. Jeez, the words are hard to get here.  We become wrapped up and dedicated to our ego that we become slaves to our ego and lose our freedom.  We become slaves to that which we believe is the right way to be for the sake of being right and that serves no purpose other than to allow ourselves to live as children with adults dictating our every action.  Living as children blindly following the rules of our parents and teachers chokes us from living as children taking delight in the universe.