Have you heard of blue bird syndrome? The term is derived from a main character of a fairytale play The Blue Bird by Maeterlinck, a Belgium playwright, poet and essayist. It refers to people who are not interested at all in the current life but only dream about happiness of the future. This term is also applied to people who cannot adapt to a rapidly-changing modern society or cannot be satisfied with their current job. They dream for a happier future and quit their job. In turn, they enroll in a school for further education or move to another job. Although people are not diagnosed with this syndrome, we can easily find these kinds of people around us. Honestly speaking, each one of us has also been living for the pursuit of unattainable happiness, haven’t we?
Why has this syndrome been named ‘Blue bird syndrome?’ Let’s find out the reason by looking at the plot of the tale The Blue Bird.
At night on Christmas Eve, two young kids of a lumberjack, Tyltyl and Mytyl, dream. In a dream, a witch granny appears and tells them to find a blue bird that brings happiness for her. So, the two children take on a journey far away to find the blue bird of happiness. They look around carefully the world of death, wander around the world of the past; they look for the blue bird of happiness everywhere but it is nowhere to be found. They finally make their way home. Then, they discover the blue bird in a cage hung at the door.
What this tells us, most of all, is that happiness is not far away, but it is already with us right here, right now. Due to this fairytale, ‘Blue bird’ became a symbolic word for real happiness within our mind. Those who are chasing the illusionary happiness they only dream for have this so-called blue bird syndrome.
Humans live dreaming for a happy future. We run and run to grasp that happiness, but the only result is the mind of futility because the happiness we dream for does not exist anywhere in the world. Seen from the perspective of the world, the plan about the future, wishes and ambiguous fears are just illusions that do not exist. The past and the future are also just the conceptions that we have in our mind. Isn’t it only this moment right now? Everything is an illusionary image that we have created in our mind. If we just live in the dream about the future, we can never realize the true happiness we are having already, and the time just passes by. Let’s look back at our life that has already flown by. How much of your dreams or plans you had in the past have been actualized? Haven’t you felt that the more you struggle to achieve them, the further you are going away from the happiness you’ve dreamed? Because they do not exist in the world, they cannot be grasped or fulfilled. The true happiness is already within us, not somewhere far away like the illusionary world. We just cannot see them because of countless minds of illusions. We are no different than being blind as we see the world through the dirty window. In order to find the true happiness within, the dirt of our mind must be wiped out. That clean place where everything is cleansed would be the mind of true happiness.
After having read this article, if you can find a little symptom of the blue bird syndrome within yourself, please read this writing of teacher Woo Myung and find the solution.
Fleeting Human Life
All people have periods of happiness and unhappiness.
Even if a person has a family that other people envy,
There is unhappiness within it.
He many wish for whatever causing this unhappiness
To be resolved, but when it happens,
He wishes for something else.
Wishing for human happiness is a manifestation
Of the sense of inferiority in one’s mind.
Even if man achieves everything he wants,
He eventually dies, and the past is all a dream.
If man lives knowing the way to live forever,
He would know what he needs to do.
Man is an entity that does not know anything.
His only wish is to get or gain things that he wants,
But this wish is just an expression of his delusions.
Time flows by, and all those whose lives have come to an end
Have disappeared from the world.
Everything they wanted to achieve were like dreams,
Dreamt during a brief nap.
Those who only exist in their thoughts have vanished,
Without having done or achieved anything.
Man does not know the ways of the world
Because he is not born in the world,
And he has never been born in the world.
He does not know the principle
That he exists because the world exists.
He has made his own world
By copying the things in the world,
He lives within this mind world,
Ignorant of where he came from and where he will go.
He runs around, for the fulfillment of his satisfaction only,
But no one can turn back the tide of time.
Only God can give man birth in the world without time;
Only God can give salvation.
Salvation is giving one birth in the world without time,
And allowing him to live there.
There, time does not exist
So there is no birth, death, aging or sickness,
And because time does not exist,
One is an eternal never-dying immortal.
Man cannot prevail over time;
Only God can take man
To the world that has prevailed over time –
The world that is beyond time.
Blaming the world and time,
Suffering and sadness,
Aging, sickness, birth and death,
Desires, anger and foolishness,
The five desires and seven sins;
These things all exist in human life – the world of sin,
But they do not exist in the true world – the world of God.
