BANGLAORE: Happiness is something which everybody wants and struggles to achieve throughout one’s life. Most of the individuals feel that happiness needs to be achieved and is very difficult to achieve. But, it is something which you already have.
It is a decision and not dependent on happening of any events. It is about freedom and it begins in the mind...
In order to be happy you need to be yourself, live by your values, be true to yourself and choose how you want to live; you need to know what you want, what makes you happy, so that you can create the life you want; you need to feel good about yourself and about in general.
In order to be yourself, feel good, and live the life you want, you need to be free from the prison of the past and its old beliefs, from the prison of pressure from other people and their beliefs, and the prison of your own mind.
Pleasure is a good feeling that comes from eating good food, watching a good movie, feeling the warm caressing rays of the sun on a winter day, etc. Pleasure has to do with enjoyment through the five senses and is dependent on circumstances, objects and people. When you are happy, minor unpleasant events usually do not disturb you. When you are unhappy, you feel as if everything is against you.
Happiness is always here, but covered by thoughts, desires and fears. It is experienced when these covers disappear for a while. When fear or worry comes to an end or a desire attained, there is a temporary disappearance of these covers. The ego and personality stop moving for a while and a great satisfaction and inner happiness is experienced.
In order to experience it on a daily basis, one has to learn to quieten the restless mind.
Indeed, it is only by reducing our wants to zero that we can get perfect happiness. The greater the simplicity of life, the greater the happiness, is a rule universally true. One of the factors that lead to happiness is maintaining good health. Without sound health, one can never be happy. One, who loses his health, loses everything. Beside this, a good loving family and a few sincere friends are essential for the happiness of life.
Faith in a spiritual source is essential for life’s happiness. In times of trouble, spirituality can be a source of much peace and comfort. Only a virtuous man with a pure conscience can know real happiness. Religion is morality, and without morality, there can be no happiness in life. It is a matter of common experience that those who are immoral, corrupt or dishonest are never happy in their lives.
Our life has become much too mechanical. Worrying about present miseries has become a trend. We have turned what should be our enemy into our friend. We are in fact sleeping with our enemy. Waiting for happiness has become our stable condition. To get out of this mindset, we require new training. To listen to a discourse needs no great training. But to practice what it teaches needs full attention and effort. We need to unlearn what we have learnt and learn new ways of thinking and doing. This leads to happiness.
Happiness is equivalent to the absence of desire. This is because; the root of our unhappiness is the constant hankering of a demanding mind. The means to happiness therefore lies in controlling our desires. Everything that you are doing, every single act you are performing, is in pursuit of happiness in some way. Why would you want to serve people? Serving people gives you happiness. Somebody wants to wear good clothes; somebody wants to make a lot of money, because that gives them happiness.
Even if he is giving away his life to somebody, he is doing it because it gives him happiness. So happiness is the fundamental goal of life. After doing all that you are doing, if you didn’t gain happiness, somewhere you have missed the basics of life. When you were a child, you were simply happy. Without doing anything, you were happy. Then somewhere along the way, you lost this simply because you got deeply identified with many things around you, your body and your mind.
Swami Vivekananda says: “In this little life of ours, if we can bring even a moment’s joy in another heart, that alone is true religion. Everything else is moonshine. This I have learnt suffering all my life”. Bring joy to others, you shall attain happiness. To bring joy to others, we must serve them. This is one of the best ways of being in happiness.