If I ask you a simple question, “Are you happy?”, what will be your answer?
I know your answer, “Of course I am happy.”. People just never accept that they aren’t happy. They don’t want to.
Internet nowadays has been flooded with article that can tell you what happiness is, how can one cultivate happiness, how much happy you are. There you can get a ton of material on happiness and how to achieve it.
Many philosophers and psychiatrists have perfectly laid out a flow chart illustrating the best ways to know if you are happy. I read such an article and it was quite impressive as it included some 15 to 20 questions about your feelings regarding happiness. The questions were
What is Happiness for You?
Is your idea of Happiness influenced by the opinion of other people?
If you could be anything, what would you be?
Have you tried to search on the inside?
Are you ready to make some changes?
What is your true potential?
Do you like others to share in your happiness?
Do you sweat the small stuff?
Do you feel proud of other people’s successes?
Do you live in present?
Do you have healthy relationships ( not just with your partner)?
Do you know how to calm down in stressing situations?
Do you have a glass-half-full mentality?
Do you pursue emotional fulfilment over material goods?
Do you easily make new friends?
Have you reached a goal (do you have more you want to accomplish)?
Do you wear a big smile?
Do you keep tossing and turning?
See, these questions are not meant to set right or wrong answers, but to get you think about what happiness means to you and to know if you are happy and up to what extent.
Now, you tell me, what does happiness mean for you?
Before you read on I would like to announce that we have new release of all kinds of ‘discovering yourself books' to heal your trauma and free your heart
What is Happiness?
It seems like an odd question, but is it? Do you know how to define happiness?
There are many who defined happiness in different ways. For example
Aristotle said, “Happiness is a state of activity.”
Eleanor Roosevelt said: “A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.”
According to psychology, happiness is about more than simply the experience of a positive mood.
Ruut Veenhoven has defined happiness as “overall appreciation of one’s life as-a-whole.”
Do you think happiness is the same thing to you as you read it from others?
How Vedas define Happiness?
According to Ramana Maharshi, happiness is within and can be known only through discovering one’s true self.
According to the Vishishtadvaita Vedanta school which was proposed by Ramanujacharya, true happiness can be only through divine grace, which can be only achieved by surrender of one’s ego to the Divine. It defined the happiness as bliss (Ananda), a state of sublime delight when the jiva ( person) becomes free from all sins, all doubts, all desires, all actions, all pains, all sufferings and also all physical and mental ordinary pleasures.
The Upanishads repeatedly use the word Ānanda ( Happiness) to denote Brahman, the innermost Self, the Blissful One, which, unlike the individual self, has no real attachments.
Shri Aurobindo in his book ‘The Life Divine', define Happiness as a delight of existence. He said that happiness is the natural state of humanity. However, mankind develops dualities of pain and pleasure. Aurobindo goes on to say that the concepts of pain and suffering are due to habits developed over time by the mind, which treats success, honour and victory as pleasant things and defeat, failure, misfortune as unpleasant things.
Difficult to achieve😐
Actually our Vedas talk of permanent happiness, a permanent bliss in one’s life. When we obtain a desired goal, we experience a moment of pleasure. A variety of other experiences such as meditating, listening to music, or watching a sunset may also produce pleasure.
And we naturally assume that source of our happiness or pleasure lies in situations, experiences, goals, or the things that seem to have made us happy. Thus we keep trying to gain those objects and replicate those situations that seem to produce this effect.
However, the same objects and situations please some people while displease others. Also, what once gave pleasure may later become a source of pain. Meditative experiences don’t last.
In short, no object or situation is, in and of itself, a source of constant happiness at all times, for all people, in all places. How then does the experience of happiness arise?
Having acknowledged that the changing world of experience can never be a lasting source of happiness, the Upanishads do not tell us there is something we need to do in order to be happy. The result of any action, being time-bound, will not provide lasting happiness. Once the Atman is recognized as it is limitless, full, and complete, ever-present, never-sorrowful, and never-changing, we don’t need to look for happiness else
Subscribe to the website so you can get the newest blog posts as I write them…
Other Articles You Might Be Interested In
Comments