ITS EASY BEING HAPPY!

What’s Happiness ?
Many people would say, "I just want to be happy." It is a worthy goal but few people know what’s happiness and how to find it. Some would say they want to have a good education and an interesting career. Others would say they want a loving spouse and a nice family. Others want a career, a family, good health, good friends, a nice house, expensive cars, good relationships, and enough money to take an extended vacation each year and to be comfortable. What would you say you need to be happy? According to worldwide research, all happiness and suffering depend upon the mind, and so if we want to avoid suffering and find true happiness we need to understand how our mind works and use that understanding to bring our mind under control. Happiness and stress are states of mind and so their main causes are not to be found outside the mind. When things go wrong in our life and we encounter difficult situations we tend to regard the situation itself as the problem, but in reality whatever problems we experience come from the side of the mind. If we were to respond to difficult situations with a positive or peaceful mind they would not be problems for us; indeed we may even come to regard them as challenges or opportunities for growth and development. Problems arise only if we respond to difficulties with a negative state of mind. Therefore, if we want to be free from problems we must learn to control our mind.

Obstacles To Happiness
Since we all have within us our own source of peace and happiness, we may wonder why it is so hard to maintain a continually peaceful and joyful mind. This is because of the delusions that so often crowd our mind. Delusions are distorted ways of looking at yourself, other people, and the world around us - like a distorted mirror they reflect a distorted world. The deluded mind of hatred, for example, views other people as intrinsically bad, but there is no such thing as an intrinsically bad person. It is the deluded mind of attachment that projects all kinds of pleasurable qualities onto its objects of desire and then relates to them as if they really did possess those qualities.

All delusions function like this, projecting onto the world their own distorted version of reality and then relating to this projection as if it were true. When our mind is under the influence of delusions we are out of touch with reality and are not seeing things as they really are. Since our mind is under the control of at least subtle forms of delusion all the time, it is not surprising that our lives are so often filled with frustration. It is as if we are continually chasing mirages, only to be disappointed when they do not give us the satisfaction for which we had hoped. Therefore, if we want to transform our life and be free from delusions by learning to transform our mind.

-Anshumali Saxena www.soilindia.net