Happiness - within or without?

I’ve been trying to, as is my wont sometimes, analyze my past actions. And guess what? I’m clueless. I mean, I know why I do things, but I absolutely don’t know for sure why I want to do those things. Sometimes, I feel that the things that we do in the name of happiness and satisfaction cease to give us the egoistic highs that we crave, after a while. A case in point – I was reading a book in the hope that it will alleviate my gloomy mood. As long as I was reading it, I didn’t think of whatever it was that gave rise to my dark mood, but the moment I put the book down, the sadness came back to haunt me. That set me thinking – if our happiness cannot be created by things that are external, can it be sustained by those things? Putting it another way, can we hope to be happy forever by pursuing things that we think will make us happy? To answer this question, we’d need to know what gives us true happiness.

When we watch a good movie, or when we hear fine music, we feel elated. Does it mean that happiness was attached to those things? If that were the case, then such things must lift our moods every time without exception. Our practical experience, however, tells us otherwise. We have found that a great book and a superb musical score, things that have never failed to make us feel happy hitherto, are no good when we are suffering a deeply personal loss. It seems to us as if those things are too insignificant to make up for the magnitude of our loss. That rules out the theory that happiness is intrinsic to things that we like. If that’s so, then it should only mean one thing: that we choose to feel happy when favourable things happen. And it also stands to reason that our sadness is of our own making too. That would mean, then, that we control our happy and sad thoughts. And that means that happiness and sadness are entirely within us, and we can choose to get rid of our gloomy moods at will. And, what seems almost inhuman, we can choose to remain happy forever.

If the key to our happiness lies in our minds, then why isn’t the world a happy place? The answer to that lies in one word – conditioning. Our minds have been conditioned to believe that certain things ought to make us happy and certain other things, sad. This indoctrination has kept us company right from our childhood and is all around us. It takes a tremendous effort of will to break out of this cycle of thought and to choose to feel what we really want to feel about things. The loss of some money or property may not exactly be a fortunate event, but it certainly doesn’t mean that we fret over it for a week. It’s water under the bridge and no amount of worrying will help us. Moreover, our gloom may affect our concentration and for all we know, may even result in yet another unfortunate event.

The first step towards achieving this happiness lies in being aware of our own conditioned responses to events. Once we know how our reactions are being controlled by our conditioning, we can take the next step, which is substituting the conditioned response with a conscious response. Over a period, choosing a conscious response will almost become second nature to us, and we’ll be well on our way to leading a happy life. Ever after.