This is the time of year when we evaluate our lives and wonder how we can make them better.

The newspapers and magazines usually have an article or two on how to be happy at this time. The answers are usually the same too – spend more time with family and those you love, go to church, eat more greens, get more exercise, go to bed earlier and get more sleep, volunteer, have a hobby, do things that are out of your comfort zone and so on.

Doing some or all of these will definitely help, but none of it quite hits the depths. Even going to church, even if you do it with some genuineness of spirit still doesn’t quite do it.

We also know that money and possessions don’t bring happiness. In fact our happiness is often in inverse proportion to our wealth (think Michael Jackson, Christina Onassis, Howard Hughes and pretty much any lottery winner in the world). Go into a casino or a meeting of multi-millionaires and you will see some of the most miserable-faced individuals about.

Certainly, having…or rather needing…less in life seems to be one of the ways to get more contentment and possibly even happiness. Living a simpler life gives freedom, lightness and an appreciation of real good. Thousands of years ago Socrates said ”…to need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer he does approach divinity.” You could brush that off as too hard to achieve – after all who wants to be divine??

But divine means wholeness, completeness, supremely good, in fact everything we would want to be. Importantly, he’s not saying that ‘having’ nothing makes you divine but ‘needing’ nothing. So it’s our state of mind, how much we have grown out of the illusions and delusions of the world that would imprison and hurt us that makes us whole, happy and…yes…divine.

…to need nothing is divine, and the less a man needs the nearer he does approach divinity.

Socrates

So needing less…wanting less…thinking less of ourselves (and that includes our emotional ‘wants’ as well as physical) has to be a part of gaining lasting happiness.

Don’t look for happiness

But, deeper than that, I really don’t think that the pursuit of happiness brings happiness. In fact, I think it does the opposite most of the time. It seems to me that happiness is a bi-product; something that comes when you’re living in the right direction. It’s not something you manufacture, buy or even find. It finds you.

Pursuing happiness is like that pointless exercise of dissecting a nightingale’s throat to find out where the song comes from. That’s not where it is!

The economist John Kay hints at it in his book ‘Obliquity’. He says “Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim.”

I often think that it’s funny how so many articles on happiness include advice from economists…like they’re the happiest people…hardly! However, John Kay is the most sensible and insightful one I know of so I think he’s worth including here.

How to find happiness

So how do we go about finding happiness without looking for it? How do we get contentment, joy, fulfilment without making those the goals of our lives? What should our goals be if not to be happy?

The very nature of real, deep, lasting happiness, I think, is that it is unselfish. It’s not something we can have and hold through any material means, including even having and holding a loved one or a big family. It’s something that is under the radar of the mess and noise of day-to-day material living.

I can’t pretend to know how to be happy all the time…I’m still working on it myself (while trying not to work on it of course!) and sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. But what I have found, often through hard experience, is that happiness…actual joy…doesn’t come with living like the world or under its rules. It comes through living in a different direction, living for others, not ourselves. It’s in genuine spirituality (i.e. living for others and living for good, not waving crystals and hugging trees) and in fact, living closer to what we really are.

Happiness is spiritual, born of Truth and Love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone but requires all mankind to share it.

Mary Baker Eddy

It’s not just about being happy either. It’s about waking up to what we really are.

The wonderful Vaclav Havel said “The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility.”

Pursuing happiness or wealth or fame or power or any of those things don’t do it because we’re not really wired to live for ourselves. Our real selves are made to live for others, for higher things for good itself. Unless we’re doing that, we can’t be happy, I think…not really happy.

Einstein, that great man who saw so much more than just physical truths, put it so well when he said

A human being is a part of a whole, called by us ‘universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Wow. If we tried to live like this in 2012, what couldn’t we achieve?!