The Secret

he secret is developing away from a conciousness that gets what it wants to a consciousness that wants what it gets.
Jagdish Parikh

It is your ego that is the conciousness that gets what it wants. Your ego is constantly wanting new things in an effort to make you feel more important or powerful. It is a useful question to ask ourselves what is the real reason that we want some thing. Typically it is because we beleive that that thing will make us more important or powerful, and therefore happier. But the truth is that no particular thing can make us happy. Real happiness comes from inside us. It comes from an attitude, not any particular thing.

Real happiness comes from wanting what you get. If you only wanted what you had, you could never be discouraged or disappointed; and if you wanted everything you had without exception, you could never be sad or anxious or fearful. Thing how nice that would be! But when we are in a state of pain or poverty or hunger, it is very difficult to want what we have. In order to really want those things, we have to truly understand that the pain or poverty is meant to teach us something; to help us learn and grow and evolve. "Every cloud has a silver lining" if we will only stop to look for it instead of just wishing the whole cloud would go away.

So the secret of success is being happy with what you have already got; and being able to see the blessings all around you. But that doesn't mean you need to be perfectly content with what you have and never want more. There is a balance between having a burning desire for something and having a desire that hurts you. We are meant to always be wanting more. But when we approach our desire from a veiwpoint that doesn't expect this particular thing to make us happy (because we are already happy) or build our picture of who we are (or feel we should be); but is something we expect to get because we feel worthy and capable of it, then we will have found the secret to real success.

Happiness

"Happiness depends, as Nature shows,
Less on material things than most suppose"
William Cowper

Have you often thought that you will be happier when you get more money in the bank? Or when you can buy that new Jaguar convertible? Or when you get that mansion on the waterfront? We all tend to think that we will be happier when we get the things we want. This is why we get jealous of the people we see who have all those things. We think that it's not fair that he has the money, the car, and the mansion that we want, and we don't.

We focus on what he has that we don't, and forget about the big picture. Maybe he has terrible family relationships, or a disease we don't know about. If we knew everything going on in his life, chances are we would change our mind about wanting the life he has. Having more things doesn't make us happy; there are plenty of very wealthy celebrities that are miserable, perhaps even miserable enough to commit suicide.

Happiness depends on interior things, which is good news because you can learn to control those interior things: your attitude and your perceptions. It depends, first and foremost, on your ability to appreciate those things you do have, no matter how few of them there are. You can appreciate your health and the fact that you eat 3 square meals a day (in many places, a person typically eats something like half a cup of rice in a day). You can appreciate the fact that you know how to read and have probably had at least a high school education (many people in other countries haven't). You can appreciate the fact that you probably can attend church without having to worry about being bombed (many people in other countries can't). If you're really desperate, you can still appreciate beautiful sunsets and cool breezes on a hot summer day. There are all kinds of things you can appreciate, no matter how little you have. This is what your happiness really depends on.

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