3. So What Do We Mean By Being Happier Exactly?
We need to spend a little time on this because understanding this is essential for understanding what you will be aiming to achieve in changing your life. There is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding this and the terms are often misused.
Happy and happiness are extremely overworked words nowadays and occasionally the way they are used and abused makes me cringe. I read a book last year about finding happiness written by a Psychology Professor, who should have known better, who asserted that 'happiness' should be reserved for a class of emotional experiences that are pleasurable and enjoyable. He went on to pose the question as to whether the happiness one gets from eating banana cream pie is different from the happiness one gets from eating coconut cream pie.
Let me explain why this is so missing the point. First of all obviously eating different foods may give you temporary pleasure but there is no food on earth that can make you happy.
More fundamentally if happiness is worth fighting for, if happiness is worth anything at all then it must give you more than a passing nice taste in your mouth! Happiness would not be worth much if it was so short lived and transitory. No this is all nonsense I am afraid and the reason is you must distinguish between Pleasure and Happiness.
Pleasure is the pleasant but transient short term experience that you experience from agreeable 'nice' external events for example from food, drink, music, art, and beauty. But Happiness is a much more permanent state that comes from deep inside yourself of contentment, peace, fulfilment and serenity regardless of what is occurring on the outside in your life. In fact it is this very foundation of inner happiness which enables you to see and notice the pleasures of your external life, but equally to accept and deal calmly with the potential frustrations and disappointments. We will, of course, be discussing in some depth how to attain this inner happiness but very briefly it has at its roots self love and self acceptance, loving and wanting the best for the people in your life, living in the moment, and really seeing and believing and understanding what a rich and precious gift life itself is.
Please consider the following definitions which explain the difference between pleasure and happiness.
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Pleasure
A series of short term pleasant and agreeable experiences that give rise to transient feelings of joy and elation and gladness that occur as the result of external events and stimuli. Most (although not all) pleasurable experiences involve our physical senses and thus can be described as sensual pleasures. Some examples of sensual pleasure are eating and drinking, listening to music, reading a good book or article, looking at a beautiful view or image, and sex. Some examples of non- sensual pleasures might be receiving a compliment or having an interesting conversation. None of these external pleasures can make you happy as happiness always comes from within you.
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Happiness
A semi- permanent enduring state of well- being that comes from within and is not based on responses to external events or stimuli. It defines your mood and how you feel and act and can be accessed when life presents challenges and disappointments in your path. It is characterised by feelings of contentment, inner peace, serenity, fulfilment, compassion, and loving kindness. Happiness comes from within you and is the foundation that this book will help you build.
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In summary Happiness is a state of inner fulfilment, a deep state of well being, not the gratification of inexhaustible desires for external things. In fact happiness can only ever come from within and does NOT depend on outward conditions. It depends only on inner conditions.
I would like to close this chapter with some quotes about Happiness for you to ponder. You will find that across thousands of years often wiser people than me have come to the same view – that happiness depends on our mind and how we think about the world.
‘Most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.’ Abraham Lincoln
‘Happiness does not depend on what you have or who you are; It solely relies on what you think.’ Buddha
‘Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind.’ Daphne du Maurier
‘Everybody in the world is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions. It isn’t what you have or who you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.’ Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
‘Nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ Shakespeare
‘Very little is needed to make a happy life, it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.’ Marcus Aurelius