The habit of comparing leads to the habit of criticism, which soon leads to self-condemnation, and fills your life with pain and misery.
A happy person compares only with self. He tries to be a better person than what he had been yesterday. He tries to help everyone to become better than what they are rather than pulling them down to satisfy his own sense of misplaced superiority. He has no desire of making others miserable by berating them and destroying their happiness.
When you love your job, the quality of work improves effortlessly. You don’t get tired with your work but feel recharged. Your work itself becomes a great source of joy for you.
We can consider successes and failures in our life as credit and debit entries of our happiness account. Every time we succeed in achieving our goal, we get credit in the form of happiness and every time we fail, we debit our happiness account. If we have enough credits of happiness, we can easily withstand some failures just like the person who has a million dollar bank balance, does not get disconcerted if he loses out on a few thousand dollars. However, the same loss can bring much grief to a person who has a very small balance in his account.
Just like a sinner can’t know the joys of living an honorable life, a virtuous person can’t know the joys of a sinful life either
The key to happiness is to use the source of happiness in the right quantity, at the right time and in the right way. There is nothing wrong per se with love, family, wealth, pleasure, power or fame. They are all necessary for happiness and living a good life. However, they become a source of problem, when we use them wrongly or in excess or at the wrong time.
Wealth is one of the most important sources of happiness. It becomes a source of pain only when we earn or spend it inappropriately.
All virtues of a man rest upon his honesty and integrity; if you are not honest, you can’t sustain any other virtue. While honesty may not provide you any instant benefit, it prepares you for the challenges of life. If you are honest, your conscience is clear. And the road to everlasting happiness goes through a clear conscience.
We are living in a competitive world and have to perform better than others to achieve success. We also believe that it is success that brings happiness. We assume that if we can take care of success then success, itself, will take care of happiness. Therefore, people keep chasing success all through their lives as they consider happiness to be its by-product.
Most people don’t consider happiness as an important goal of life because happiness is an internal feeling and not an external achievement. Most people wish to achieve things that are discernible and acknowledged by the world as an achievement. They want success, power, fame, wealth—things that can be quantified as accomplishments. Happiness simply does not fit in this bill. Hence, many people don’t consider happiness as an achievement.
We and our world are not different just as a drop of a sea and the sea are not different. We are the world and the world is us. Just like every single cell in the body of a person has the same DNA, we too are a microcosm of everything that is out there in the world. We have evolved with the world and we are one with it.
An unfortunate reality is that most people are unhappy most of the time. Unhappiness is so widely pervasive in the modern world that if you tell someone that you are happy, people are unlikely to believe you. It is because we have stopped accepting that it is possible to achieve happiness.
You can’t become an illiterate person again once you have become literate. You can’t think like a teetotaller once you have become alcoholic. Every piece of knowledge and every experience of your life transforms you forever and you are never the same person again.
The characters of mythologies are like superman or spider-man who have infinite power and infinite goodness. When people try to imitate God, they fail miserably. You have to be stupid to jump from a hundred storey building like Superman in the hope that you will be able to fly like him.
Faith is the language which makes us understand the true meaning of words. When faith is lacking, two people can’t live together harmoniously, while millions can unite as one, if people have faith in each other.
We don’t know if the mythologies are fact or fiction or mix of the two. But as far as people have faith in them, they shape their values. When people lose faith in scriptures and mythologies, they easily fall prey to the fictions of the modern times, which propagate infidelity, pleasure seeking and materialism.
It is important to have faith in life to connect to the fellow human beings as much as we need rational mind to understand the material world. It is unwise to drop all faiths just because faiths have been misused by some ignorant people. We have to see the positive impact of faiths and beliefs in the society and in the life of billions of people who are believers. Only by balancing our rational and faithful mind, we can find perfect life in this world.
When you understand the language of the faith of another person, you can connect with him not only intellectually but also emotionally. A common faith builds relationships and binds people.
When we see the reality which can’t be explained by our existing faith and beliefs, we drop or modify our beliefs and try to understand the world by using our renewed beliefs. Our faith is not hard-coded but changes with time like a living entity.
It is difficult to understand human beings as rational beings because even our rational mind is guided by our emotions. Emotions are the product of our beliefs which are based on faith without much logic and reason behind them.