Love and Happiness: Art of Wise Living Brings Great Joy

By Swami Sukhabodhananda

The art of wise living involves four steps: Plan purposefully, prepare prayerfully, proceed positively and pursue persistently.

The joy of wise living involves the art of joyous looking. There are two types of looking. You can look at the world with thoughts; you can also look at the world without thoughts, from a pure Being.

When you look at the world with thoughts, then you should be aware of the subtle pollution that exists. Thoughts come from memory, memory is the representation of an experience of the past, and so from the past you see the present. Hence, pollution happens.

Effective people learn to reduce stress,

enhance happiness and increase potential.

Is it not natural that we look at the world through these thoughts? If the answer is 'yes', then the possibility of a higher perception does not exist. Ordinarily, you look through thoughts. However, there is an extraordinary way of looking at life. Have you not observed many physically challenged people doing extraordinary things in life?

Mental setbacks are harder to cope with than the physical, because it makes people ineffective. They operate from the ''I can't'' rather than ''I can''. They operate from scarcity rather than abundance. They are rooted in poverty consciousness rather than in prosperity consciousness. We have to learn the art of coming from abundance rather than from scarcity. Creativity happens in this space. Effective people learn to reduce stress, increase happiness and increase potential. There is external and internal stress.

External stress involves your eating habits, pollution and erratic sleeping habits. Internal stress involves attitudes, beliefs, dogmas and negative patterns. One has to learn the art of handling them from a spiritual perspective. Meditation is a great way of making this happen. What do people really want in life? Most of us are like a ship in the ocean without a compass. What we want is success and satisfaction. Success is getting what you like and satisfaction is liking what you get.

Reflect on the following exchange between a traveller and a tourist guide: Traveller: ''What will be the weather at this point?'' Guide: ''The weather is going to be the weather that I like.'' Traveller: ''How can you get a weather you like?'' Guide: ''I don't always get the weather I like. Therefore, I learn to like what I get. So I get a weather that I like.''

The art of getting what I like and liking what I get - this, one should cultivate through spiritual practice.

Most of us are searching for happiness. We search for happiness in the world of objects and things. However, we fail to appreciate that the world of objects can give us pleasure but not happiness. People don't see this distinction; hence they suffer in life.

Once we learn the art of dissociating ourselves from the idea of misery, we will see so much of joy around us.

Happiness really exists within. The art of going within is one of the arts we have to learn. Once we discover the art of being happy within, then we will participate in the miracle called life. Have you seen the beauty of the sunrise? Very few people experience the ecstasy of the sunrise.

We live in a beautiful world, but we still continue to live in small ponds of misery. Even when we are pulled out of the ponds of misery, we continue to be in our own misery, for each one is identified with his or her own misery.

Once we learn the art of disassociating ourselves from the idea of misery, we will see so much of joy around us. We will participate in the sun rising, the sun setting, we will participate in the twinkling of stars and the moving clouds. The whole world will become a source of joy.

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See also: Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Death and Dying, Body Mind and Soul

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