How to Find Happiness

ByEknath Easwaran

Release Date: 2012-01-07
Genre: Self-Improvement

Score: 4.5

4.5

From 22 Ratings

Description

Learn how to find true happiness by learning to live selflessly.

Easwaran is one of the twentieth century's great spiritual teachers and an authentic guide to timeless wisdom. He shows that true happiness is based on a paradox, which is why it is so hard to find. As long as we try to make ourselves happy, life places obstacles in our path. But as soon as we turn away from ourselves to make others happy, our troubles begin to melt away.

When we learn to live and work selflessly we don’t have to go looking for joy; joy comes looking for us.
This short ebook is based on two articles of deep insight, realism and warmth from Easwaran's Blue Mountain Journal

Reviews

How to Find Happiness
5
By Poetwoman
I've read other books on happiness, but this is the simplest and most straightforward I've found. Not that it's easy advice. On the contrary, unlike the messages we hear every day about how we deserve happiness and it's ours for the taking, Easwaran's surprising suggestion is to take our minds OFF ourselves and instead seek to help others. And he uses, of all people, George Bernard Shaw to illustrate his point: "he comes very close to the great mystics of all religions when he tells us we have an evolutionary imperative to grow beyond the conditioning of pleasure and self-satisfaction. "
Shaw's idea of hell is a place where you can do as you like, when you like, for as long as you like. Sounds like Madison Avenue's idea of the American Dream. But Easwaran points out that such a course will inevitably lead us to more isolation and unhappiness. Again referencing Shaw, he says, "I have never forgotten his dry observation that work belongs in heaven, and 'the true joy in life' consists in giving yourself completely to an overriding goal – 'a cause recognized by yourself as being a mighty one.' "
Easwaran's advice is practical but it is not a quick fix. Work belongs in heaven. Easwaran tells us how to do that work, and encourages us to make the effort. And somehow he makes us see that it is worth it, that it is, amazingly, what we wanted to do all along.