Creating Happiness Intentionally. Sandy MacGregor
of the happy moment in the midst of misery. She says:
When you reach that moment of complete despair the Universe or God or whatever, will actually intervene to give you one of those moments of profound and inexplicable happiness. It does this just to show you the potential that is still there. I have spoken to many people who have experienced that moment. It is given to us gratis, completely free! What we do with that moment is ultimately up to us and might actually be one of the tests of our lives. We can slide back and lose it. Or we can hold it before us and use discipline and intentional acts to pursue it.
This type of experience is by no means confined to the people of our own time. It is recorded in many places in more ancient literature. Religious writings are full of it, descriptions of ecstasy, sublime happiness, unbounded joy. For example, in the Christian scriptures Saint Paul, in the second letter to the Corinthians, describes the experience in which, he reports, he was taken up into the ‘third heaven’. He tells that he saw things beyond the ability for humans to understand. There has been much conjecture about what Paul was describing, because notions such as ‘third heavens’ have nothing to do with the core of Christianity at all. So it must have been something which was happening in St. Paul’s mind and even St. Paul could not decide whether the experience was a physical one or a purely spiritual one. Whatever it was it must have been a powerful experience because it was one of the things that kept him going throughout his whole life. St. Paul led a life in which he experienced considerable suffering. He was shipwrecked, imprisoned, persecuted, beset by personal torments, and probably suffered blindness too. One explanation of his ‘third heaven’ account is that it may have been one of those experiences at the moment of final despair.
Another interesting historical account is from the life of John Bunyan. I was once intrigued by the life of this man, a copper smith in pre-Industrial Revolution England. It is reported that he was physically unattractive, quite ugly in fact. He carried a heavy anvil tied to his back with ropes, eking out a living as he went from place to place. John Bunyan led a life of great hardship and very little worldly achievement and yet reports in his writings great moments of spiritual joy. The anvil has been preserved in a church in England where there is also a stained glass window depicting John Bunyan on the road. To some art critics the subject of the window might seem quite corny but it moved me to tears when I first saw it. It shows the heavy ropes breaking and the weight of the anvil falling from his back as he first leapt to that wonderful moment of spiritual freedom. It moved me so much because it so closely depicted a part of my own experience. I’m sure the happiness John Bunyan reported is an example of the Universe opening up and showing us the potentialities.
Interestingly too, both St. Paul and John Bunyan are examples of people who did not let the glimpse of happiness slip from their sight. They held the glimpse before them and pursued it for the rest of their lives. Maybe we can copy their example.
In our quest to create happiness intentionally, it is necessary to spend some time looking at the other side of the coin. We need to look at the questions: What is unhappiness? What makes us unhappy? What were the features in our lives when we experienced unhappiness? The purpose of looking at this other side of the coin is not to go back and wallow in the unhappiness we had, nor to engage in negativity. The purpose is to be able to identify what we want to avoid. Surely an action plan to create happiness intentionally needs to comprise several major strands: the things we need to do to avoid unhappiness and the things we need to do to create happiness.
Towards the end of my last book, ‘Switch On To Your Inner Strength’, I asked the question: “Where to from here?” and made the following suggestions:
It is very important to use your inner strength in a deliberate manner rather than by accident.
It is very important to develop a routine of daily meditation.
It is very important to be clear about what is your life’s purpose now and what goals you need to achieve to fulfil this purpose.
It is very important that you clearly identify your values and having done this, to make sure that your values support your goals.
If, in this whole process of meditation, you find that there is a conflict between your ‘life’s purpose now’, your goals and your values, then you must be prepared to change one of these to bring them into alignment. Something’s got to change.
It is important to establish a hierarchy of purpose. It would seem to me that discovering your life’s purpose now is at the top of the hierarchy. Goals and values are the ways in which you pursue your purpose. They must all be pointed in the same direction.
Purpose, goals and values in alignment – that’s what this book is all about. And I believe we can create happiness intentionally by finding out what our purpose is and following it. In order to liberate ourselves to follow our purpose it is essential to examine deeply the values underpinning our lives. We’ve got to stop still for a moment in the rush of everyday life to look at our belief systems.
There is a Chinese word ‘Chi’ which deals with the concept of achieving peace by harmonising the work in all areas of your life. At the simplest level this involves harmonising the goals we are working towards with the value system we hold. There can be no harmony if our value system is in discord with our objectives.
Though the word Chi itself might be Chinese, the concept is by no means exclusively Chinese. It occurs in all cultures in one form or another. It is certainly deeply rooted in western culture and forms a major pre-occupation of important philosophers such as Aristotle and Aquinas. It’s the basic idea behind the term you hear in business from time to time – Synergy two different parts sharing some common ground and working together to produce a beneficial result. How many lives would be more fruitful and fulfilling if this simple concept of alignment of goals and values was followed? How many lives are led in complete frustration because people are perpetually divided in their attention, constantly fighting with themselves over what they want to do? How many lives are led, from start to finish, in mediocrity, boredom and aimlessness for the same reason? How many lives wallow in that limbo of not really being sad, but not really being happy either?
Modern life has done a lot to reduce the direct causes of misery, but has it really made us happy? Probably not. Happiness is in our own hands. It is our own responsibility. This is possibly the key concept of creating happiness intentionally. Happy people are often the ones who choose to be happy and who work at it!
Happy people are often the ones who have chosen a purpose in life, a reason to be here, and are working their way towards the achievement of the purpose on a day by day basis. They are on a journey towards their purpose and gain happiness from the process of being on the journey.
If other people can do it, you can do it too. You can choose to be happy. The bad news is that, in choosing to be happy, you might have to face some conflicts in your life and resolve them. This may present you with considerable hardship. You will have to work at it! The good news is that there are specific techniques, mental tools if you like, to help you in the process. These tools are easily learnt and applied and will be of enormous benefit if you want to Create Happiness Intentionally.
The vital, next stage in the idea of alignment is to go one step further than just aligning your goals and values in the conscious part of your mind. You need to find a process whereby the goals and values in both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind are put in alignment with each other. They need to be ‘synchronised’. A typical example of a mismatch between the goals and values of the conscious mind and the goals and values of the subconscious mind often occurs when a person makes a ‘spur of the moment’ New Year’s resolution.
The ‘spur of the moment’ New Year’s resolution is often made exactly at midnight on New Year’s Eve when everyone at the party is in an exuberant mood and all calling for resolutions to be made. A particular resolution is often chosen because the person making the resolution thinks he ought to do ‘such and such’. So the person is often acting under a sense of obligation to others rather than a true and deep motivation within himself.
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