Happines is the Place Where Nothing Bad Ever Happens

For sure, we live in a material world and guided by our senses, but within us a spiritual being is always yearning to re-channel our sense perceptions into a realm of happiness. For sure, pleasure is around us and always trying to please our senses, but our spiritual being yearns for a higher pleasure, a pleasure that leads us to success and much happiness for a life well-lived. The only requirement to achieve success and happiness is that we accept this realm as if it was a self-evident truth—a spiritual axiom. Happiness through human auto-realization begins with this simple fact: it is always there, and it is as certain as the animate and inanimate things we observe around us. When Thomas Jefferson was drafting the American Declaration of Independence, his first draft included these words: “We hold these truths to be sacred…” Benjamin Franklin, in an attempt to keep the document free of religion (though the word Creator could not be avoided) persuaded Jefferson to change the phrase to read: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” So there’s nothing new in affirming that the pursuit of happiness is a lofty goal that goes beyond material rewards, and that it exists. Man —mortal being that he is— has the privilege of enjoying many physical pleasures: money, affection, love, possessions, fame, glory, and other rewards which are but of a temporary nature. We see them all around us and at all times. Yet happiness transcends materiality; it conquers time and space. Our spiritual development depends first of all in accepting that our happiness is lasting, permanent, and unchanging, for in the realm of the spirit change, mutation, space and time are surpassed. While art may please our senses and –at times— transports us temporarily into a realm of bliss, this oceanic feeling will soon wane, leaving us empty, devoid of continuous enjoyment. In contrast, spiritual bliss is lasting, for it makes us whole, engulfing us with a sublime feeling of goodness. Happiness is indeed goodness. In the realm of happiness nothing bad ever happens! No disasters, catastrophes, or atrocities ever mar the realm of happiness. Truman Capote, a much underrated writer, wrote a novelette entitled Breakfast at Tiffany’s. In this novel the heroine Holly Golightly loves to visit the famed 5th Avenue super jewelry store. Although many scholars, critics, and commentators have reviewed the novel and the film by the same name, no one that I know has commented on what –to me at least—is the moral lesson of the book: that in that super jewelry store –Tiffany’s—nothing bad ever happens there. It is there where Holly finds happiness. And we all carry in our hearts our own Tiffany’s: in a good heart nothing bad ever happens.

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