Seven Laws of Being Happy

7 (Human and Spiritual) Laws of Being Happy Shrikant Soman
Success, Effectiveness, Abundance and Love are natural by- products of being Happy
Let us keep some basic understanding straight.
For being happy you need not believe in God or religion. You need not go to temples or do prayers.
You need not do charity or do ‘good deeds’ to earn some ‘credit’ points in heaven.
Earning lots of money, fame and popularity is neither craved for nor abhorred by a happy person. He may or may not pursue it. This may depend on the call of his heart. In any case, he does not attach any spiritual, religious or moral dictates to these things. Every persons mission in life is to be happy.

1 Do NOT Try Hard but do your best to get what you want.
Trying hard is not the same thing as putting in your best efforts. Trying hard requires you to push and pull yourself to the maximum. This creates the situation of your inner being getting driven by your outer being. This creates a dichotomy in your personality. Remember that your inner being does not like to be pushed and pulled. As the centre of power in your personality is at the outer being in ordinary cases, the inner being will not be able to resist the pressure of outer being. However, it will not remain passive to this whole affair thereby depriving the outer being of the wisdom and pure energy which only your inner being can supply.

2 Accept Reality without Emotional Judgement while at the same time trying to mould your environment the way you want.
Accepting reality does not mean accepting the present reality to continue in future. Accepting reality only means that the reality as it exists is accepted for the present. Please note that the reality ‘out there’ is not waiting to be accepted by you to become the ‘actual’ (?) reality. It is exists by itself. It does not need your acceptance for its existence. Your accepting the reality only means that you have full range of data to be used in your planning for the future. And your future lies not in next year or next month or next week or next day or next hour but from the next moment onwards ! The question of your liking or not liking the reality as it really (!) exists is irrelevant from the point of view of your getting the picture clear in your mind. This reality has to be accepted without any emotional judgement. Do not get instinctively excited or dejected, attracted or repulsed, loved or hated by the contents of the reality while taking stock of it. Any emotional judgement will put false colours on the actual picture as per your emotional palette. Please note that emotions do have a very important and extremely useful role to play in our life. However, they should not have any role to play while taking stock of the reality.

3 Consider enjoyment of life as a continuous and natural living process without critically depending on some event or status.
Shift the focus from ‘event’ dependent joy to the ‘process’ of living in Joy
Milestones and targets are very essential in charting out the life plan. Without milestones one would only drift without any definite course. However, their role should not be over emphasized. The moment they assume the character of ‘critical or crucial’ we lose in the net. The critical milestones may at times help us to have achievement of the goal. However, in the bargain we have to suffer ‘burn out’ at the level of our inner being. The amount of burn out is directly proportional to the ‘criticality’ of the target. More the achievement of the target is critical for us, more will be the amount of burn out of our inner being. At the core level, life should be treated as a continuous process. Every moment in our life is as precious as any other. Critical target puts a shadow on our present moment. Critical target can be anything like getting minimum percentage of marks in the exams, getting particular amount of salary and perks, getting a particular positions in the hierarchy of management, getting the love of our sweet hearts, winning an election, getting popularity and most importantly having a certain amount of bank balance. When we do achieve the so called critical target, the joy of achievement lasts only for a very short period when we are the peak. The ‘high’ we have gets to a ‘low’ by the law of emotional gravity. The law of emotional gravity states that we can not continue to remain in a state of joyful excitement if the cause of this excitement is any event external to us. It is like the tension applied to a rubber string. The moment the tension is releases, the string will get reset to its original length. In fact it will lose some amount of its strength as a direct consequence of the tension.

Consider enjoyment of life not as a special event depending on some event or status but as a continuous and natural living process.


4 Always strive for more, better, vaster of the riches of life without craving for these riches
Our religion has taught us to be satisfied with little. From childhood we have been brainwashed by the spiritual doctrines that money is the bane of our sorrows. Nothing can be farther from the truth. Money does buy comforts of life. It helps us to get free of the physical necessities and spend time and resources in pursuit of our desires. Money is good to us. And more money the better. This is not only a practical principle but also a great Spiritual Truth ! Money is a narrow term representing the vast riches of life. All that is there in this Universe is divine and its enjoyment is the divine foundation of our life.
However, we should not get hooked to any desire. The moment we are hooked to any desire, we get dragged by it. Our desire is like a powerful horse. As we learn to ride and master the horse, it will take us to places and we can at the same time enjoy the ride. If we do not know how to ride the horse and still make attempts to ride it, we will fall from the horse with our feet entangled in the padle. This will cause us to be dragged by the horse. There is no point in blaming the horse for our predicament. It is foolish if we shun the use of horse because we do not know how to ride it and instead prefer to walk the road. We should therefore learn to ride the horse in correct manner and enjoy the ride. Similarly, we should treat desires as our horses.

5 Do not depend on or even expect the spiritual justice for wrongs done to you or rewards for good deeds. Life is a natural process benevolent to every being.
People who cause you hurt reap the fruits of their Karma as per their life process and NOT as a result of justice for some wrong done to you
One of the biggest cause of misery in this world is our deep rooted belief in so called ‘divine justice’. Whenever we see any wrongdoing happening to us, we are told to believe that God is watching and he will punish the sinner. This make us depend on God for justice to be done. We comfortably shift our responsibility in the situation to God. This sense of justice also prompts us to do ‘good’ things so that we will be rewarded at future time. If we do not see justice done, we are told that it will happen at right time. This right time can even be in ‘after-life’ or in our ‘next life’. There is a subtle sense of helplessness in the hands of God in this belief system. We get dependent on an external agency – God to set right our affairs. The control centre of our life gets shifted from our inner being to somebody external to us. This will not work. We are not denying the existence of divine justice. However, this divine justice works by it’s own laws and not ours. In fact the word justice is not there in God’s vocabulary. It is a word invented by man. What we call divine justice is in fact divine plan of the cosmos. There is also an autonomous system of cause and effect called Karma in spiritual language. Again this system works in some mysterious ways not properly understood by man in ordinary course of life. We are better off in acting in life as if all this system of divine justice and Karma did not exist. It frees us from being bothered by any system of divine rules handed down to us by our religious teachers.
Let us start from the premise that ‘Life is a natural process benevolent to every being’. Life is benevolent to a virtuous man as well as to a sinner. Each one of us is a divine spark and have our origin in the Ultimate Source of Life – call it by any name. We are all equal citizens of this Universe. The reason we share the resources in unequal manner is due to our own choice and not due to the system of reward and punishment by God.

6 Get yourself free from ‘conventional’ spiritual commandments of living an ascetic life as a way to attain godhood. Accept this new commandment : To enjoy life is a greatest service to God and Humanity.
while at the same time, enlarge the scope of your ‘enjoyment’ to encompass the whole of humanity and other living world

We are indoctrinated by our religious upbringing in practically all the religions of the World to believe that God loves poor people. Poverty is a blessing. Poor are more human and loving and more nearer to God. This belief scuttles our clear enthusiasm for striving for the riches. Even if we do work hard, the guilt feeling at the background of our mind results in sub-optimum results. It also tends to make us live in double standards. One spiritual and other the practical. This double standard brings the element of ‘sin’ in our striving for the riches. In reality, spirituality and practical life are harmonized. The spiritual aim and the focus of our practical life should integrate. This will eliminate the idea of sin from our minds and will enable us to get the best possible results from our endeavour while at the same time the intensity of our enjoyment will be heightened considerably.

7 Be Self Centric in whatever you do while expanding your vision and horizon.
but do not be selfish
We always confuse between ‘self centric’ and being ‘selfish’. Being self centric is absolutely essential for the growth of our Self. We should not starve our Self for the cause of humanity at large. In this process, we neither serve humanity nor make our self satisfied. We are able to fulfill our mission in life only when the twin objectives of nourishing our inner Self and being of service to humanity integrate into one and cease to be ‘contrary’ objectives. Being Self Centric does NOT mean having excessive ego. It means that we get dictated by our inner voice and not by the books. We do what WE feel is right and not necessarily what is ‘told’ to us as being right by any OUTSIDER. Our primary purpose in life is to enjoy OUR OWN life. If we are clear about our focus, then only we will be able to plan our life in the divine wisdom of SELF. In this condition, our capacity and inclination to make humanity happier is increased manifold. On the other hand, if we starve our inner self by living an ascetic life without any inner spiritual inclination, we lost the most important source of our energy – from our inner SELF. And without energy, no work can be done – irrespective of our good and noble intentions. When we nourish our inner self by being Self Centric, we have twin consequences of opening the floodgates of Energy and of having a natural propensity to be of help to humanity and share our joy with larger humanity and thereby INCREASE our JOY as further nourishment of our SELF. This is a WIN-WIN situation.