How to Take Control of Your Joy

I have been thinking a lot recently about happiness. It is a subject to which not many people devote themselves. Until the advent of “positive psychology” in the last decade, the psyche was studied through the window of unhappiness. Psychologists had their hands full treating anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a host of other maladies to which the mind is inclined. It was assumed that happiness did not need much thought, overall. In 2021 when the General Social Survey asked participants whether they were happy, 80% of Americans answered in the affirmative (either “very happy” or “pretty happy.)

But there is a hidden trap behind this cheerful response. The expansion of happiness is the goal of life. However, you define success, if it did not bring a measure of happiness, success would not be worth attaining. So, what kind of success would make a person truly, deeply, and permanently happy?

Society pressures us to believe that external achievement are the key. If you attain enough money, status, power and all the other trappings of a burgeoning career, you will experience happiness. To this list, most people would also add the need for fulfilling relationships and a secure family life. We all learned about Maslow and his hierarchy of needs theory in college

The trap is that external success does not lead to happiness. The evidence is well-documented. Studies of wealth reveal that, beyond a certain modest prosperity, having more money does not necessarily buy greater happiness. Causation ≠ Correlation. However, it can be tied to a greater sense of well-being. On the broad scale, the traffic in pharmaceuticals for depression and anxiety is a multibillion-dollar business. Divorce rates hover around 50%, meaning that anyone’s chances of attaining a happy marriage are no more than random.

Standing back from this confusing picture, I began to think of one person who had the courage to assess, through his own experience, every avenue that might lead to happiness. He came to a definite conclusion, and he did it 2,500 years ago. Born a prince, he was carefully protected from any form of external suffering, yet by the time he grew up, simply the sight of other people’s suffering convinced him that money and privilege were fragile and unreliable. Every person, he reasoned, must confront disease, aging and death. Those threats were enough to undercut the comforts of the most coddled cherished lifestyle.

Therefore, he turned to a simpler existence. He left his family and wandered the countryside, begging for alms and depending on the kindness of strangers. He had no worldly obligations and enjoyed the simplicity he had found, yet his mind refused to be tamed. It ran riot with subtle fears and anxieties.

So, he decided to tame his mind by taming his body, because the body carries out the mind’s rampant desires.

Through rigorous discipline, he underwent one kind of purification after another until his body wasted away and he was on the brink of death. Yet his mind refused to be tamed. He crawled back to a normal existence, and as he recuperated, he wondered what paths was left to him.

By now, you may realize that we are talking about Siddhartha Gautama, the ancient Indian prince who became the Buddha. I think of him as somewhat of a doctor of the soul, someone who was willing to assess to the fullest what it means to be alive and conscious. Gautama spent year after year in dissatisfaction, searching for one thing: happiness that cannot be taken away. And year after year that kind of happiness eluded him—until he attained enlightenment.

The awakening of the Buddha is said to have taken place sitting under a tree on a moonlit night. But how can total transformation take place instantly after years of searching? Having found the goal of life, namely supreme happiness that can never be taken away, the Buddha must be called an ultimate success. I would like to suggest that what turned Gautama into the Buddha is quite simple: He discovered his true self.

I am in not Buddhist; rather, his story is symbolic of every person. Happiness is a universal goal, and if the Buddha’s soul experiment was valid, the true self that he found is always available.

By “true self,” I mean a level of awareness that is happy without reasons to be happy. It enjoys a permanent state of fulfillment, needing no externals. When you do not need money, status, power, or even other people to love you, those things do not vanish. They remain valuable as mirrors of your inner fulfillment. Or, to put it simply, the externals that people chase after are the byproducts of happiness, not the cause.

That is where my recent thoughts led me to the notion that enlightenment is the simplest and most basic way to be happy. Gautama found that pursuing his true self, as directly as possible, was the route to happiness.

As I see it, enlightenment is not only a normal state; it is the most normal state of existence. It is also the highest definition of success.