A few days ago I had a very emotional discussion about happiness with a person very close to me. It was about the attainment of happiness and where it comes from. Intellectually it was very clear to me where it is considered to come from, but as I was not very happy during this discussion I thought that I better think about it a bit more.

I guess that everybody, at least everybody who happens to come cross these pages, knows that real happiness has to come from the inside.

But there is often quite a difference between knowing something with our head and knowing it with your guts. In my opinion I am required to really DO something to attain this gut-feeling.

It is so easy to take the route of “When only Henry is nice to me and loves me then I will be happy” – but have you ever experienced that this actually works for an extended period of time?

So why do we try to find happiness on the outside? Is it laziness, fear, or plain stupidity?

As you can guess from the simple fact that I pose these questions, I probably have an answer to that, right? Otherwise why would I write this article in the first place.

And indeed, I do have an answer – – – perhaps.

I observed in all the many different faculties of new age ideas, philosophies and religions that there seems to be one hidden element they all have in common, that actually makes them work. And it is usually not the obvious.

An example or two:

One of my favorites – urine-therapy – does it work? Reading literature about it, it sure seems to. Some swear by it. But others turn in disgust.

Then one from my own experience – macrobiotic – the philosophy that is, here in the west, mostly known for it’s data on nutrition, the yin-yang principle applied to food. Does it work? I have seen it work, for myself and others around me. But I also have seen it do nothing or even creating undesired effects.

Behavior like that causes me to believe that it is not the thing being advertised by the philosophy or religion, that does the job, but another – hidden – element.

My current belief is that this element is “taking responsibility.”

Let me tell you the one instance where this became apparent to me, even though it is sad that I had to loose a person to understand it. At about the time when I learned about macrobiotics my father was admitted to a hospital with heart problems. As it is usual in the medical world, the physicians took charge and did what they are trained to do. So – somebody was there who took responsibility and things improved. But from which view-point? I would say from the physician’s. The doctor took charge and in his universe things where handled. One element of making the improved conditions persist, was to prescribe medication be be taken from now on and never to forget.

But what happened in my father’s universe. He had taken no responsibility whatsoever, he was completely the effect of the the physicians doing. I am sure that if nothing else had happened, he would have gone home, had taken his medication religiously and had died some short time later.

But in this case he grasped the idea of macrobiotic. I had to make a photo-copy of my book because I could not find another copy, sent it to him and asked him to read it – all without much preaching which I was used to at those times long past. Somehow he managed to take responsibility for himself, reclaimed the delegation for his well-being previously given to others. What happened in the physical world was that he tossed the medication in the trash, stopped believing that he would die without it and started cooking – together with my mother – to make himself well. And it worked – within a very few weeks he was working in his garden and not too much later he started the group activity of “senior citizens dance”, became a group leader and lead a very fulfilled life.

Seeing only this part of the story, I would still have believed that it was the practice prescribed by macrobiotics that had fixed him, but the story is not finished yet.

After a few years of traveling all over Germany and a few other bordering countries, in which he taught seniors to dance and told about his experience with eating healthy, he got sucked into some believe-system that wanted to heal every ailment with some special tea. This theory of healing was rather contrary to what he had learned from macrobiotics but regardless of which of the two was right and which other was wrong, what he did was to abandon what he had believed in without any real reason. He had not been sick, so there was not reason to change. But he dropped his believes in favor of something that another offered, promising something that he actually did not even need.

He gave up taking responsibility for himself and delegated it to somebody else.

And that turned out to be deadly.

He had given up the state of mind of “taking charge” once, so it was easy then to do this again. After all the teas did not work, he was sure that there was something not ok, therefore he had himself checked out by the established medicine and the frowning of the family doctor over the blood test results made him die of leukemia some time later.

But now wait a minute – there are so many instances where somebody gets healed by another person! There are many people coming out of the hospital well again, kahunas fixing a broken bone instantly or miracle healers doing what they are named after.

Good old buddy Jesus showed us how to do this – but then he also gives us a clue on what really happened.

“Not I but your faith healed you.”

Back up a moment – – – FAITH??

With a few thousand years gone by and with translations into several languages we can safely assume that this is not what he said and meant. Not in the sense how the word faith is understood and used these days. Certainty or knowing would be much better words. Jesus just as all the others that heal professionally had taken charge in the beginning and then were able to pass that state of mind on to the person being treated.

And knowing that something is this or that way – I mean really knowing without any doubt – is the state of mind of being in charge. The good healer, from the witch doctor to the surgeon, has to have the ability to instill this certainty into his subject that things are ok, therefore making him taking responsibility in form of knowingness.

All the patients that cling to their doubts will be back soon.

Now lets get back to happiness where we started from.

Certainly things outside of you can make you happy. Falling in love with somebody and having this love returned sure makes happy. Even winning a few millions in the lottery can make you happy. As long as you are sure that this is the one thing that makes you happy, so sure that you take charge for your own happiness.

As soon as the first doubt comes in that you are really the only one for your sweetheart or that the money will last for the rest of your life and you feel the need to run to somebody or something else to help you get the happiness back – there goes the happiness.

So we can now see that the statement that true happiness comes from the inside does not quite get it right either. It just seems to be that way because usually we are “inside of us.” The inside-happiness is created by ‘taking charge’ which is a creation of our very essential “I” which is beyond and above any happiness.

Happiness starting on the outside can make for good happiness as long as we convince ourselves that we are responsible for it.

Happiness born on the inside can turn into pretty good un-happiness if we develop doubts about it and thus give up responsibility.

There is never a right or wrong way of becoming happy, only the one where we take responsibility and then things are so obvious that they are beyond good or bad, right or wrong.

Before ending up one word of advice though: please don’t get stuck in taking responsibility for each and everything. Being stuck is a pretty destructive thing, so keep your ability of being completely irresponsible and enjoy both sides of the coin.

Man! – here we go again – enjoying means making it your own, which is another word for taking responsibility – that’s why it will work when you enjoy it.

Be seeing you!