If happiness is defined as joy or positive emotions which we normally experience with our inner beings, therefore happiness has to start from within, rather than from without. For example, will you be truly happy receiving the insurance benefits of your beloved someone--benefits from the policy of a dead wife or a dead child? Certainly, not. True happiness thus, cannot be bought with money for it is all about yourself, not any stimulus outside of your person. To be happy with yourself is purely "self business"!
There are people who can't be truly happy with themselves amidst their millions of dollars or a good wife, a good job, or good-looking children. Again, because happiness is self business--it starts from within you. Solve that empty-something in your heart first, before you can have true peace with yourself, the real essence of happiness--yes, peace within!
What is that empty-something that's somehow invading your happy serenity? Well, it is that feeling of vulnerability, rejection, hopelessness, insecurity, irrational ambition, selfishness, a guilty conscience, a feeling of sinfulness--a feeling of being unclean, wicked and godless inside you.
Someone has well said this: "The first solution to a problem is acceptance that it really exists." Yes, it is never a happy feeling amidst good looks, riches, and fame, if in your unguarded moments the thought of becoming so poor or so old and sickly or having a divorce--or the thought of dying or of hell--comes flashing and swinging like a light of persistent truth occupying and parading in your reveries. We have a problem, an empty something, a vacuum inside us we need to be filled in with truth and reason. Adam of old experienced it after being catapulted out of paradise: our meaning! Why are we here? Where did we come from? Where shalll we go from here? These are the three questions of life. Answer them and you'll be happy!
I have a problem: Socrates taught us to "Know thyself" but failed to teach us how! I will tell you how: "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest," said Jesus Christ our Lord. Matthew 11:28.
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