Happiness Will Heal the World

An old way of being happy has brought the world to the brink of peril. A new way of being happy can save it. These are drastic statements, but if they are true, a profound change can occur, and its effect will only be positive. All the problems we see around us are the result of individuals making choices. No matter how huge a challenge may be, from global warming to nuclear arms, from AIDS to overpopulation, the seed of the problem was a decision to act in a certain way. When the decision was being made, the person making it tried to create more happiness or to avoid unhappiness. The question is how to make choices that lead to happiness without leading to unforeseen disaster.

That cannot be done when happiness is defined the old way, even though the old way felt safe. Owning a car and driving it to work makes most people happier than walking. Having a child makes married couples happy. Raking leaves in the fall and burning them in a pile was the mark of a responsible citizen in years past. Yet in the long run these simple actions resulted in global problems. Happiness can be blamed even for self-destructive behavior. During the Cold War the buildup of nuclear arms began as a way to keep us safe, for example, yet very soon the United States and the Soviet Union had achieved mutually assured destruction—that is, pushing a button to launch the first missile would set off a chain of events that would annihilate both nations.

Even before global warming and the arms race, people made choices every day in pursuit of happiness that didn’t actually lead to happiness. The old way of being happy carried certain beliefs and conditions that ensured unhappy results:

Each person is alone and must struggle to fulfill his desires.

The basic state of Nature is one of lack. There are not enough of the good things in life to go around.

The environment is hostile and therefore to survive means a life of struggle.

It is desirable to accumulate material goods without end. Rich equals fulfilled.

If you don’t look after yourself, no one will.

Making yourself happy today is more important than thinking about tomorrow.

Countless people pursue happiness without questioning these beliefs, but there will be no happiness for the world until we break their spell. Let me relate a moment in my own life that helped me to break it. I had taken my six-year-old granddaughter to the beach and watched her as she waded in the shallow water. She came to me to be dried off, and as I leaned over her, I smelled the salty smell of the sea in her hair. When I took her home, she said good-bye and I kissed her on the cheek, which still tasted salty from her splashing in the sea.

Suddenly I realized, “Here is the oneness of life.” The salt in the sea is the same salt that runs through every living thing. Simply smelling the sea brings a cloud of salt molecules into your body, and when you kiss someone on the cheek, the sense of taste brings more molecules from their body to yours. Nothing goes unshared. When you smell cigarette smoke from someone, you are inhaling particles of polluted air that were in someone’s lungs. Every moment we inhale viruses that incubated in someone else’s cells—these harmful microorganisms represent a worldwide circulation of DNA from one life form to another. In the poem “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman said, “Every atom belonging to you as well belongs to me.”

You are inescapably woven into the web of life. Think of a tree in tropical Africa, a squirrel in Siberia, a camel in Saudi Arabia, a Chinese peasant harvesting rice, or a taxi driver zooming through the smog-filled streets of Calcutta. You have raw material inside your tissues that was circulating in those bodies less than twenty days ago. Your body is not your own. It never was. The mathematics of radioactive decay reveals that each of us has at least a million atoms in our bodies that were once in the body of Christ, Buddha, Genghis Khan, or any other historical figure. In just the last three weeks a quadrillion atoms (10 followed by 15 zeros) have passed through your body that were previously circulating through every living species on this planet.

This sharing extends to subtler levels of existence, too. Each thought circulates around the planet thanks to the Internet, entering other nervous systems and being absorbed by them. Communications devices run on electricity, so once again we are part of one energy field and one information field. Likewise, our emotions are not confined to us. Anxiety over the economic meltdown enters every house in the world, producing shared responses among billions of people. When you feel your blood pressure rise, your heart race, and your skin grow cold, the same anxious reactions are affecting everyone who shares your extended emotions.

I’ve articulated this insight many times in many ways, but at that moment, watching my granddaughter get out of the car and run back into the house, the impact was undeniable. It was instantly clear that I couldn’t possibly hope to be happy in isolation, much less hope to be enlightened. I can take refuge in the illusion that “I” am separate, that “I” can compete against “you” to get what I want, with one of us winning while the other loses out. But this refuge is the most dangerous place anyone could live. The sense of separation causes us to make choices that come back to haunt us. All because salt molecules are drifting from the sea to a human body, and then another and another, without end.

I try to remind myself often of a quote from the English physicist and astronomer Sir James Jeans: “In the deeper reality … we may all be members of one body.” This is the first principle of the new happiness outlined in this book. It breaks the spell of separation; it makes possible the healing of the world at a time of great insecurity and crisis.

The second principle is that we all exist inside one another, because the air, food, and water that we take in and expel are in constant circulation.

The third principle is that this constant circulation is one process. Nature is behaving as a whole, leaving not a single atom outside the tapestry.

If these principles are true, a shift in awareness is the only way that happiness today can be attained without unhappiness coming along in the future. Currently, the happiness that people experience depends on someone else being unhappy (through poverty, exploitation, war, crime, and class division), or else on blinding ourselves to how insecure today’s happiness actually is when tomorrow brings a change.

We all have a global stake in creating happiness that is true and enduring. For many, the phrase “happiness will heal the world” sounds too far-fetched and wishful. And it’s true that a nice feeling or a sense of personal contentment doesn’t heal the world, far from it. But at a basic level, happy people wouldn’t choose to develop chemical weapons, start terrorist movements, commit acts of torture, and start wars. If even a small group of people found their true selves and thereby attained the happiness that can never be taken away, they would live at a deep level of awareness. From that level, the influence radiated out into their surroundings would be profound.

They would add an element to the world’s consciousness best described as “coherence.” (In an age of faith, we might call this saintliness, purity, or the peace that passes understanding.) This is everyone’s ground state, because coherence is natural; no cell in your body could remain alive for three seconds if life wasn’t systematic, organized, balanced, and interconnected. At the level of awareness, to be coherent in yourself means that you are:

At peace

Nonviolent

Awake and aware

Fearless

Without conflict and illusions

Resilient

Independent, free of outside influences

These shouldn’t be rare qualities. But they are when people grow unhappy, and their incoherence radiates out into the surroundings. Individual incoherence advances a state of chaos, confusion, and conflict. From that state, which all of us have known in our personal lives, the unhappy problems of the world follow as naturally as night follows day. When asked how to prevent war, J. Krishnamurti uttered something profound. He said, “Change yourself. Your own anger and violence are the cause of all wars.” The world has let incoherence spread like a pandemic. Now we must test whether coherence can have the opposite effect, bringing an end to chaos, conflict, and confusion on a global scale.

It was always true that we were dependent on one another for our emotional and physical well-being. A harsh word from someone else can cause physical havoc in your body. A loving word can turn havoc into harmony. Emotions such as love, compassion, empathy, and joy bring the body back to a state of balance known as homeostasis: self-repair mechanisms are triggered; a biological healing response is the result. If you are in such a state of well-being and I am around you, I will be affected in the same way. My physiology will mirror yours.

The underlying truth seems undeniable: My happiness can heal someone else just the way it heals me. The most important contribution I can make to the healing of our planet is therefore to be happy. By spreading that happiness wherever I go, I create a healing response. It’s crucial to realize that this doesn’t require doing anything special—you don’t have to focus on acts of loving kindness, although if they are spontaneous expressions of your happiness, that’s wonderful. It is not by saying or doing that we create the most profound change around us. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Who you are is shouting so loudly that I can’t hear what you’re saying.” The more intense your state of happiness, the greater its healing effect.

The healing influence of happiness travels literally at the speed of light. Like a single inspiring thought that goes on the Internet and reaches millions of people in a matter of hours, one person’s happiness is unbounded. It multiplies exponentially like a benign infection, creating greater order in place of disorder, greater unity in place of separation. So rather than clinging to a limited identity, see yourself on a world scale. If you are on the path to unity consciousness, it’s a small step to imagine happiness on a world scale, as part of humanity’s extended body, mind, and spirit. A matrix binds us together that is beyond any energy field or information field. It’s a spiritual field. This is the manifestation of what religions call the mind of God.

Now the vision is complete. As the ancient philosopher Plotinus said, “Our concern is not merely to be sinless, but to be God.” The happiest existence anyone can imagine is to live in the mind of God, a mind made fully human, which was God’s intention all along. Everything we fear in the world and want to change can be transformed through happiness, the simplest desire we have, and also the most profound.