Introduction

Does the world need another self-help book?

When was the last time you were happy? I don’t mean the kind of happy that comes from a belly laugh or a mind-blowing orgasm. I mean the kind of happy that you sink into; the kind of happy that saturates every pore of your body and lingers. I mean the kind of happy where you are one hundred percent at ease, and your lips can’t help but slide into an easy smile. I mean pure pleasure.

A few years ago, I had one such experience. I was lying on the grass one summer night in the backyard of my friend’s house, staring at the stars, absolutely enraptured. Overcome by the beauty of the galaxy that lay before me, I had a powerful epiphany: happiness should be my default setting. It occurred to me then that happiness actually was the default, and in my day to day life, I was doing damn near everything I could to make myself miserable. Because of my actions, my words, and most fundamentally, because of my beliefs, I was creating a constant anxiety that prevented me from enjoying my life.

Despite all the advantages of modern life, most people aren't happy. I can see this clearly by the explosion of the self-help genre in recent years. Thirty years ago, if you walked into a random bookstore you probably wouldn’t find a self-help section. Sure, you might find a section on philosophy, or psychology, or religion, all which may contain books that could assist you in your quest for self improvement, but there weren’t much self-help books per se.

Perhaps the first self-help book, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich was published in 1937. The premise of the book was that merely by persistence and keeping a positive attitude, anyone could become rich (or achieve some other version of success). The book featured thirteen steps leading to success, most of which relate to some aspect of positive thinking. Think and Grow Rich was wildly successful and made Hill very wealthy. In large part, because of Hill's book, the self-help section is now ubiquitous.   

Many of the preeminent books that you might find in the self-help section take their cues from Hill. Either they focus on the power of positive thinking, as per The Magic of Thinking Big, The Power of Intention, and The Power of Positive Thinking, or they present a number of steps that lead towards personal transformation, as per The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The 48 Laws of Power, or The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.

My favorite example the ‘enumerated steps’ sub-genre is James Redfield’s 1993 blockbuster, The Celestine Prophecy, which contains nine sequential insights, leading to personal transformation. In the wake of The Celestine Prophecy’s runaway success came a sequel which revealed *surprise* a tenth insight, and then another sequel which revealed the eleventh, and then another after that which revealed an twelfth. 

Not all self-help books are created equal. Many of them center around dubious claims, or seek to dazzle with enumerated epiphanies, which ultimately fail to come to any meaningful conclusion. However, some such books are genuinely profound, like Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, which breaks the mold, by offering simple wisdom, with the express purpose of making the reader happy by anchoring him in the moment. Also in the self-help section, you may find powerful works from the canon of classical literature, such as The Tao Te Ching, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations; or The Essential Rumi. In my experience, self-help sections tend to have a lot of good books and a lot of not so good books. Consistently, they have a lot of books.

Whether good or bad, I’ve never seen a self help book that takes a graduated approach, starting with practical methods for bringing more happiness into our lives, and moving gradually to the more esoteric. For better or for worse, self-help books tend to take the approach of leaping headlong into ethics and philosophy, with little regard for anything else. I think there may be a better approach, and that’s what this writing is all about. Before I explain why I think a graduated approach may make more sense than the existing model, let’s take a minute to consider why we’re so unhappy in the first place.

Why are we so unhappy?

Why are we so unhappy, anyway? For starters, living in the modern world has had a profoundly negative effect on our bodies and our minds. Since time immemorial, our ancestors evolved alongside slowly changing natural environments...that is until two or three million years ago, when we started chipping knives out of flint. Since then, man has been the progenitor of an exponentially expanding mass of technologies. In an evolutionary blink of an eye, we have gone from living naked in trees, to playing video games in virtual reality. As a result of our environment changing such with staggering rapidity, our bodies and minds have not had time to adapt. We are yesterday’s humans living in tomorrow’s world, which is one reason why we are not happy.

Perhaps the reason why homo sapiens sapiens has altered his world so drastically in such a short span of time is his insatiable desire to acquire more. Condone it or not, it’s a natural human impulse. Whether in the relatively auspicious form of accumulating skills and knowledge, or the potentially disastrous form accumulating ever greater amounts of power and wealth, we always seem to want more. All but the very rare human being ever feel like they acquired enough, and as a result, most of us are damned to perpetual dissatisfaction. This seemingly inherent greed is the second reason why we are not happy.

Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, we are unhappy because we do not know ourselves. While the humble toad sitting on the lily pad never spares a thought to his place in the universe, man has been burdened with consciousness. Not to say that the toad is not aware, but he is not self-aware. Man, though self-aware does not understand the nature of his own self. Since man has conceptualized self, he has necessarily conceptualized other as well. As long as man believes that he is separate from the rest of the world, he can never feel whole. Perhaps that is why he is perpetually dissatisfied and always trying to accumulate all the things he perceives to be outside of himself. Self awareness is why the toad can sit motionless for hours like a Buddha, and why most men, in the absence of a television, cannot sit still for more than a few minutes.

 A Three-Tiered Approach

To address the problem of happiness in a logical, graduated fashion, I’ve decided to write about it in three parts, respectively pertaining to the body, emotions and mind. My reasoning is that by starting with the gross, physical, and easy to understand, and gradually moving towards the subtle and profound, we can create a momentum that will help us penetrate higher truths.

All human experience happens through the body. So regardless of your personal philosophy, if your body isn’t healthy, you’re not going to feel you best. By recognizing the ways in which modern life has detracted the natural behaviors of the body, we can identify our unhealthy behaviors and work towards correcting them. By using diet and exercise, and otherwise regulating our lifestyle, we can reliably affect a powerful change in how we feel. As anyone can attest, just by having something to eat, changing your breathing, or stepping into a different environment it's easy to quickly and effectively alter your mood. You don’t need to have a lot of insight to live a healthy lifestyle, just a little knowledge and dedication, so it’s a good place to start. Also, the returns in energy and positive outlook should make next step towards a deeper happiness a little easier.

The various emotions are not discrete experiences; they are different vibrations of a single phenomenon. A person can’t feel angry and delighted at the same time any more than a room can be both dark and fully lit. In the modern world, people have become so distracted that they often don’t feel much of anything. Largely because life’s various distractions, we have become estranged from our emotions. How can we feel happy, if we don’t feel at all? Sure, we all have moments of happiness, but few among us can sit in sustained periods of silence and just enjoy being alive. If we can only free ourselves from the various distractions and allow ourselves to engage in our emotions, we can all learn to be grounded in the moment. Learning to engage with emotions adds incredible richness to our lives, and allowing ourselves to be guided by them engenders wisdom and compassion. When our emotions become our allies, we are able to develop the concentration and equilibrium necessary to approach the deepest truths of who we are.   

Creating good health makes for a solid foundation of happiness, and cultivating emotional awareness brings it into bloom, but the deepest peace and most profound joy are only possible by knowing one’s self. Knowing ourselves is not an intellectual realization that can be summed up in a few words. In fact, it’s not a realization at all--it’s an experience we must have directly. To have this experience, one must see directly, the relativity of thought. It sounds simple and it is, simple. In fact, it’s so simple that most people miss it entirely. Luckily, there are things we can to do sharpen our powers of perception. First, we must learn to concentrate, and then we must learn to focus on nothing at all. If we can do this, the mind will become still, and a deeper awareness will begin to manifest. That deeper awareness is the key to self knowledge and true happiness.