How to Find Happiness

This is not your typical self help title easily repeating what most of these books tend to say. As with eastern philosophy, this book is geared more toward a sense of awareness. It’s practical, easy to understand, and easier to implement than one would think if we would only set aside our ego and human constructs that tend to point us toward rugged individualism rather than toward the greater good. Great bedtime read or anytime you need a gentle reminder of how to attain true happiness.

I've read other books on happiness, but this is the simplest and most straightforward I've found. Not that it's easy advice. On the contrary, unlike the messages we hear every day about how we deserve happiness and it's ours for the taking, Easwaran's surprising suggestion is to take our minds OFF ourselves and instead seek to help others. And he uses, of all people, George Bernard Shaw to illustrate his point: "he comes very close to the great mystics of all religions when he tells us we have an evolutionary imperative to grow beyond the conditioning of pleasure and self-satisfaction. "
Shaw's idea of hell is a place where you can do as you like, when you like, for as long as you like. Sounds like Madison Avenue's idea of the American Dream. But Easwaran points out that such a course will inevitably lead us to more isolation and unhappiness. Again referencing Shaw, he says, "I have never forgotten his dry observation that work belongs in heaven, and 'the true joy in life' consists in giving yourself completely to an overriding goal – 'a cause recognized by yourself as being a mighty one.' "
Easwaran's advice is practical but it is not a quick fix. Work belongs in heaven. Easwaran tells us how to do that work, and encourages us to make the effort. And somehow he makes us see that it is worth it, that it is, amazingly, what we wanted to do all along.