by Ryan Meyers

Created on: November 11, 2008   Last Updated: October 27, 2009

The Secret to happiness! Is there one? I think you first must define happiness. I've been trying to be happier for a very long time and it seems I was not only focusing on the wrong things to make me happy, I didn't even understand what happiness meant to me!

This is the fundamental problem with searching for happiness. Everyone's happiness is different and happiness for one person may be Hell for another. A racist may feel that abolishing all other races is bliss and we know this certainly is not true.

I think I was under the impression that happiness is an overwhelming feeling of joy that dominates every moment of life. This happiness does not seem to exist, nor should it.

During my self exploration of happiness I was enlightened by something I read in a book that was written in the early 1900's. The author wrote this; "happiness is not the constant state of overwhelming joy, it is simply the predominance of positive thought moment to moment!"

Think about that! When I first heard this I was sort of floored. You need to understand that I was already practicing thought control to attract the things I thought would make me happy. What I found was my daily life became incredibly easy and more joyous. When the realization that my new thought process was keeping me completely present and overwhelmingly happy, I started to see that the happiness is in the gratitude of living not the things I want in life.

Of course this is always known in mind but I started to really feel it deep inside me. My perception of life was changed and I know longer worried about anything at significant length. It was at this moment that I read the author's enlightening statement. The statement suggested that all I needed to posses happiness was to cultivate it and to do so through thought control.

It sounds easy but being responsible for your thoughts is incredibly daunting but the reward for such hard work is incredible.

Exercising these thoughts helped me realize that all my life I was sabotaging my happiness because I allowed the world to define me instead of defining "it"! Sure life will bring incredible hardship at times but the mind that exercises positive thoughts will stay lucid and therefore be more likely to continue happiness.

I do believe there are parameters on happiness and I mean it in a way of true happiness and false happiness. The easiest way to explain this is to use drugs as a reference. If you are happy because you are high from drugs, you have false happiness. It

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