How Do I Become Happy?

- What is real happiness?

- Which road leads to happiness?

- Religion is happiness.

Introduction

In the previous lesson, we knew that all people search for happiness and constantly try to get rid of pain and escape misery. Now, the significant question is: how do people obtain real happiness?

Various Means

Many people believe that happiness is gained through indulging one’s self in appetence and pleasures or through great fortunes and riches or through possessing more power and authority. In fact, however, what one gets from these things is nothing but a delusive and evanescent happiness.

This best describes those who are after life. The more they get fortunes and powers, the more their desire grows for more riches and authorities. Moreover, anyone who would compete with them to get the same shall become their enemy. They become satisfactionless as reported by Imam Al Sadek (peace be upon him and his household), “Life is like the water of the sea: the more you drink, the thirstier you become until you are dead.”¹ When the time of reality comes, one leaves everything he has gained and leaves away with nothing.

Real Happiness

The greatest mistake of those who follow dispersive and aberrant doctrines is that they do not think hard enough in the truths of their goals and intentions. They did not use their minds or refer to their pure instinct and sound of conscience. Had they done so, they would have realized that what they wanted was constant, real happiness which knows no pain or misery and which is never transient.

Life can never achieve this. Any weak person who feels fear and weakness and needs safety shall refuge to a powerful person. A poor person who has nothing to satisfy his needs and hunger shall refuge to the rich. A sick person who feels pain needs a physician. A lonely person needs a shoulder to cry on. Man’s need for power, safety, richness, affability and love is eternal and absolute; consequently, these needs are not satisfied by ephemeral things. True happiness and constant, absolute comfort are not achieved but through the one and only love, the perfection who is immortal: Allah, may His Name be glorified.

This is why we soliloquize and supplicate him in Al Jawshan Al Kabir, “O Ye who is near more than anything; O Ye who is the most beloved; O Ye who is strong than anyone; O Ye who is merciful than anyone…”

Imam Khomeini says, “The light of instinct has showed us the way to the fact that the hearts of all human beings aim at complete perfection… that is, absolute perfection is the beloved of all… so watch out, dear, and wake up from your inadvertence and feel happy since you have an eternal beloved who is evanescent, who is faultless and who is Allah Almighty.”²

He who denies this happiness because it cannot be sensed or does not go with his short-lived pleasures and appetence is either deep in inadvertence or is blind because he is far from sound conscience and sound mind.

Real happiness is like a beautiful garden surrounded with huge fences and has certain doors. What is beyond this garden is an arid desert. Infidels have looked away from that garden either because they have fallen in a deep pit or because they are busy sniffing the breeze of this garden’s odors from a distance or in a mirage they believe to be happiness. Should they reach this mirage, they would find it nothing and they still blunder in aberrance.

Almighty says, ﴾But those who were blind in this world, will be blind in the hereafter, and most astray from the Path.﴿³

Road to Happiness

On the other hand, believers considered true happiness with their insights and pure instincts. They only had to walk the way that lead to happiness – even if they had put up with some obstacles, they do not feel the same due to their anxiousness and eagerness to meeting Allah – and had to enter from the specified doors.

This road is described to us in the Holy Qur’an when Allah says, ﴾Whoever works righteousness, man or woman, and has Faith, verily, to him will We give a new Life, a life that is good and pure and We will bestow on such their reward according to the best of their actions.﴿⁴

As for the doors that Allah ordered us to enter the houses from when he said, ﴾… Enter houses through the proper doors…﴿⁵, they are the prophets and imams peace be upon them. In the sacred hadith, “I am the City of Knowledge and Ali is the gate that leads to it.” In Nudbah supplication when we soliloquize Imam Mahdi, we say, “Where is the door of Allah where we come through to Him?”

As a result, we know that righteous work is nothing but complying with the divine sharia to which we are guided by prophets and infallible imams.

This is why Allah has said, “O ye who believe! give your response to Allah and His Messenger, when He calleth you to that which will give you life…”⁶

Good life is not achieved for a believer unless he responds to Allah and to what the prophet calls for through the verses of the Holy Qur’an or through his Sunna because the Holy Qur’an mainly outlines the headlines of the sacred sharia whereas the prophet clarifies the ramifications and partial rulings thereof.

We can conclude why Allah has set the goal for his creatures, which is to worship, when He says, ﴾I have only created Jinns and men, that they may serve Me.﴿⁷

Therefore, serving Allah and real connection to him through abiding by the Sharia and worshiping through executing the rulings he has ordered us to execute is the right way to achieve happiness.

Believing is the Happiness and Safety

When man feels that he has a great power next to him which cannot be disabled by anything and which can get him all his needs and deliver him from any dejecting, he shall never feel hopeless, depressed or fear. On the contrary, comfort and delight shall overwhelm him in a way words cannot describe.

This is the state of a believer who has connected himself to Allah and depended on him. Allah is the Merciful Who takes care of him more than his mother does.

Allah says, ﴾Say: O my Servants who have transgressed against their souls! Despair not of the Mercy of Allah: for Allah forgives all sins: for He is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.﴿⁸

And Allah says, ﴾…And if any one puts his trust in Allah, sufficient is (Allah) for him. For Allah will surely accomplish his purpose: verily, for all things has Allah appointed a due proportion.﴿⁹

So, dear, let us come and chant this awesome paragraph from the Great Jawshan Supplication:

O He, Who created me and perfected me,
O He, Who provided me with sustenance and nurtured me,
O He, Who provided food for me and quenched my thirst,
O He, Who brought me near Him and brought me most nigh,
O He, Who protected me and kept me in safety,
O He, Who saved and guarded me,
O He, Who honoured me and enriched me,
O He, Who helped and guided me,
O He, Who befriended me and sheltered me,
O He, Who causes me to die and revivifies me.

* Path of Knowledge. Islamic Cultural Knowledge Organization. Knowledge Center for Islamic Studies and Researches.

^{1- Al Kafi, V2, P136.
2- Forty Hadith; Hadith of Instict.
3- Al-Qur'an, (Al-Isra [Isra, The Night Journey, Children of Israel]).
4- (An-Nahl [The Bee] 97).
5- 189 (Al-Baqara [The Cow]).
6- 024 (Al-Anfal [Spoils of War, Booty]).
7- 056 (Adh-Dhariyat [The Winnowing winds]).
8- 053 (Az-Zumar [The Troops, Throngs]).
9- 003(Al-Talak [Divorce])}.