There is a reason humanity has chosen “Happy New Year” as the best wish for one another during this season. The reason is that happiness is the greatest good; the ultimate aspiration of mankind.

In their book, “The Art of Happiness”, the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dalai Lama, who is also the spiritual leader of Tibetan people, and Dr. Howard Cutler, the American psychiatrist, submit that the purpose of our existence is to seek happiness. “It seems like common sense,” they wrote, “and Western thinkers from Aristotle to William James have agreed with this idea.”

It is for this reason that all of us are struggling to be rich, or at least to have enough money and other material things. We believe that money automatically brings happiness. Unfortunately, that is not exactly true. If money automatically brings happiness, why are some rich men and women still unhappy in life?

At this juncture, it is important to point out that there is a whole world of difference between happiness and pleasure. Many of us hardly give thought to the difference between pleasure and happiness, and therefore tend to confuse the two, or conceive of them interchangeably.

But happiness is deep-seated. It resides at the deepest level of our being or consciousness, and it is characteristically eternal. Pleasure, on the other hand, exists at the surface of our being and is almost by nature, entirely sensual and subject to the vicissitudes of life.

According to Dala Lama, what we are seeking is ultimate happiness, a kind of happiness that is stable and persistent, “a state of happiness that remains, despite life’s ups and downs and normal fluctuations of mood, as part of the very matrix of our being.”

The authors of “The Art of Happiness” also aver that happiness is determined more by one’s state of mind than external events. “Success,” they write, “may result in a temporary feeling of elation, or tragedy may send us into a period of depression, but sooner or later our overall level of happiness tends to migrate back to a certain baseline.”

Contentment is also a great pathway to happiness. Dalai Lama and Dr. Cutler put it this way: “Our moment-to-moment happiness is largely determined by our outlook. “In fact, whether we are feeling happy or unhappy at any given moment often has very little to do with our absolute conditions, but rather, it is a function of how we perceive our situation, how satisfied we are with what we have.”

To avoid encouraging people to be lazy and accept conditions that are less than what their abilities are capable of achieving for them, it is important to emphasise that being satisfied or contented with what we have should be after we have done our best.

But in all, the greatest source of ultimate happiness is genuinely loving people and being loved in return. It is a universal law that when we love people, people will love us. To be happy, therefore, in this new year, and at all times, we must eschew cruelty and wickedness. We cannot dish out unhappiness and expect happiness in return. If we produce unhappiness, we will also receive unhappiness. Similarly, if we dish out love, happiness, kindness and compassion, we get happiness in return.

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