"The Work" by Byron Katie is wonderful. You ask yourself four questions about your demons, and then turn it around. Great healing and getting around mental obstacles. Check out the six videos on the right side of her website, They are mind blowing life altering videos.

This is what happiness is for a lot of kids in canada

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxOvnTtyQSg

Maybe in a physical reality where, ultimately, we exist only within what we can experience with our 5 senses, there has to be a physical correlation to what is within our consciousness.

A trinity of HEALTH,WEALTH and LOVE. It sounds a bit simplistic but with a good measure of health,money to free us from worries and the love of partner,friends and God..well it sounds pretty much like happiness to me.

Graham

Being at peace with one's existance.

Happiness does not happen randomly. It is a result of a series of actions. You have the power to make conditions right for happiness. You can choose happiness today by setting a goal that will command your thoughts, liberate your energy, and inspire your hopes.

Hi @Robert I must admit I'm surprised that your question "What is happiness?" is stacked away in the archives of IQ and has attracted so little interest.

For me this question is fundamental. The short answer of how I see happiness is that it's the hidden motivation for "everything" I do. Whenever I wish for something, whenever I have a want, whenever I have a desire ... it's always an emotion that I really want and that emotion is happiness. The thing that I wish for is just an imagined pathway into feeling the emotion that I really want and what I really want is to feel happiness.

Mind you it's taken me a long while to realize this so I can understand why and how it is so often overlooked. I've been down many of these paths and acheived many things, money, sex, money sex, money, sex :) did I end up happy? nope. Live quietly alone in a secluded place with mother nature as company, was I really happy? I was calm and really felt sometimes in deep harmony with nature, the trees, the grass, the birds, but was I deeply happy all the time yes you've guessed it, nope I wasn't happy all the time often I felt lonely. I must admit the period of my life that I really enjoyed quite a lot was when I gained good money collecting vehicles, all of which just so happened to have left their destination at the exact second as they were in the same spot as me, at the same time as me, illegally defying the law of probabilty. For those that don't understand the meaning of that last phrase to put it bluntly "I stole vehicules!" was I happy? half the time yes the other half the time I scared the **** out of myself and sometimes just before the start of a hazardous operation I would actually physically experience getting the runs.

But the funny thing is that when I was scared I enjoyed it. So in other words I was feeling good happy half the time and feeling scared happy the other half, great I was on to something, but "good happy" "scared happy" does that make sense? well yes if you change the usual definition of happy.

ok so what does fear mean; a very unpleasant or disturbing feeling caused by the presence or imminence of danger yet for me it was a driving force. Perhaps I'm jumping ahead too fast and should clarify what I stated earlier that "happiness is the hidden driving force for everything I do" how did I come to that conclusion?

Here's a useful mind game that I enjoy and it does actually correspond to my reality, it shows that if I keep asking questions like why? how? what does it bring me? ... on anything that I do it all boils down to an emotion that I wish to feel and that emotion is happiness.

It's the magic genie mind game; the magic genie (symbol of the all powerful) can grant me three wishes on the condition of being very precise on what I wish for; this is an imagined dialogue between the genie and me represented by the sporty young woman (my better half)

There's an important point I'd like to make clear, whenever I wanted something car, sex, money, you name it, whenever I really got the "thing" I wanted what I thought would happen when I got that "thing" never happened. I thought that with money and sex I'd be happy, that with a calm quiet life style I'd be happy. The stealing vehicles bit was make or break, do or die attitude, an act of desperation and anger.

So what is all this about stealing vehicles was both enjoyable and exciting? A moralist would probably say because I had lost all concern or judgment of right and wrong of human action and character. On this point you maybe surprised to know that I agree entirely "I had lost all concern or judgment of right and wrong of human action and character" yes absolutely.

I invite you to ponder that for a while because it gives the key to what follows.

So how come stealing vehicules even though it is considered as "bad" by many, even though it is illegal, even though I risked going to prison, even though some operations could have finished in a disaster, even though I kept telling myself I must be crazy ... How come I enjoyed it? Because it was all that, it was extremely exciting, it sharpened my senses to realize I was in danger, it was full of different emotions, fear, joy, excitement, calm, control, feelings of being "alive".

So what is happiness? the way I feel happiness to be is to experience a wide variety of emotions in a stream like fashion. What I mean by stream is to experience the emotions flowing within. I feel sure that everyone knows what I'm talking about, just imagine yourself doing something that you really enjoy the emotions flow within they can be emotions of joy, excitement but also fear, distrust, anger, disappointment, but in the flow they all blend into a wonderful joyful and happy thing. There's no judgment, no right or wrong, no negative, you just go with the movement and enjoy every minute of it.

All this I learned long before I came to IQ, I've always been more or less interested in psychology, science fiction and the unknown and the only practice I'd really put in to action were the teachings of "The Lazy Man's Way To Riches" by Joe Karbo. I found his method efficient and it certainly got me out of a difficult situation and taught me the value of making a plan and visualization. For me all emotions are useful and form a dynamic couple, without which there's just no motor.

So you can imagine my confusion when I came to IQ and people talked of negative energies and how to transform or eliminate them, to me it just doesn't make sense. To me it's like taking part of the motor away so that it's capacity to perform is diminished. I like to use the metaphor of electricity, truth is no one can really explain what electricity is but we can use it as a "source" energy. Without rapidly oscillating polarity (that oscillates at the speed of light) there just ain't no juice. And the greater the polarity the tension if you wish, the greater the power. Take the two commonly considered extremes of joy and fear that is where the greatest tension is. Now look towards the center overwhelment disappointment, the tension is inert. It's neutrality. Here's a graphical representation;

Notice that this system converts "vertical" spiritualized neutral "source" energy into "horizontal" polarized earth energies.

When you can line up all emotions to perform a particular task, you can blow a black hole in the blue sky, metaphorically speaking of course and make the connection.

Wait a minute let's look closer at that last phrase and put it in the first person "when I line up all my emotions (that is energies) to perform a particular task, I can blow a hole in the blue sky", or metaphorically take off like a rocket. hmm

here's a bit of info showing that the human magnetic field mirrors the earth magnetic field

At this particular point you may be wondering "well what's all this got to do with the original question, what's happiness?"

From all this my conclusion is that happiness is a state of abundance, plenitude, full of everything. Remember the magic genie it can give me anything I want on condition I am very precise. Imagine the abundance of everything under the sun. The earth's magnetic shield is a great selector of beneficial energies, my magnetic field mirrors that shield though often the mirror is distorted or clouded thus masking the way that abundance is shown to me that I can easily misinterpret as negativity. I very much like the definition of abundance given by Bashar "The ability to do what you need to do when you need to do it" there ain't no definition clearer than that!

There's an excellent symbol of abundance it's "Cornucopia"

Now I have an amusing question to ask you ... what do you think would happen if for my first wish I asked my magic genie for "cornucopia"? :)