What Does Happiness Depend On?

Happiness is relative. We can find people living under very difficult conditions who smile, support one another, and enjoy life, while people surrounded by wealth, success, and comfort might live under constant pressure and rarely experience genuine happiness.

Happiness therefore does not depend primarily on our socioeconomic situation, health, age, or social status. It depends on whether we have sources from which we can receive fulfillment for our inner life.

The most influential factor is the attitude we receive from those around us. When people feel close, understand and support one another, and develop a connection from heart to heart, this inner connection fills them with happiness. We are social beings, and therefore we need to feel the support of our environment.

This also changes how we experience difficult events.

In truth, there is no evil in the world. Our entire existence is an opportunity to rise from a life experienced through suffering, threats, and difficulties to a life of happiness and fulfillment. However, to make full use this opportunity, we need a good environment that is built on values of mutual connection, support, and love.

We are all connected in a single global, integral system. When people become conscious of this internal network and begin building relationships that correspond to it, they become included in one another. Then a burden that falls upon one person can, in a sense, be distributed among everyone. Even something that initially appears bad can become an opportunity to deepen the connection between us.

This is why the best help during a crisis is to connect with the right environment, a society aimed at friendship, mutual responsibility, and love. Such an environment gives us a broader perspective and teaches us to see life as a continuous process of development.

Kabbalistic sages said that a person must bless the bad just as he blesses the good. What appears to us as evil can ultimately direct us to a higher state if we use it to strengthen our connection.

Nature is a single closed, interconnected system, and everything that happens to us can become an invitation to rise toward greater harmony with it.

The key to happiness is therefore not hidden somewhere inside me alone. It exists in the connection between my heart and yours. From that connection comes both genuine happiness and the strength to overcome the difficulties of life.

Based on "New Life 226 – Maintaining a Positive Attitude, Part 2" with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.