With our superior intellect, our thumbs and our gift for creativity, every human being should quite easily be able to work out what they need to feel content with their life. However, when I look around me at my fellow humans, I see something completely different. Instead of people living their life with self-awareness and self-knowledge, at peace with their inner self, I see lots of confused souls. I see people who have handed control of their emotional life to commercial interests. People who are looking for happiness in external stimuli which are completely superficial and temporary. People who are always searching for the next "fix". Hopping from one island of pleasure to the next, they never really feel satisfied or fulfilled. They hardly ever stop to ask themselves if this method is actually working. Am I getting the results I want?
Since they rarely stop and look at the results, they don’t notice the impact they have on the environment, their fellow human beings, animals and nature. If they ever do look up and realise that their behaviour isn’t giving them what they really want, the feelings that result from this brief moment of reflection are often so difficult to handle that they think it’s best to lower their gaze again and just press on to the next goal. Is this really a natural way of dealing with life’s challenges? I think the level of dissatisfaction, lack of engagement and mental ill health as well as the "every man for himself" mentality we see today, cannot be our natural heritage. Human beings are created to survive in a group. We all depend on the well-being of others to survive. An optimistic view of our own and the group’s capacity for survival should be a stronger, and therefore more natural power than such a negative perspective on our inner and external circumstances.
It is my belief that everyone is looking for meaning and a deep sense of satisfaction and inner peace. In order to achieve this, we must first understand how we really work. Then we have to apply this knowledge to our life and practise going in a different direction to the one we have been going in for so long. If we can achieve that, then we are ready to find insight into what actually make us happy. It may not be what you think and the method is probably both harder and simpler than you can imagine.
The purpose of this book is to present a method of looking at life that takes you along the path towards satisfaction and contentment. My aim also is to do this in a way that is easy to understand and easy to apply to your life.
My truth & your truth
This book is the result of many years of thought, investigation, analysis and personal experiment. Even if there is a lot of support for the conclusions in the book, it is important to point out that the "truths" presented are mainly my truths and of course there are other ways to formulate and verify this knowledge. I would like you, the reader, to take my truths as your working hypothesis and then look for your own truths about how you function and what you need to establish a deep feeling of satisfaction and inner peace _in your life.
The Book in a nutshell
If you want a quick overview of what Happiness and Suffering conveys, you should look through the book until you come to the chapter - The Book in a nutshell._
If you are very impatient and want the book’s message in an extremely simple form, look in the chapter - The Nut.