Happiness is your inheritance!

If I ask any one of you, what is the one thing that you ultimately want in life, I take it for granted that your answer is going to be, happiness.

- ITTOOP PANIKULAM, SVD

Don’t be surprised, the same question will be answered in the same way by the elders too, including senior citizens all over the world. If you have any other answers, it would seem that the question had not yet reached the heart, the natural storehouse of happiness. The key to open the door of the store is love, and you are given total freedom to deal with it as you like.

The frequency, intensity and duration of happiness depend on the quality and the measure of love you have stockpiled in your heart. Hearts are more or less similar in size. A human heart is often compared to the size of a fist and a cow’s heart has the size of a human head. Poor cow! Size does not matter when it comes to love and happiness. Even a dog’s heart, biggest among the animals in its proportion to its size, cannot generate love, so no real happiness is possible for dogs either, except ‘puppy love’. If the heart centre is awake and aglow, it soaks up the entire being into loving — becomes self-love; self in the embrace of love. When that becomes true, happiness is guaranteed. Size does not matter, quality does. Some fist-sized hearts can contain an ocean of love. Some others may be ponds of it. Some may even be drying up...

The heart does not know how not to love, it is learned on the way. Heart, because its objective is love, wants relationships not divisions. To create divisions, the mind has to advise, to coax and to compel the heart to produce something that it does not want — hatred. If you hate anyone in the world, the psychological X-ray shows that there is hatred, a virus in your heart. It does not matter towards whom your anger is directed, you become the first culprit and begin to punish yourself although your wish is that someone else gets harmed. You are then one virus-affected.