Part 6

Think of blessings, and keep happy.

Think of the blessings of others. Anything is better than giving attention to supposed injuries and hardships, and to sorrows, and resenting or bemoaning them.

or to Reasoning

When things seem amiss, then is the time to give all your thoughts the upward direction. Keep happy. Hold on to Happiness, not like grim death but like irrepressible life.

Remember that “everything serves some useful purpose.” If you refuse to keep happy, at least determine to find out the useful purpose. But, as soon as you can, come back to yourself, and keep happy.

Help Others

Help others. This is the old and ever new way. As Maeterlinck says:

“Before we can bring happiness to others, we must first be happy ourselves. Nor will happiness abide within us unless we confer it on others. If there be a smile upon our lips, those around us will soon smile too; and our happiness will become the truer and deeper as we see that these others are happy.”

Therefore, keep happy by helping others. We can help others by our thoughts--by wishing them to be well and happy and successful, or by imagining them to be well and happy and successful. We can help them by all our expressions--our words, our looks, our acts--and by our very abstinence from non-happiness.

Abstain from Thoughts against Others and against Self

Merely to send out no thoughts and to harbour no thoughts against other persons or things, or against ourselves, is a step in the right direction. I once saw hornets destroyed by a man who stood over the nest and, as each hornet came out, knocked it down and killed it by a blow from a little wooden bat. So we can beat down any undesirable thought--of worry or failure or resentment, etc.--so that it ceases to live and poison us or others.

But still this is negative. It is not positive and constructive. To keep happy, we must fill the glass, drop by drop, with the sparkling and fresh water of Happiness; and then the dirty water will automatically trickle away, and--who knows?--somehow become a kind of mental manure and fertiliser.

“Self-Suggestion”

Self-Suggestion is a great help, if we would keep happy. We can tell ourselves to keep happy, in the same way as Peter Latham, at a hard and critical point in one of his Professional Championship Matches, kept not only happy but also plucky by telling himself to “buck up,” as this was the chance to bring out his best game!

Self-Suggestion has many forms and varieties. Henry Wood, in his “Ideal Suggestion Through Mental Photography,” advises us to write down inspiring “Self-Suggestions,” and to look at them often. Leland, in his “Have You a Strong Will?” advises us to determine, the last thing at night, that the next day we will, for example, work calmly and easily and successfully. I myself find that now one form of Self-Suggestion is most effective, now another. It may be Imagination or Realisation or Assertion, or it may be a quiet order to the Servant Mind or Manager Mind, or it may be a strongly-felt and repeated Desire, or it may be nearer to Silence and Receptivity, together with “the attitude of expectancy.”

Self-suggestion is feasible at all times and in all places. It is unobtrusive. It is “without money and without price.” It is effective. It tends to become a sub-conscious habit, and, as it were, to “do itself” without our attention.

To keep happy, we can use happy words. Words have vast and little appreciated power. Think how useless we should be as regards our power of controlling ourselves and helping ourselves and helping others, if we had no words! It would be easy to write a long book on this aspect of the Art of Happiness, alone. But I must be content with just one idea.

We should speak with a cheerful voice and tone, as well as with a cheerful face; and we should prefer, to such words of ill omen as “miserable” and “cruel,” words that end rightly, such as un-happy and un-kind--words that leave us with the right and happy notion. Conversely, however, when we are--or think that we are--absolutely obliged to mention some unpleasant episode, in order to get others to help to put it right, we must not use such vivid expressions--we must not speak whiningly nor even keenly. This is preeminently the occasion for such a monotonous and expressionless voice, as is unusually put on by a Secretary when reading the minutes of any previous meeting!

Can we not speak of pleasant things with the excitedness of the French, if indeed we wish to be excited at all; but speak of unpleasant things, if we feel we must speak of them, with the apathy of the Hindu?

When you have finished any Self-Suggestion, be sure to keep happy.

To keep happy, we must use Repetitions of Self-Suggestions and of Happy Words, and we must use them long before we seem to need them. In place of the old adage, “In time of peace prepare for war,” one can substitute, “In time of peace prepare for victory”--and then there will be no real war.

Persistent Repetitions

The persistent Repetitions may be in the form of sheer repetitions; or in the form of Synonyms--such as Happiness, Gladness, Enjoyment, Joy, Welcome; or in the form of cognate words, words that suggest not so much Happiness itself, as the father and mother, the brothers and sisters, the sons and daughters, of Happiness. Thus, to take the letter P alone, it has a decided effect upon our feelings of Happiness to repeat, with as much attention to and realization of the idea and the inner spirit and soul of each word, as possible, the words Purity, Poise, Peace, Plenty, Power, Pluck, Pleasantness.

As to the influence of Repetition, we must remember that we are mainly what our sub-conscious mind is; and our sub-conscious mind is largely what our conscious mind has chosen or allowed itself to think, and what our conscious mind every moment--every now--is choosing or allowing itself to think.

Or, instead of repeating the ideas themselves or the words that can convey them, we can keep happy by Reason and Argumentation. While an Assertion like Robert Browning’s,

“God’s in His Heaven, All’s right with the world,”

will help some, a recalling of the advantages of Happiness--or of the disadvantages of Non-Happiness--and a working out of the ways in which the past “failures” of ourselves and others turned into blessings, will help others. I remember how disappointed I was when I did not get a Fellowship at Cambridge. I am now very glad that I did not. What seemed a calamity led to my present work, which enables me to keep happy. As a fossilised Don I should not have kept happy!

Appreciation and Welcome