The Secret Of Happiness Is Relationship

By Masami Sato | January 12, 2009

Why do we live? What are we here for? Day after day we asked these questions of the purpose and meaning of our lives. And most of us constantly look for the answer. How can we achieve happiness? This is yet another question urging us to look for its answer every day. What if the answer to those questions is simple? What if it is all simply about ONE thing? Connection. The secret of happiness is explained thoroughly in the clear and refreshing voice of Masami Sato in this excerpt of her book, ONE.

What are we searching for?

There are a host of things that we do in our lives.

But have we ever thought about why we do what we do? What are we really looking for?

The world is a confluence of millions of people of all continents, races, religions, and ideologies, doing different things. They look different and also act in different ways. All of us have different interests and each have a different viewpoint. We converse differently using different languages. We have different emotions and desires.

Nevertheless, if there was ONE thing that ALL of us are searching for, what could that be?

As I travelled around the world, I often asked people a simple question, “What would you like to achieve in your life? What do you really want?”

At first, it seemed everyone was looking for different things as they randomly said, “Good job”, “My own house”, “A nice partner”, “A loving family”, “A soul mate”, “More money”, “Wealth”. “Freedom”, “Peace of mind”, “A life purpose” There were many more answers.

I noticed that while some of these were temporal, and more related to day-to-day needs, others were of a more spiritual nature. We yearn for temporal desires because we do not as yet have it, or don’t feel that we have it yet. As different from this, spiritual desire is not about getting things we do not have. It is about a ‘feeling’ we look for, which does not end no matter what we manage to achieve at every moment of our life.

If we take off the temporal desires from the list and look only at the permanent desires, it is clear that all we want is to continue experiencing positive feelings like exhilaration, enjoyment, encouragement, motivation, kindness, love, happiness etc. – in another way, we want to remain happy.

Delightfulness

Happiness is one state of emotion that we are all longing to be in. We all may define it differently. We may value it differently. We may experience it at different levels of intensity. But we surely have something in common when happiness comes to us. And when we discover this secret about happiness, we hold the power to be happier, and to make others around us experience the same feeling too.

This life, that we live, is a mystery. All of us like it in our own different ways. We may also dislike it in different ways. We may wonder about it. We may cherish it. Or we may just accept it in an offhand manner. But what is the ultimate purpose of this life? What if the mystery of our existence is at hand? What if its revelation actually brings us happiness and fulfilment when we come face to face with it?

What if the secret of our life purpose, and of happiness, is as simple as this:

It is all about relationship.

Relationship is everything

Everything depends on bonding. All things are part of some other things. A look at our own lives would say it all. Then we will begin to see the real purpose of life.

Why do we do anything, ANYTHING at all, in life as humans?

It is just because we want to connect to others. We make friends to build a relationship. We get married to establish a relationship in a deeper and more permanent manner. We create a family to further strengthen that relationship. We go out to meet more people to connect with them, not only to get benefits out of those relationships, but also to become more connected to the world.

We buy nice clothes and go to a hairdresser to feel more connected to our sense of aesthetics and to our own physical beauty. We eat a variety of food to feel more connected to our sense of taste and smell. We dine out to feel connected to the people we share the meals with. We buy mobile phones and computers to connect with others and the world. We read newspapers and magazines to stay connected to what is happening and what others are doing and feeling. We study and learn to connect with what others know and value.

Every thing that we do is to satisfy the need of keeping alive relationships. It is our relationship to our own body that makes it imperative that we eat and sleep. Because of our relationship to our senses, we are asked to do things to satisfy the demands that body makes. If we ignore the demands that body makes, we have to bear the resultant aches and distress. And above our mundane needs, we yearn for another relationship – a relationship to our very existence – a relationship to our purpose. And without that connection, it is vacant. Just like the blankness so many of us feel when we have no relationship even to ourselves. That is just not the way our lives are supposed to be lived.

Bonds are powerful, and yet they are fragile and tender

When the bonds in a relationship lose strength, we go in for a separation, divorce, disagreements, judgement, and bitterness. It never feels good to lose the bonding. Still, it possible to be in love with someone today, and totally disconnected and bitter towards him tomorrow. And this change of feelings can happen just by the flicker of an eyelid. And the eyes might be yours or theirs!

When we feel disconnected

When we do not feel the connection, we start seeing problems. We start seeing differences and barriers. We start judging and criticising others. We magnify, dwell on and give energy to those things we perceive as problems. When that happens, we could even turn it all inwards and give ourselves pain and criticism. We cannot feel totally happy when we’re feeling disconnected from even one thing.

Bonding: the Secret to Happiness

What if we choose to perceive the entire thing in reverse? When we do that we understand this simple truth: we cannot feel despondent when we are in a strong relationship. It is simply not possible!

Try to feel moody when we feel the security of our bonding to the people around us and laughing and enjoying with our whole heart. Even if we have our own fair share of difficulties in life, we would still be able to break into a laugh and enjoy and feel good when the bonds are strong. At the same time, we would be unable to enjoy things when those bonds are absent.

Connection: Our Life

Relationship is the core of everything. That is what life is. Relationship.

Everything is a mere collection of smaller parts. Everything connects together to form a greater unit; like our bodies are collections of smaller parts, organs, cells, atoms and molecules.

Our actions and choices also express the need for connection. We are designed to constantly seek ways to connect to each other and to a greater purpose.

Bonding and Religion

Some of us choose to be part of different religions to feel more connected. The connection they seek could be to God. It could be to the people with the same belief. When we share the same belief, it creates a stronger sense of bonding within that group of people. More giving happens naturally among people who are feeling connected to each other.

Relationship and Business

People start a business to feel a stronger relationship to themselves by having better mastery over their destiny. But quite often in the world of entrepreneurship, there is a greater sense of isolation especially when we start seeing other enterprises as rivals, staff as devices and customers as a source of income. With all that, the main reason for getting into the business was to establish a relationship. So why should we cause any secluding at all? Maybe in an ideal world, all enterprises worked in another way, but jointly.

Bonding and Wars

Some of us even raise arguments or wars to feel some sense of ‘triumph’ or what is a heightened sense of safety and importance. But strangely, this ricochets. The minute we ‘win’ the fight, we are in fact weakening the relationship. We now require more sureness to defend ourselves from being assaulted by others. We thus end up being more unsure and frightened. We cannot take it lightly as it really happens to almost all of us in one form or another.

It may be the differences of opinion we have with people around us. It may be the wrong conclusions we reach at when we decide another person is wrong. When we want to be the only person to triumph, it will not be a victory in the true sense of the word – there would be no bonding. We can only rejoice when we succeed in unison. Then we feel the strong bond.

Despite the myriad ways in which we communicate our wants, everything we do is to fulfil the longing we have to feel and have strong bonds.

The complete experience of relationship is only felt through our heart. We can build a relationship with anybody when we truly care for them, and feeling that association with them. If we know this, forming that needed state is not difficult, but just simple and amusing. Then we would really feel more pleasure and contentment.

Life is like a play. We act things and feel things in a play but actually, the aim of the play is to derive pleasure out of it. It is not about acting out things, doing things. When the curtain falls finally, the winners are the ones who have experienced joy by acting. Not the ones who received more applause in the end. The effects and upshots of a play in which we acted do not affect our real life. But if we lost all our life to act in a play just because we wanted to be the best actor there, would it make us the best actor of the play?

It is easy to comprehend this when compared to acting in a play, but we often fail to understand it while enacting the play of life. We do not remember that life is also a play.

Even if we don’t know when this game actually started and when it would end, we know that it somehow started in the past and it will end someday. When we close the lid of the game box eventually one day, can we simply say, “Wow, it was so much fun. Let’s play again!”

In this play called life, the aim of the play is to ‘bond.’ We can keep bonding until we all merge to become one. It is the one way to perpetually feel bonded to our rationale – the feeling of joy and pleasure. We cannot afford to have the bonds to anything weakened or reject and decide even one thing if we are to reach the state of complete bonding.

Life is as simple as that. There is just ONE secret.

And the secret is to establish a relationship.

To turn into ONE

To enjoy.

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