The pursuit of happiness

It struck me as odd when I first found scientific confirmation that we remember bad things better. If the design of the universe was based on a positive principle, and my experience constantly reaffirms me that it is, then why would we forget the happy things?

But if you take a moment and think about it, it actually makes perfect sense. The reason that we have such difficulty in remembering the joy of our journey is that fun is something you have. It implies participation, and it only makes sense at the time.

Quite the opposite is true when you look at the bad and the ugly, they exist in the past. In fact, without them our past would probably be somewhat uneventful. Not that it would matter of course! If the argument holds true we will most likely be having too much fun to care.

It is therefore no real surprise that scientific evidence has shown that the relation between fun and care is inversely proportionate to each other. This means that if you have more of the one, you will by equation, have less of the other.

So how can we get more? Mingyur Rinpoche is a Buddhist monk and the author of the book "Joyful Wisdom". He carries the distinction of being dubbed "The happiest man alive" after he participated in research aimed at showing how mindfulness meditation could increase our happiness coefficient.

Previous research had shown that there is a shift in activity from the right to the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain in subjects who were happy, and the experiment wanted to determine if purposeful meditation could achieve such a change.

It turned out to be a huge success, and after eight weeks some of the participants showed an increase of up to 800 percent in left sided brain activity by following a 30 minute a day program of mindfulness meditation.

But meditation is only one of the ways that we can increase happiness. Various other experiments has shown that anyone can put a smile on their face just by focusing on happy things, proving the age old wisdom that energy flows where the mind goes.

Those who actively pursue happiness get it, and there is at least one Tibetan Lama that can vouch for it!