7 Steps to Happiness

Accourding to SSS Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji, there are 7 steps to happiness, “The known formula for happiness is: Commitment will give you character. That will give you dignity. That will give you divinity. That will give you grace. That will give you the power to sacrifice. Then you’ll feel achieved, and you’ll be happy”.

1. Commitment - Commitment to your word means doing what you say and saying what you’ll do in all of your personal and business activities. Your word should be final, definitive and exact. There are no maybes or excuses in a commitment, it is final. For example, if you say you’ll be somewhere at 9:00am, then you should be there without any excuse, irrespective of circumstances. Otherwise you become a victim of circumstances and lose the power of your word to command your environments. If however something arises that cannot be avoided, then you always must honour your word by letting the person know you can’t make it at 9:00am. By informing the person, you are honouring the value of your word, and this increases the power of your word. Additionally, you will discover there are many levels to commitment. There are those commitments you make to your friends informally, to those commitments you make to the government formally, to those commitments you make to you yourself. An informal commitment may be just calling someone up who you said you would call, or buying a toy for your child that you agreed to buy. A formal commitment may be driving at the specified speed limit on the road, or discarding a train ticket for a journey you’ve made even if no conductor stamped your ticket. A commitment to yourself may be walking to work every morning, or eating no chocolate for two weeks. By doing what you say and saying what you’ll do you create a clarity to your life and remove all the sneakiness. This leads to character.
2. Character - Character is when people see you have an uncompromising level of integrity, that you will not betray your word, your values or yourself for anything.You become reliable, dependable and trustworthy. It does not matter how you see yourself, if people cannot see the truth in you, then you do not have character. There will be no impact to your words. When people can see the truth in you, this leads to dignity.
3. Dignity - Having dignity is very precious. It is a currency you cannot buy. You earn it through your character. Dignity gives you a radiance, a glow. It also gives you a protection because the universe will always serve those who have dignity. Naturally therefore, dignity leads to Divinity.
4. Divinity - Divinity is being God-like. When people see you, they see God in you. You become a light, and light up humanity. Your presence alone is enough for people to feel safe and feel hope. People want to talk to you, even if you do not say a word to them. Your presence becomes attractive. When you speak, your words are remembered. That is Divinity, and it leads to grace.
5. Grace - Sometimes people are rude or reactive, they forget kindness and compassion. Grace is where each of your moment-to-moment experience and moment-to-moment actions are refined, calculated and elegant. You can sail through every situation of life, without needing to control anything. You wake with grace, eat with grace and walk with grace. You always reach to your angelic self and balance the heavens with the earth. Moderation is your way. Graceful people are grateful people. Grateful for the small things in life, like health, family and circumstances. Then being graceful, you learn to give and this leads to the power to sacrifice.
6. Power to sacrifice - When you can go beyond your own personal circumstances and situations to raise other people out of their misery, depression and unhappiness, then this is the power to sacrifice, which leads to happiness. By serving others, God serves you. It is a universal law, and no one can change it. By serving others, this brings within a person total fulfilment, where you are fully-filled with love. In fact, this is the stage where you have learnt so much, experienced so much and transformed so much that you cannot help but to share that with others. You are overflowing with love and light. This is happiness.
7. Happiness - Happiness runs in a circular motion, floating like a little boat upon the sea, everybody is a part of everything anyway, you can have everything if you let yourself be. Why oh because, why oh because…

7 Steps to Happiness

According to SSS Bhai Sahib Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji, there are 7 steps to happiness, “The known formula for happiness is: Commitment will give you character. That will give you dignity. That will give you divinity. That will give you grace. That will give you the power to sacrifice. Then you’ll feel achieved, and you’ll be happy”.

1. Commitment - Commitment to your word means doing what you say and saying what you’ll do in all of your personal and business activities. Your word should be final, definitive and exact. There are no maybes or excuses in a commitment, it is final. For example, if you say you’ll be somewhere at 9:00am, then you should be there without any excuse, irrespective of circumstances. Otherwise you become a victim of circumstances and lose the power of your word to command your environments. If however something arises that cannot be avoided, then you always must honour your word by letting the person know you can’t make it at 9:00am. By informing the person, you are honouring the value of your word, and this increases the power of your word. Additionally, you will discover there are many levels to commitment. There are those commitments you make to your friends informally, to those commitments you make to the government formally, to those commitments you make to you yourself. An informal commitment may be just calling someone up who you said you would call, or buying a toy for your child that you agreed to buy. A formal commitment may be driving at the specified speed limit on the road, or discarding a train ticket for a journey you’ve made even if no conductor stamped your ticket. A commitment to yourself may be walking to work every morning, or eating no chocolate for two weeks. By doing what you say and saying what you’ll do you create a clarity to your life and remove all the sneakiness. This leads to character.


2. Character - Character is when people see you have an uncompromising level of integrity, that you will not betray your word, your values or yourself for anything.You become reliable, dependable and trustworthy. It does not matter how you see yourself, if people cannot see the truth in you, then you do not have character. There will be no impact to your words. When people can see the truth in you, this leads to dignity.


3. Dignity - Having dignity is very precious. It is a currency you cannot buy. You earn it through your character. Dignity gives you a radiance, a glow. It also gives you a protection because the universe will always serve those who have dignity. Naturally therefore, dignity leads to Divinity.


4. Divinity - Divinity is being God-like. When people see you, they see God in you. You become a light, and light up humanity. Your presence alone is enough for people to feel safe and feel hope. People want to talk to you, even if you do not say a word to them. Your presence becomes attractive. When you speak, your words are remembered. That is Divinity, and it leads to grace.


5. Grace - Sometimes people are rude or reactive, they forget kindness and compassion. Grace is where each of your moment-to-moment experience and moment-to-moment actions are refined, calculated and elegant. You can sail through every situation of life, without needing to control anything. You wake with grace, eat with grace and walk with grace. You always reach to your angelic self and balance the heavens with the earth. Moderation is your way. Graceful people are grateful people. Grateful for the small things in life, like health, family and circumstances. Then being graceful, you learn to give and this leads to the power to sacrifice.


6. Power to sacrifice - When you can go beyond your own personal circumstances and situations to raise other people out of their misery, depression and unhappiness, then this is the power to sacrifice, which leads to happiness. By serving others, God serves you. It is a universal law, and no one can change it. By serving others, this brings within a person total fulfilment, where you are fully-filled with love. In fact, this is the stage where you have learnt so much, experienced so much and transformed so much that you cannot help but to share that with others. You are overflowing with love and light. This is happiness.


7. Happiness - Happiness runs in a circular motion, floating like a little boat upon the sea, everybody is a part of everything anyway, you can have everything if you let yourself be. Why oh because, why oh because…

Short-term Happiness or Long-term Bliss?

We as human beings are programmed from birth to always go for the short-term happiness. Short-term happiness is anything which we do or look for which is outside of ourselves. This can include drinking alcohol, taking drugs, making friendships and relationships with people, listening to music, going shopping, earning money or having sex. Actually, everything that we can see, hear, smell, touch and taste can be included in this list. So, then two questions arise:

1. Does this mean that all these things are wrong to do?
2. How can we go beyond short-term happiness and attain long-term bliss?

So firstly, no, all of the above is neither wrong nor right. We are not talking about morality here, we’re talking about reality. These worldly things will only bring you either closer to your destiny or further away, depending on your state of mind. That’s all it is a question of, a state of mind. If you can learn to live in the world and not be attached to it, and you can learn to make your mind your slave so that lust, anger, greed, attachment and ego does not get in the way of you achieving your destiny, then you are living as a liberated human being.

But this is easier said than done because everything you have been taught is false. You’ve only been taught to fill your mind with junk, and to relate to your ego and emotions as if they are the real you. You’ve also been taught that everything your senses tell you is real. None of these are true. You must understand that the mind is very clever, it plays a lot of games with you, which you’re not aware of. But you should feel hopeful, because the mind can be reprogrammed and controlled. All that is required is consciousness, and by nature, you are consciousness. That’s all you really are. So you have everything you need in your backpack of life to set off on this journey to find reality and to control the mind.

It is through the control of the mind that we can attain long-term bliss. Bliss isn’t like anything you’ve every felt. You may have felt snippets of it when falling in love with someone, or if you’re a mother, the love for your child. But these experiences are just snippets. The real wealth, the real happiness, the real joy is in the stillness of your mind. When you become fully present to life and reality, no longer does the mind go back and forth between the past and the future. It is still. It is calm. It is centered. In that space, through a constant consciousness, the mind turns from a monkey mind, into a Divine mind. The Divine mind is useful because it is one-pointed and will not play games with you. Instead, it will aid you like a good companion and servant, to achieve whatever you want.

In order to achieve long-term bliss and to create a Divine mind, a person must meditate consciously. Meditation is the process of stilling the mind. I always hear people say “I can’t meditate because there’s too many thoughts!”. Well, that’s the whole point of meditation: to clear them out! Just like taking a shower you clear your physical body, you meditate to clear your mental body. And it is a process that you have to be patient with. Practice makes you realise you’re already perfect, but there will be ups and downs. You must gracefully ride through these. Meditating is the greatest challenge and the greatest journey a human being can undertake, because it means you have to take responsibility for every part of yourself. Every single part. In the ancient script of Gurmukhi this phrase is called ‘Ang Sung Waheguru’. It means that every part of you is coordinated towards a single purpose of higher consciousness.

So please, it is my prayer that you give yourself the gift of meditation and incorporate it into your everyday life, into your everyday smile and your everyday step, so that through a Divine mind you can be healthy, happy and holy in every facet of your life.

Short-term Happiness or Long-term Bliss?

We as human beings are programmed from birth to always go for the short-term happiness. Short-term happiness is anything which we do or look for which is outside of ourselves. This can include drinking alcohol, taking drugs, making friendships and relationships with people, listening to music, going shopping, earning money or having sex. Actually, everything that we can see, hear, smell, touch and taste can be included in this list. So, then two questions arise:

1. Does this mean that all these things are wrong to do?
2. How can we go beyond short-term happiness and attain long-term bliss?

So firstly, no, all of the above is neither wrong nor right. We are not talking about morality here, we’re talking about reality. These worldly things will only bring you either closer to your destiny or further away, depending on your state of mind. That’s all it is a question of, a state of mind. If you can learn to live in the world and not be attached to it, and you can learn to make your mind your slave so that lust, anger, greed, attachment and ego does not get in the way of you achieving your destiny, then you are living as a liberated human being.

But this is easier said than done because everything you have been taught is false. You’ve only been taught to fill your mind with junk, and to relate to your ego and emotions as if they are the real you. You’ve also been taught that everything your senses tell you is real. None of these are true. You must understand that the mind is very clever, it plays a lot of games with you, which you’re not aware of. But you should feel hopeful, because the mind can be reprogrammed and controlled. All that is required is consciousness, and by nature, you are consciousness. That’s all you really are. So you have everything you need in your backpack of life to set off on this journey to find reality and to control the mind.

It is through the control of the mind that we can attain long-term bliss. Bliss isn’t like anything you’ve every felt. You may have felt snippets of it when falling in love with someone, or if you’re a mother, the love for your child. But these experiences are just snippets. The real wealth, the real happiness, the real joy is in the stillness of your mind. When you become fully present to life and reality, no longer does the mind go back and forth between the past and the future. It is still. It is calm. It is centered. In that space, through a constant consciousness, the mind turns from a monkey mind, into a Divine mind. The Divine mind is useful because it is one-pointed and will not play games with you. Instead, it will aid you like a good companion and servant, to achieve whatever you want.

In order to achieve long-term bliss and to create a Divine mind, a person must meditate consciously. Meditation is the process of stilling the mind. I always hear people say “I can’t meditate because there’s too many thoughts!”. Well, that’s the whole point of meditation: to clear them out! Just like taking a shower you clear your physical body, you meditate to clear your mental body. And it is a process that you have to be patient with. Practice makes you realise you’re already perfect, but there will be ups and downs. You must gracefully ride through these. Meditating is the greatest challenge and the greatest journey a human being can undertake, because it means you have to take responsibility for every part of yourself. Every single part. In the ancient script of Gurmukhi this phrase is called ‘Ang Sung Waheguru’. It means that every part of you is coordinated towards a single purpose of higher consciousness.

So please, it is my prayer that you give yourself the gift of meditation and incorporate it into your everyday life, into your everyday smile and your everyday step, so that through a Divine mind you can be healthy, happy and holy in every facet of your life.

Inner Meaning

The search for inner meaning is an inverse process. In order to get to a place of inner meaning, first we must strip all meaning from our lives. The search for Truth is an inverse process. In order to get to something, we must first get to nothing. It is in the stillness of nothing that everything becomes clear.

The reason for this is that reality is not known to us, largely it is unknown. We have assumed a particular reality from our parents, and they from their parents, and so the cycle continues. Many of our learned behaviours, ways of thinking and being, do not serve us and our destiny. We have consciously, subconsciously and unconsciously put meaning into things that have no meaning in reality, and have put no meaning into things that have all meaning in reality.

Therefore, in order to come to knowing what serves us or not, where we should place meaning or not, we must elevate our mind to a place in which we can see clearly. This means reversing everything we have ever done until nothing is left. No thoughts. No ideas. No concepts. No meaning. In that nothingness, we can see reality and our part in that reality very clearly and therefore can begin to rebuild our lives, habits and ways of being to serve us towards our destiny, and to put meaning into things than matter and strip it from things that don’t matter.

This all sounds very philosophical, but I am a practical man, so what does this mean in day-to-day down-to-earth language? Well, firstly we must look at our lives in some way, some new way. Let’s start with one basic of all life: relationships. Think of someone you hate. Now ask yourself, what makes you hate that person? Contemplate this for a while. Now think that actually, its not that you hate them, its that you hate yourself in some way. Contemplate the gap there is in you which is making you see that you hate another person. As you continue to go within yourself to find the answer, the entire universe will also start teaching you about this small aspect of yourself. The universe will begin to create situations in your life in which you can uncover and let go of this gap. As you left go of this aspect that doesn’t serve you, new opportunities open up for you. Just as something goes, something else comes. And now you can see that from something so small, something so profound can come about. This is the process of finding inner meaning.

In this new blog, I intend to write about many aspects of Sikh Dharma, Meditation, Kundalini Yoga, Spirituality, Philosophy, God, Oneness of Religion, Spiritual Stories and Applications of Spirituality in everyday life.

In God We Dwell. Sat Naam.

Inner Meaning

The search for inner meaning is an inverse process. In order to get to a place of inner meaning, first we must strip all meaning from our lives. The search for Truth is an inverse process. In order to get to something, we must first get to nothing. It is in the stillness of nothing that everything becomes clear.

The reason for this is that reality is not known to us, largely it is unknown. We have assumed a particular reality from our parents, and they from their parents, and so the cycle continues. Many of our learned behaviours, ways of thinking and being, do not serve us and our destiny. We have consciously, subconsciously and unconsciously put meaning into things that have no meaning in reality, and have put no meaning into things that have all meaning in reality.

Therefore, in order to come to knowing what serves us or not, where we should place meaning or not, we must elevate our mind to a place in which we can see clearly. This means reversing everything we have ever done until nothing is left. No thoughts. No ideas. No concepts. No meaning. In that nothingness, we can see reality and our part in that reality very clearly and therefore can begin to rebuild our lives, habits and ways of being to serve us towards our destiny, and to put meaning into things than matter and strip it from things that don’t matter.

This all sounds very philosophical, but I am a practical man, so what does this mean in day-to-day down-to-earth language? Well, firstly we must look at our lives in some way, some new way. Let’s start with one basic of all life: relationships. Think of someone you hate. Now ask yourself, what makes you hate that person? Contemplate this for a while. Now think that actually, its not that you hate them, its that you hate yourself in some way. Contemplate the gap there is in you which is making you see that you hate another person. As you continue to go within yourself to find the answer, the entire universe will also start teaching you about this small aspect of yourself. The universe will begin to create situations in your life in which you can uncover and let go of this gap. As you left go of this aspect that doesn’t serve you, new opportunities open up for you. Just as something goes, something else comes. And now you can see that from something so small, something so profound can come about. This is the process of finding inner meaning.

In this new blog, I intend to write about many aspects of Sikh Dharma, Meditation, Kundalini Yoga, Spirituality, Philosophy, God, Oneness of Religion, Spiritual Stories and Applications of Spirituality in everyday life.

In God We Dwell. Sat Naam.