What can make a person happy

Veja magazine published in its February 2018 edition an especial report about happiness, in which presented the reader a summary about studies and scientific researches that have been debating how body and social environment, together, bias people to be happy.

Researchers say half of bias of human being to happiness is determined by genetic; the other half depends on outside factors. Some of them depend on aspects which we have no full control of them – married, children, work and money. The others are connected to the way we face what life brings us.

Harvard University has conduct a research for almost eighty years which shows that the common fact among happy individuals is the quality of their relationships – family, love or friendship. Those who nourish satisfactory relationships present lower levels of stress.

Other researches show that having a purpose in life is a fundamental component. It is easier to survive to boring and unpleasant daily situations when we have a goal, an aim in mind. People who have faith would take advantage in that way.

The report spots two important information that each one has on its way connection to what we learn in Spiritism. First: along with spreading Cristian ideas, it has gained force in the world the doctrine that lasting happiness does not belong to this world. Second: Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis’ father, considered happiness to be a fugitive state, totally unattainable, due to the conflict between the desires of the human being and the social impositions.

How Spiritism deal with the issue?

Let’s remember a brief text in the book The Lying Giant – Live and work of Jerônimo Mendonça, wrote by Jane Martins Vilela, current responsible director of The Immortal journal, before answering it:

“In Brasília, during an interview was allowed to viewers to make questions. A misses asked:

- Jerônimo, I think you are an example to us all. I know you are extremely enlightened and I could make difficult questions but I want only to ask you what happiness is for you.

He thought briefly and answered:

- Misses, for me, who have been in a bed for 25 years, it would be just lie down on my stomach.” (cited work, page 149)

For those who do not know Jerônimo, he lived his last decades of life quadriplegic and blind.

The message transmitted in Paris, titled Happy is not of this world, François-Nicolas-Madeleine spirit, who was the priest Morlot when reincarnated, approached precisely the theme, explained why people seek sometimes vainly to be happy but aren’t. (The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter V, item 20)

It’s seen that lasting happiness is not frequent in our planet, there are moments in life which we are really happy, like Jerônimo Mendonça said in the interview above presented. This is what happens when a baby is born, when we get married, when we passed in a test, when we start at University, when we get a graduation diploma, when the team we cheer wins… but they are moments that pass and many times, follow a period of sorrow and sadness, in a way that in Spiritism point of view lasting happiness is not an apanage of the world we live in.

The explanation of this fact which intrigues everyone, in accordance with, evidently, Spirit teachings, can be deduced from the questions below contained in Allan Kardec's Spirits’ Book:

920. Can man enjoy full happiness on Earth?

“No, because of it life is given as a test or atonement. However, it depends on it smoothing his evils and be happy as much as it is possible on Earth.

921. It is understood that man will only be happy when Humanity is changed. But, while it does not happen, can man achieve a relative happiness?

"Man is almost always the worker of his own unhappiness. By practicing the law of God, many evils will lodge and provide for himself as great happiness as his gross existence behaves."

922. Happiness on Earth is relative to each one position. What is enough for someone’s happiness, means a disgrace to other. Nevertheless, there will be some sum of common happiness to all men?

“Related to material life, is the possession of necessary. Related to moral life, is the quiet conscience and faith in the future.”