The Key to Happiness

By M.E. Brines

Do you want to be happy? Then you need to read this book.

The author examines happiness and why we seldom achieve it for long. He examines several failed solutions including Religion and Consumerism, then provides a workable solution: the Four Pillars of Happiness and the Key. Includes practical techniques for retaining happiness once you attain it.

The author's conclusions will not be accepted by everyone, but if you've tried everything else and remain open minded to new solutions his techniques will work for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.E. Brines
• Release date: Jul 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476468716

M.E. Brines

M.E. Brines spent the Cold War assembling atomic artillery shells and preparing to unleash the Apocalypse (and has a medal to prove it.) But when peace broke out, he turned his fevered, paranoid imagination to other pursuits. He spends his spare time scribbling another steampunk romance occult adventure novel, which despite certain rumors absolutely DOES NOT involve time-traveling Nazi vampires! A former member of the British Society for Psychical Research, he is the author of three dozen books, e-books, chapbooks and pamphlets on esoteric subjects such as alien abduction, alien hybrids, astrology, the Bible, biblical prophecy, Christian discipleship, conspiracies, esoteric Nazism, the Falun Gong, Knights Templar, magick, and UFOs, his work has also appeared in Challenge magazine, Weird Tales, The Outer Darkness, Tales of the Talisman, and Empirical magazine.

Book preview

The Key to Happiness

By M.E. Brines

***

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 by M.E. Brines

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

***

Table of Contents

Why are we unhappy?

Failed Solutions: Consumerism and Buddhism

The Four Pillars of Happiness

What Faith is (and what it’s not)

The Key to Happiness

The Keystone

Controlling the Id-kid

***

All quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible. While there are a lot more readable versions available (I like The Message, myself) the KJV is the most widely available, and most likely familiar and accepted version.

***

Why Are We Unhappy?

We all have problems, situations that make us discontent. If we lack possessions, we want them. And if we have them, we fear losing them. Unhappiness pervades our society like an infectious disease. And like an infirmity, we treat it with drugs and alcohol. Or sex or shopping or even more bizarre and esoteric pursuits. But nothing you’ve tried seems to help. (Or you wouldn’t be reading this book.)

We’re unhappy because we lack something – perhaps food, clothing or shelter, but in modern 21st century America it’s more likely friends, love and a feeling of accomplishment.

We worry about money and about our health and about… death.

We worry that life is too short, that we won’t have enough time to…(fill in the blank with your own pet concern.)

We feel cheated and mistreated and unloved.

We look around at all our possessions and say, is this it? Is this all that life is about? Isn’t there something, anything else?

We feel bored and lonely and unsatisfied.

Advertisers bombard us with messages that increase our dissatisfaction, promising their products will solve our distress. Coke is it, they promise – the real thing. The army recruits by promising the unfulfilled they will be all you can be. Advertisements for other products promise happiness and fulfillment, but only if we buy today. And some actually deliver – to your door, but not permanent satisfaction.

We’re discontented, some might say greedy. And when we do temporarily possess enough – then we worry about losing it. We’re never content and we never feel secure, not for long. Our jobs are unfulfilling, our personal lives empty, yet we trudge onward to our next shift because the bills are due for the house, the car, the appliances and all the stuff that promised happiness but just clutters our closets. Every neighborhood has storage facilities where you can rent more space to store all the possessions clogging your life, so you have the room to go out and buy more of them.

Life has become an endlessly spinning wheel of unhappiness and we’re trapped inside like obsessed hamsters. We’re rats trapped in a shopping mall maze. And when we finally reach the cheese, it never satisfies.

This problem goes back to the dawn of humanity. The very beginning of time was said to be a golden age, where Mankind lived in paradise. Even today we describe any ideal setting as like the Garden of Eden.

***

Genesis 2:7-25

(7) And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

(8) And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.

(9) And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

(10) And a river went out of Eden to water the garden; and from thence it was parted,