My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy - William Shakespeare 

One of the great things about having kids is that you can pass on to them things that will enrich them culturally. This is mutually rewarding because it re-evokes those things in you and opens a whole new world to them. These are things that, in no particular order, have given me exactly that pleasure:

She’s Lost Control - Joy Division

The Art Of War - Sun Tzu

The National Gallery, London

The observation deck on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building, New York City

Tamla Motown

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

The Beatles

Widdecombe Fair

The Royal Shakespeare Company

Monumental Architecture

Monty Python’s Flying Circus

The Getty Museum, Los Angeles

The Buzzcocks

Substitute - The Who

Kraftwerk

Vermeer

Penny loafers and smooth dancing to hard soul music

Leonardo Da Vinci

The Advantages of bespoke tailoring

Film Noir

The Life of Brian

Pogle’s Wood

Western and Eastern Philosophy

The Trace of the Esoteric in World History

Dickens

The Pre Raphaelites

The Jagger, Richards, Jones triangle

REM

David Hume, John Locke, Ben Franklin

Abbess Hildegaard of Bingen

Greenwich Village, Covent Garden and Santa Monica

The certain and absolute knowledge that we all have an immaculate potential for genius stored within that it is possible to uninhibit

Happiness is a direction, not a place. - Sidney J Harris 

Every now and then I catch myself taking myself too seriously. I look in the mirror and see this serious guy looking back, a bit cranky, a bit of a cumudgeon. At these times I remind myself of things that keep me anchored in sanity. Things like….

Humour is the greatest gift, after devastating good looks obviously, and no matter what I learn I have never trumped the certain knowledge that the journey of development is a funny old road.

 You will listen to many songs before concluding that the brass sections in Edwin Starr’s 25 Miles are as good as it gets. Feet don’t fail me now.

 You can tell more about a man from his shoes than just about any other item of apparel; own a good pair of Oxford wing tips, brogues and penny loafers and no situation will ever confound you.

The 1960s were a golden era of popular culture.

 All the concentrated darkness in the world cannot put out the light of a single candle.

Standing on one foot and juggling while singing is something that I can do but no machine we’ve been able to devise can do this. 

The size of the Universe is humbling, its complexity is staggering and my place within it is the most profound thought process I can engage with.

Undoubtedly, lamb shank cooked tenderly with a jus of mint, creamy mashed potatoes and petit pois is a food of the gods. Washed down with a good Cabernet Sauvignon it becomes sublime.

Manhattan is physically breathtaking, London is the most culturally diverse city in the world and Paris is the most refined, despite the Parisians. Humans working at full stretch are capable of magnificent things.  

William Shakespeare’s vocabulary and appreciation of the topography of the human condition.

Goethe’s intelligence and Leonardo’s all round brilliance.

Film Noir, we should all visit Rick’s Bar or its equivalent at least once in our lives.

Good conversation with companions along the way.

The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet. - James Oppenheim 

Let’s take the five ‘W’s.

Who

What

Where

Why

When

Just suppose it were possible to quantify happiness. You can go along and be tested for your intelligence and get your quotient as a numeric value. What if you could do the same for happiness? Get a relative value for your happiness quotient or HQ. You could say that the seat of your happiness resided within your HQ. Where would you start?

There will be five ‘W’s of happiness and they work as a matrix that supply one another with energy, inspiration and an urge to be fulfilled. So my shameless plug is this, read my The Mechanics of Happiness - Engineering a Positive Approach to Your Life for some of my views and perspectives and you will be, hopefully, provoked to think and then, even better, provoked to take action within your own life.

We are all different. What makes one person happy doesn’t do it for another person. Suppose it’s a team sport and fans of opposing teams will be both happy and disappointed by the same result. We can see from this that happiness is a subjective quality based around the expectation and desire of the individual. If you expect something and desire it, it follows that you will be happy when you get it. However experience shows us that this is not always so and that even the reverse can apply. Sometimes, paradoxically, reaching one’s objective brings about a sense of disappointment or a loss of motivation because the very thing that kept us occupied and gave us a goal has been removed. What’s the solution?

We are empowered by our desires, they compel us to progress and develop both as individuals and as integrated parts of our society. This is where the mechanics of happiness comes into play in your life and it is about setting a series of desires that are sustaining and, strangely enough, unattainable. Why is that? If you set yourself objectives that are attainable you are creating a Fixed Paradigm. Within the Fixed Paradigm there is a singular potential result. this means that the odds of disappointment are that much higher because setting yourself one potential outcome is limiting. The key here is to set yourself a series of staged progressive results, so instead of saying ‘I want X’, you say ‘I want X because it will allow me to Y and then I can Z’.

X, for example, is your dream home.

Y,  for example, is the meditation space you have always wanted to create.

Z,  for example, is the enhanced level of self knowledge you will attain.

Create a life of equations (Get X, Allow Y, Become Z) within a sequence of happenings rather than isolated fixed outcomes. Nothing occurs in isolation so include your objectives within the integrated fabric of your life and the Universe. This means they are connected to a whole network of possibilities. So while it is possible to have your dream home, self knowledge is something potentially unlimited and therefore a constant potential motivator in your life.

Your dream home, your meditation space, your knowledge of self is completely unique to you. Visualise the three now, one at a time and they are like a funnel that opens up; one leads to the next and they are like a progressive journey, a ladder that can move you always upwards and to a different level. Use different examples to colour and add texture to the different areas of your life and you will find that it becomes more of a ‘lived in’ experience than a ‘dreamed about’ experience and ultimately more rewarding. Something that is rewarding promotes greater satisfaction which is one of the components of happiness.    

Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness - Sophocles

It’s often a struggle to find the key, the thing which will open it all up and make everything clear. The key doesn’t exist but it is the search for the key that defines our experience and our experience which persuades our world view. The way that we view the world is dependent upon those factors that have influenced us from the day that we are born so it is good practice to once in a while consider your situation from another perspective. This is where the development of compassion and its sibling empathy are so vital.

If you only ever perceive your life by viewing it through a mirror you will end up with a very monochromatic perspective. Consider the reflections of others because the way they see you is for them the way you see others and it does not have the same biases and prejudices that we bring to bear when assessing ourselves. Their views and experience are as valid as your own. If we do not consider the way that our actions affect the world then we are at best inconsiderate. Each of us is contributing and our own lives are the fulcrum of our contributions, the arena where what we have created comes out to play.

Think about the person you want to be, then the person you are, how great is the shortfall? A life lived in shortfall is a life playing catch up. If you think that you are always having to catch up then you run the risk of thinking that something has passed you by. This is never the case, you are always at the hub of a great churning dynamo. The art is to wake up and realise that it goes on, even now. You will get to where you are going so travel light.

A wise man once said to me, ‘You become what you think about.’ It’s true, you do, so try to fill your thoughts and occupy your mind with things that help you to get where you want to go. Knowing what you want is the true road to happiness, knowing what you want is step one and then implementing a strategy to bring that about in your life is step two. Step three is learning to have the wit, wisdom and grace to accept whatever is the result of that process.

I talk with lots of people and when the conversation gets into its groove, we’ve done the warm up and now we’re on the main event, people say things to me like,’ I consider myself to be a human being on a spiritual journey.’ Perception is everything, and I say to them, ‘Have you ever considered that you might be a spiritual being on a human journey?’ we all have a development path to follow, and we will travel it no matter what. Surrender to the journey, go with it, become like the elements and allow yourself to grow with flexibility and room for manoeuvre, the scenery is always changing as you progress, do not expect it to meet you always on your terms.   

image: panache 

Our best chance for happiness is education. - Mark van Doren 

Let’s see, Carbon Oxygen Nitrogen, Brahma Shiva Vishnu, Red White Blue, Past Present Future, there’s something powerful about threes, combinations of three seem to represent a platform or a sound foundation we can build on. Taking that as a location I thought for many years about the constituents of leading a meaningful and purposeful life, which seems to be something that all of us are interested in, and developed a three vectored approach:

Development

Fulfilment

Happiness

Each of these components works individually but significantly they interact with one another, I actually see them as a moving diagram whereby they rotate and subsequently form a dynamo that draws things to itself, good things, just as in Einstein’s Special Relativity paper a dynamo draws energy from the atmosphere and generates its own magnetic field.

Development… I see to be the over-riding principle that governs all our lives from the day that we are born, all our activities are about refinement, from learning to walk to becoming a more accomplished speaker to thinking more effectively and so on to encompass all that you do. My own strategy is, whatever you do, try to do it better than last time. The area is huge, huge, huge, and it can’t be summed up adequately in one paragraph, just know that development is the urge to grow that accompanies us each step of the way and is the key to our personal emancipation.

Fulfilment… this follows on from development; there is no greater feeling than the feeling of something done well because that is what you set out to do and that is what you accomplished. The reward is in simply doing things to the best of your ability and the feeling of fulfilment that promotes in self. It can be fine tuned along the way but that is where development comes into the picture as part of a binary system that swings like a pendulum between the two.

Happiness… the natural state that the activation of the other two promotes. It is a subliminal thing that often defies description because it is a plastic mediator that forms up differently in each of us. When certain conditions are in place then happiness is the resultant process. This is why there is a tripod or trio in the system, the three components each power the other and a dynamic medium is created within your life.

We can all do these things in our lives whatever the circumstance we find ourselves in. We can learn to activate and integrate the three members of our trio in our lives. Development is not only a few enlightened beings locked away in monasteries hidden in faraway, inaccessible places. We’re all in this together, for better or worse, the days of finding a cave and becoming a hermit are passed, the tallest peaks these days are littered with the trash left by mountaineers so you wont get the privacy you used to be able to count on anyway! What this is saying is, don’t wait for the ideal moment or situation; the ideal moment and situation is here and now.

Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence - Aristotle

The opening decade of the twenty first century has travelled a pretty rocky path. There is a feeling abroad that things generally are not as good as they might or should be. That there is a tangible downturn in what people might expect in the overall quality of their lives as distinct from material abundance. Lots of people want to be elsewhere and doing things other than they are currently doing although this too is often based on a vague kind of belief that someone somewhere is enjoying a better life.

The absence of development, fulfilment and happiness in their lives represents a nagging doubt that they are not getting the return that they had hoped for from their life. This is evidenced by the huge migrations occurring in the world at the moment. There is a population shift of unprecedented numbers of people, displaced, disaffected and feeling powerless, all chasing the elusive better quality of life. They want a better deal for themselves and who can blame them, why ever settle for anything less than the best? 

There is a latent sense of disquiet because it seems that no-one has yet provided practical solutions to the challenges that confront us all. There is a sense of disenfranchisement from those in positions of authority who seem incapable of bringing about resolution in the ongoing social, territorial, tribal and cultural disputes that plague the human race’s affairs. There is also a growing sense of frustration at the intransigence demonstrated by some of those involved in such disputes, an apparent desire to perpetuate strife rather than seek ways of making things better. This is the legacy that future generations will inherit.

It is, therefore, understandable that people look to their own circumstances and try to bring about change within their own sphere of influence. Ask yourself, why now? What is happening now that is creating this backdrop for human affairs to define themselves against. What do you think it might be that is motivating people? We are all compelled at times to do things which are not so easily rationalised, however, why is there such an increasing incidence in the prevalence of conditions such as compulsive obsessive disorders, eating disorders, chronic fatigue syndrome and a myriad of associated states and conditions to say nothing of radical increases in substance abuse? Something seems to have agitated the human race at large and it appears to be compromised by its attempts to define and express what this may be.

So the stage is set. The most important issue facing the human race today is its lack of development and its inability to put its own house in order. Seven billion of us coexisting on a planet that becomes increasingly small and more crowded. The challenges confronting us now are greater than at any time in human history, the stakes are higher and there is a greater reward to be had than at any other time. My name is Lee Baldwin and I have spent most of my life on a pilgrimage in pursuit of wisdom and enlightenment. I have been privileged to live the most extraordinary life and have travelled to some of the most inaccessible places and met and studied with some of the most remarkable men and women with the intention of assimilating their wisdom, understanding and learning their ways.

I believe that each of us writes our own ticket in life, we are the creators of our own reality. I also believe that there is a serious deficit in quality information and authoritative guidance. For someone looking to understand their situation and improve themselves, two craggy mountains have sprung up before them, one is academia and the other is the self help movement. The former tends to make itself inaccessible and far too intractable while the latter tends to over promise and under deliver. Neither of which is satisfactory. The Mechanics of Happiness offers an alternative to both while championing the best of each.

This is the first posting on my new blog. You will soon be able to visit my website, themechanicsofhappiness.com, buy my books and most important, interact with me, leave your feedback here, let’s talk…