Andrew Rooke – Australia
How important is it to strive for Happiness? Everyone has their own ideas of what it is to be happy and most people direct their life-long efforts towards that end. In Australia, our social, economic, cultural, and political institutions are based on the visions of generations of immigrants seeking greater happiness in a new land.
Over the past 50 years, medical science has done some serious research into the healing power of joy. Author, Norman Cousins, in his famous book, The Anatomy of an Illness, gives his own experience of how his severe bone and joint pain was driven from his body by regularly having a good belly-laugh from watching old Marx Brothers comedy movies.
Cousins described his theory of the chemistry of laughter in one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine. His article received more positive letters from readers than any other up to that time in the journal’s long and distinguished history. The famous ‘clown doctor’, Dr Patch Adams, started a whole movement in the medical profession encouraging the use of humour in hospital wards in the 1990s after a film on his life starring the late comedian Robyn Williams, was such a huge hit.
Happiness and the Soul: If the physical body responds so positively to the healing influence of good humour, how much more important is a feeling for the joy of life to the inner man? Our former Leader, Katherine Tingley, tells the story of her meeting with a Master of Wisdom (HP Blavatsky’s teacher) in Darjeeling, northern India, which has a lot to teach us about coping with the stresses of life through mental balance and good humour. As they spoke together on a hillside overlooking a farmer’s field, one of the Master’s students (in India referred to as a ‘Chela’) was ploughing the field with a team of oxen. The Master used the example of his student to illustrate his ideas about coping with the stresses on the path of understanding – especially for aspirants to spiritual achievement. The Master said that the student/ploughman’s team of unruly oxen were always calm for him because they were immersed in the atmosphere of the student’s concentration and contemplations.
Further, he said one should not live in dread of life’s experiences, but go cheerfully on our way coping with the tasks at hand rather than being overwhelmed by distant goals. He said that a joy in the spiritual life could actually make the very atoms of our body lighter! We should fight the tendency to let the worries and anxieties of our everyday consciousness weigh us down. The Master said that hopelessness and anxiety can bring our body’s atoms ... “half way to death; but they can be quickened to a kind of immortality by the fire of the divine life, and attuned to universal harmony. Men everywhere could get rid of all that burden of un-necessities, and carry themselves like that young Chela does, if they had mental balance.” [The story of the Master and his ploughman/chela is recounted in Katherine Tingley’s, The Gods Await.
Happiness: some perspectives from Theosophy: A sense of humour indicates an understanding of human nature and an ability to draw forth the positive aspects from the difficulties of life. The world’s great comedians have always played the role of placing ourselves and sometimes our most cherished institutions into humorous and more balanced perspective. Religious teachers roughout history have emphasized the joy awaiting man on his path of inner discovery through the outer sufferings and travails of daily life. They have often demonstrated the practical value of humour and joy with their work in the world. Think of the infectious laughter of the Dalai Lama when he is interviewed on even the most serious subject. Likewise, the writings of theosophical masters in The Mahatma Letters, often exhibit a keen sense of humour for the frailties of human nature on its path of learning.
In particular, our former Leader, Katherin Tingley, often spoke of the need to hold sacred a real sense of the joy of living even when besieged by the sorrows which come to everyone n the course of daily life. In her book, The Travail of the Soul, she writes:
“Let us open up our minds to the fact that life is joy: that is, the real spiritual life, and that the disarrangements, the failures, the discouragement, and the heavy, tearing, heart-shadows we must face in life are our own to adjust. We have the opportunity, even in the ordinary lines of daily life, to think a little more, to let our souls break through to something better, and to find ourselves out under the great blue sky of our aspirations, in touch with nature’s wonderful lessons and its silent and marvellous beauty.”
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This article also appeared in the March 2026 issue the magazine Theosophy Downunder (TS-asadena)
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