Yes, I have been out of sight for a while, having had a great deal of work with various seminars and also a trip to Chartres, but besides that I have once again written a little book. I do not have it myself yet, but it has already been published. I do not have it yet because I am not in the Netherlands, so I cannot show it, but it will probably be displayed on the screen. And I wanted to give a presentation of that little book. It is a little book about happiness, and when I began to write it, I said, or actually wrote: yes, so many books have already been written about happiness that one may ask oneself what one is actually embarking upon by writing yet another little book with that title. And yet I am of the opinion that I can still write something special about it, and I hope that I have indeed done so.

When I began reflecting on what happiness actually is, one quickly discovers that it cannot really be expressed in words, and that the word happiness also has very different meanings. I think we most often use it in the sense opposite to bad luck. I have been lucky, fortunately it turned out well—a form of chance that happens to you in a positive way is often referred to as happiness or luck.

When I started writing it, I was occupied with preparing a trip with a group to Chartres, and for that purpose I was reading the book by the great Alanus ab Insulis from the twelfth century. The book is called The Creation of the Heavenly Human Being, and in it virtually all the qualities that a human being can possess are discussed. At a certain point, a relationship must also be established with the goddess of fortune. And it is interesting that this goddess of fortune is actually described more or less as Fortuna, as a kind of luck such as we generally mean when we say, “I have been lucky.” I included a few lines from that description of the goddess of fortune in the little book, but that is not really what I wrote about. I tried to follow a kind of ascending line, starting from the most fundamental happiness—the possession of a healthy and preferably also beautiful body—through many stages toward spiritual blessedness.  And it is interesting then to look through history at what writers have said about happiness, because it varies greatly. I would like to quote a few of those whom I mentioned at the beginning. Thus Jean-Paul Sartre says: “Man is nothing other than what he makes of himself.”

Immanuel Kant says: “The concept of happiness is such an indeterminate concept that, although every human being wishes to attain it, he can nevertheless never state decisively and consistently with himself what it is that he actually wishes and wants.” Typical Kant.

Then there is a contemporary Spanish priest who has written a little book about silent meditation, and he says:

“At the end of my most recent intensive meditation retreats, which I do once a month for an entire day, I went walking in the mountains. And for a short time, perhaps an hour, I experienced an extraordinarily deep feeling of happiness. Everything seemed more beautiful, more radiant, and I had the difficult-to-explain feeling that it was not I who was in these mountains, but that they, the mountains, were me. Twilight fell and the sky was cloudy, but to me it appeared in perfect beauty.”

Then a writer from antiquity, Epicurus:

“When we say that pleasure is the goal, we do not mean the pleasures of debauchery, but freedom from pain in the body and from disturbance in the soul.”

And so I tried to gather a number of interesting statements during my ascent toward spiritual blessedness, which, as I experience it, is directly connected with inner activity. I do not believe that a human being is entirely dependent on fate where happiness is concerned.

Partly, of course, yes. The inner life, too, is partly determined by fate. I mean, one person has a positively inclined soul, while another lives almost continually in gloom and negativity.

Such a person will have greater difficulty overcoming it through inner activity than that positive soul which is already so cheerful. But it is still possible to say that there is something in the human being that lies within one’s own reach, where one is not dependent on fate, whether one is cheerful or gloomy. A gloomy person may even have a greater chance of finding that inner activity, because in gloom there is, of course, a certain depth that is necessary in order to begin that inner activity and also to persevere in it.

If natural happiness is great, then one does not have much incentive to search for a way out of the depths. And so in this little book I eventually arrived at that which, for me, has always been the great salvation of the human soul: namely, the possibility of becoming so strong in one’s soul through one’s own inner activity that one can rise above the conditions imposed by fate—not always, of course, but certainly in many moments.

Thus, even when life is not happy at all, when there is much suffering, when much has to be endured that weighs one down, there is nevertheless a place in the soul to which one can go, and where one can lift oneself out of that oppressive mood, can raise oneself above it.

That is ultimately the point that I have, naturally, described with emphasis in this little book. And I have also described that one then has, as it were, found one’s support in a truly existing spiritual being. It will probably be clear, even without my mentioning the name, which being I mean by that.

I hope that this little book can once again be a support for very many people, helping them in our time, which brings so much negativity, to find a source that in fact every human being can tap into—and that source bubbles up with happiness.

I wish that wholeheartedly for everyone.