The best-selling spiritual writer of such works as Life After Death demonstrates how to experience joy in spite of the unique challenges of today's world, drawing on the Buddha's teachings of the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment to reveal how to focus on positive aspects of painful experiences. Reprint.

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Deepak Chopra

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Your first and most reliable guide to happiness is your body. The body is designed to support the mind, and working together they create the state known as happiness. When you're deciding whether or not to act, ask your body, "How do you feel about this?" If your body sends back a signal of physical or emotional distress, reconsider the action. If your body sends a signal of comfort and eagerness, proceed. Together, mind and body form a single field. It is artificial to separate them as we usually do. Every experience has a physical component. If you're hungry, the mind and stomach are hungry together. If you have an incredible spiritual experience, your heart and liver cells share in it. You cannot have a single thought, sensation, or feeling without your body responding.

The first key to happiness tells us that by being aware of your body, you are connecting to the underlying field of infinite possibilities. Why do mind, body, and spirit feel separate when they are not? Because of lack of awareness. Awareness has tremendous power. It tunes into every cell. It regulates the body's countless interactions. Awareness is the invisible, silent agent that lets your body know what your mind is thinking, and at the same time it sends feedback from the body so that the mind feels supported and understood. Ideally, when you experience being loved, your mind will grasp that you are loved, your cells will be nourished by that love, and your soul will rejoice that you have reached deep enough to find the source of love. Every good thing in life saturates your whole being.

When mind, body, and spirit are in harmony, happiness is the natural result. Signs of the absence of harmony, on the other hand, are discomfort, pain, depression, anxiety, and illness in general. Unhappiness is a form of feedback. It signals that disharmony has entered the field somewhere—
either in mind, body, or spirit. Awareness has become disconnected. Only when we look at the situation in this holistic way can we link health, wholeness, and holiness, for all three share the same root word, and all three share the same state of harmony or disharmony. You may have heard the saying "The issues are in the tissues." This refers to the fact that psychological issues such as anger, depression, neurosis, hostility, and free-floating anxiety are not simply psychological. They have a correlate in the brain, and through the central nervous system the brain makes every cell and tissue in your body aware that you have an issue.

The entire field quivers at the slightest twinge of pain or pleasure. In other words, the field is aware. When you consciously pay attention to what your body is telling you, this awareness is tremendously increased. Awareness isn't the same as having a thought. A mother is aware of how her child feels without having to think "A is bothering him" or "B has gone wrong." Awareness is intuitive. All you have to do is pay attention, and awareness grants you access to every corner of the infinite field. This is like being plugged into the cosmic computer, because when the field organizes the smallest thing in creation, it organizes the whole.

The opposite is also true. When you withdraw awareness, disruptions occur on many levels at the same time. Feedback loops no longer operate as they should between mind and body. The flow of energy and nourishment needed by every cell begins to diminish. By not paying attention to your body, you are putting it in the same predicament as a neglected child. How can a child be expected to develop normally if the parents pay no attention, if they ignore its cries for help, and remain indifferent to whether their child is happy or unhappy? The same question applies to the body, and it leads to the same answer. The body doesn't stop developing around age twenty, an arbitrary time we call maturity. Constant change is always taking place, all the way down to the level of genes. Change is never neutral. Either it leads to growth, development, and evolution or it leads in the opposite direction, toward decline, decay, and disorder. The difference depends on how you pay attention, because attention is your connection to the field of infinite possibilities.

The field has certain qualities or attributes that support mind, body, and spirit. There are three qualities that contribute to happiness most significantly. Intelligence is the first. When you listen to your body, you eavesdrop on the mind of the universe. This involves many tasks at once. A human body can think thoughts, play a piano, secrete hormones, regulate skin temperature, kill germs, remove toxins, and make a baby all at the same time. That is a miraculous display of intelligence. This intelligence also allows you to make choices that lead to fulfillment.

Fulfillment seems mysterious to many people, but we can break it down into its simplest parts. Fulfillment is the result of right thought, right feelings, and right action. Each area involves the body. We don't have to create artificial boundaries between a liver cell that makes a right choice and the mind making a right choice. Intelligence embraces both. If it makes a mistake at the chemical or genetic level, the cell dies or becomes malignant. The mind discriminates right from wrong at a different level, the level of ethics and morals. The emotions have their own level, discriminating between nourishing and toxic feelings, or between loving and harmful relationships. When you are consciously aware of your body and what it is telling you, the quality of intelligence is amplified. Its reach is infinite. While the human body performs countless physical processes, it tracks the movement of stars and planets, because your biological rhythms are actually the symphony of the whole universe. That's why we call it the universe—"one verse," "one song."

The second attribute of the field is creativity. Creativity keeps the flow of life fresh and new. It prevents inertia; it dispels habit. Much of the time the body seems stuck in routine. One breath is the same as another, one heartbeat repeats the action that came before. Simply to process food and air, your cells must endlessly repeat the same chemical processes with tremendous accuracy; no improvisation is allowed. But miraculously, the body also has complete flexibility to adapt to new situations. When you decide to do something new—have a baby, run a marathon, or climb a mountain—billions of cells adapt to your intention. This flexibility isn't mechanical. It's not like your car accelerating because you push down on the gas pedal. Rather, your body adapts creatively.

You can observe this in how creatively you can think and speak. No two thoughts are required to be exactly alike; no two sentences demand exactly the same words. The brain displays a pattern of neural activity to match any thought or sentence, even if that thought or sentence has never before appeared in the history of the universe. The ancient Vedic wisdom tradition in India identified creativity with Ananda, or bliss. Bliss is usually described as intense joy, but cells have their own bliss in the form of vitality, flow, and infinite dynamism.

To be most alive is to be in bliss. When you are in that state, everything feels possible. Your body is no longer a burden; you feel light as air. Nothing is old or stale. Instead, your creative potential is ignited. Creativity depends on the constant ability of life to refresh itself, and that ability is founded on bliss. You don't have to …