The Search for Happiness

Everyone wants to be happy. Some of us seek happiness through our families, in natural and healthy living, in successful careers, active social lives, fine gourmet foods, gambling, or through sports and exercise. Others experience happiness in politics, the arts, academia, or in hobbies ranging from mechanics and computer science to drama, philanthropy, welfare work, and literally thousands of other activities that comprise humankind’s unending quest for pleasure. Millions of people find their happiness in liquor, mood elevators, tranquilizers, or other drugs.

Each day doctors and scientists discover more about how the human mind and body work. Yet with this abundance of scientific knowledge and space age technology, which vastly outstrips that of all previous generations, are modern people really any happier than their predecessors?

The basic problem in our search for happiness is that our sources of pleasure are all limited. What many people consider our most basic and fundamental pleasures – eating and sex – can only occupy a few moments of each day. Our bodies constantly thwart our plans for enjoyment. After all, you can only eat so much before becoming ill. Even sex has its limits.

Chant and Be Happy provides information about how we can expand our pleasure beyond our present limitations. It deals with a pleasure principle that operates beyond the bounds of time and space and emanates from the innermost part of our being. This book thoroughly explains how this inner happiness can be experienced immediately by anyone, through the mystical power of transcendental sound vibrations.

This technique for obtaining unlimited happiness does not depend on new products touted by Fleet Street whiz kids or Hollywood moguls, but has been successfully practiced by countless people throughout the ages. Chant and Be Happy explains how to use these transcendental sound vibrations to attain the ultimate state of happiness. It’s an easy process, and it’s free.

To achieve this unlimited and imperishable happiness one need only chant and hear what sages of ancient India have for millennia called the Great Chant for Deliverance, the Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra. This simple, sixteen-word mantra is comprised of sound vibrations powerful enough to awaken the natural happiness within everyone.

In recent years, millions have learned how to chant the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra and experience this true, spiritual happiness. It is the most popular mantra in India, the homeland of meditation, and differs from other systems in two ways. First, the complete mantra is chanted (not just a fragment of a mantra) and second, the mantra is chanted aloud (not silently).

A brief introduction by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda, the founder and spiritual master of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, explains the exact nature and meaning of the mantra. Chapter one, an exclusive interview with the late George Harrison, reveals how the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra played a leading role in his life over the years. George explains that although he had achieved riches and fame beyond what most people could ever hope for, he found that there was “nothing higher” than the happiness he experienced from chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa. George discusses his confidence in the mantra’s power over death, explains how much of his musical career was influenced by and intimately connected with the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra, and describes the knowledge, bliss, and spiritual intelligence that comes from chanting.

In chapter two, Śrīla Prabhupāda speaks with John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and George Harrison at John’s estate in Tittenhurst Park, discussing the potency of the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra as the path to peace and liberation.

Chapter three is a fascinating account of how Śrīla Prabhupāda brought the chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa from India to the Western world in the midst of the countercultural turmoil of the sixties and convinced the disillusioned hippies of New York’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury that this mantra, not psychedelic drugs and antiwar protests, would make them happy. The history of chanting and meditating for higher consciousness is discussed in chapter four. The next chapter delineates the life and teachings of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, the sixteenth-century saint, mystic, and incarnation of Lord Kṛṣṇa who popularized the timeless practice of chanting the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra.

Chapter six, a narration taken from one of India’s most important historical and philosophical literatures, the Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta, reveals how by simply hearing the chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa from a genuine spiritual master anyone’s character can be freed from all unwanted qualities.

The next chapter forms a treatise on self-realization, mantras, religion, and the power of the mind in meditation, compiled from the teachings presented in Śrīla Prabhupāda’s books. Chapter eight explains the wide-ranging effects and personal benefits one can expect from chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa. The final chapter gives practical, step-by-step instructions for chanting, which if followed will open the door to ultimate happiness.