Discover The Jewels of Happiness…

Sri Chinmoy – prolific author and student of peace – shares thirteen secrets to abiding happiness.

Available in print and audiobook.

…timeless truths full of encouragement.

“These sweet gems of wisdom by my dear friend Sri Chinmoy are timeless truths full of encouragement, love and goodness.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu (extract from the foreword)

Video: Archbishop Desmond Tutu reads out his foreword.

More praise for The Jewels of Happiness:

The Jewels of Happiness is beautiful and inspiring, and is a reflection of Sri Chinmoy himself. It shines with the spiritual joy of a life well lived.

Jane Goodall

Reading this book will allow you to experience a radiant and abundant awareness of how to achieve happiness.

Roberta Flack

5-time Grammy award-winning artist

Sri Chinmoy takes us into a world where we pursue our most wanted desire – to discover the true meaning of happiness.

Jose Ramos-Horta

Nobel Peace Prize Winner

… and the audiobook is pretty special too.

A unique experience – read by 17 renowned spiritual, diplomatic, artistic and athletic luminaries who all shared close ties with Sri Chinmoy. Sit back, listen and enjoy timeless wisdom read by celebrities from all walks of life.

Nobel Laureate Archbishop emeritus Desmond Tutu
9-time Olympian Carl Lewis
Ambassador Anwarul Choudhury (former UN Under-Secretary General)
Narada Michael Walden (3-time Emmy Award Winner)
Charles Johnson (National Book Award winner)
Cathy Oerter (co-founder of Art of the Olympians with her husband, 4-time Olympian Al Oerter)
Ambassador Davidson Hepburn (Former president, Unesco general conference)

Roberta Flack (5-time Grammy award winner)
Bill Pearl (5-time Mr Universe, Best-Built Man of the 20th Century)
Boris Grebenshikov (legendary Russian singer-songwriter)
Khaliah Ali (Emmy Award nominated talk show host, humanitarian and daughter of Muhammad Ali)
Professor Shawn Wong (award-winning author)
Ashrita Furman (holder of the most Guinness World Records)
Eric Petersen (author of Light and Liberty, a celebrated collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writings) with his wife Katheryn Rhoades

Excerpt from Chapter 1: Peace

In the outer life you cannot have peace unless and until you have first established peace in your inner life. Early in the morning, if you treasure a few divine thoughts before leaving your home, then these thoughts will enter into your outer life as energizing, fulfilling realities.

It is in the inner world that everything starts. The inner world is where we sow the seed. If we sow the seed of peace and love, naturally it will produce a tree of peace and love when it germinates. The peace we bring to the fore from the inner world through our prayer and meditation is very strong, very powerful, and it lasts. When we have that peace in our inner life, our outer life is bound to be transformed. It is only a matter of time.

A moment’s truth
Can and shall make the world beautiful.
A moment’s peace
Can and shall save the world.
A moment’s love
Can and shall make the world perfect.

Excerpt from Chapter 2: Love

One first has to love oneself. Those who say, “First love humanity, then think of yourself,” are mistaken. Love, spontaneous love, must first grow inside. We cannot grow love in the supermarket or in the subway station. Love has to be grown here, deep within us. When we see and feel and become love, only then can we offer our love to the rest of humanity.

When the real, the highest, the most illumined part in us comes to the fore, at that time we really love ourselves. We love ourselves because we know who we are. Love is not a kind of outer movement or action. Love is life, and life itself is spontaneous nectar and delight.

You follow
Your heart’s love.
Your life’s happiness
Will follow you.

Excerpt from Chapter 3: Joy

Exercise: Child in a Garden

You can have the most joy just by imagining a child infinitely more beautiful than any child that you have seen in this world. You have inside you a child who is infinitely more beautiful. Just imagine it. While imagining it, you will get utmost joy.

When you feel that you are a child, immediately feel that you are standing in a flower garden. This flower garden is your heart. A child can play in a garden for hours. He will go from this flower to that flower, but he will not leave the garden, because he will get joy from the beauty and fragrance of each flower. Inside you is the garden, and you can stay within it for as long as you want. In this way you can meditate on the heart.

Be like a child,
Act like a child.
Go from one flower to another
In your heart-garden
Until you find complete joy
And perfect satisfaction.

Excerpt from Chapter 4: Hope

When we aspire, we come to realize that hope is a hand, beautiful and powerful, beckoning us towards our inner transformation. When we do not aspire, hope appears before us in a different way. We feel that perhaps it is all mental hallucination; perhaps it is all deception.

Each individual on earth, whether he is aspiring or not, cannot escape from hope. But hope itself is not an escape. It unites us with a higher reality that illumines and fulfills us.

A sincere seeker is not interested in seeing the distant or remote future. He feels that this world is an Eternal Now. By virtue of his convincing inner hope, he wants to see, feel and grow into the Eternal Now.

Hope comes first,
Life follows.
Life comes first,
Perfection follows.
Perfection comes first,
Satisfaction follows.

Excerpt from Chapter 5: Wisdom

Knowledge and wisdom are not the same thing. Knowledge is something earthly; it is something we get from books or from the outer lives of other human beings. Knowledge is in the mind, of the mind and for the mind – for the expansion of the mind. But wisdom comes from our inner existence – from the light of our soul. So wisdom is much deeper than knowledge.

Some people have wisdom, but they may not abide by this wisdom. If they abide by their wisdom, then they will only do absolutely the right thing. When wisdom dawns, it is like the sun appearing through the clouds.

Experience is the beginning
Of knowledge-dawn.
Knowledge-dawn is the beginning
Of wisdom-moon.
Wisdom-moon is the beginning
Of satisfaction-sun.

Excerpt from Chapter 6: Patience

When doubt or other negative forces enter into you, you can take them as a monkey that is constantly bothering you. You let the monkey go on and on, because you are patient. There is a competition between your patience and the monkey’s mischievous pranks. Just because you are a seeker, you are bound to have more patience than someone who is not aspiring for a higher life. The monkey is not aspiring, so the monkey’s patience can never equal your patience.

In this world, as we have an ego, the monkey also has a form of ego, only you do not see it. If you are not paying any attention to it, the monkey will eventually feel that it is beneath its dignity to bother you again and again. Patience has such capacity to dissolve negative forces. If you have the capacity to ignore or to constantly reject the negative forces, then they can never win.

Patience, increasing patience,
Is all we need
To be victorious
In the battlefield of life.

Excerpt from Chapter 7: Enthusiasm

When we launch into the life of self-discovery, or any new endeavor, we need enthusiasm. Without it we will not budge an inch.

When we enter into any new field of activity, there is enthusiasm. To maintain that enthusiasm, we can think of a plane. When the plane takes off, it makes so much noise. It gives us the feeling that it will absolutely destroy everything around it. Once the plane is high in the air, its speed is much faster than when it was taking off, but we hear practically no noise. And if the plane has a good pilot, will he not reach the destination?

Enthusiasm in its purest expression
Is courage.

Excerpt from Chapter 8: Power

Exercise: Dig deep

Very often when we think of will-power, we think of it as being inside our head, inside our brain. We never think of will-power in the heart. We feel that the heart is feminine and the mind is masculine. In the mind there is a tiger, a lion or a bull ready to fight. This is our human conception.

But it is not true that will-power is inside the head. The easiest and most effective way to cultivate will-power is to concentrate on the heart. For inside the heart is the soul, and the soul’s light is will-power, real will-power.

Please concentrate on your heart and then dig there every day. But do not be satisfied with your digging. Today you have dug and you have come to a certain point. Tomorrow again you have to dig further. The deeper you go, the sooner you will feel and see the light. First you feel, then you see, then you become. First you will feel that there is something inside like a very tiny insect: that is the light. Then you will see it with your inner vision or with your human vision. Finally you will grow into it.

When I dive deep within,
I can leave my heart’s inner door
Always open.

Excerpt from Chapter 9: Simplicity

God is extremely simple. It is we who think of Him as someone complicated. God speaks the simplest language, only we do not understand Him. Poor God, He has been talking constantly and tirelessly, but we do not have time to listen to Him.

One who has love, devotion and surrender can be simple. A child is simple; he loves his mother. He does not have to love anybody else – his mother is his whole world. He listens to his mother. He devotes himself to his mother. If his mother asks him to do something, he feels that his mother knows everything better than he does, so he surrenders to his mother’s will. A child is so simple that he tries to do everything to please his mother, and in his simplicity, he is reaching his highest goal.

If you live in the heart,
You will act like a child.
The simple way is to follow
The path of the heart.

Excerpt from Chapter 10: Sincerity

You have to be at once the student and the teacher. As the student, you will bring forward your sincerity and purity. As the teacher, you have to give yourself marks – sixty out of one hundred, seventy out of one hundred or ninety out of one hundred. Every day you have to ask yourself how many good things you have consciously done and how many bad things you have consciously done.

Unconscious things you do not know, but conscious things you do know. Try to decrease the things that you are doing wrong in various fields and try to increase the good things that you are doing. By taking the side of the good actions, you will be able to increase all your divine qualities. You be the judge. You be the teacher and you be the student. This is the way that each individual can make fast, faster, fastest progress.

A heart of sincerity
Is always clothed In purity-light.

Excerpt from Chapter 11: Humility

There is also a great difference between humility and unworthiness. When we are about to do something, certain incapacities that we are born with may make us feel unworthy. Again, unworthiness may come as a result of something undivine that we have done. But whatever the reason, he who feels unworthy will automatically remain far away from the world of delight.

This is a negative way of approaching the truth. But if we take the positive approach, then we feel always that we have come from God. We have to be conscious of God within us, not through the feeling of unworthiness, but through humility. If I am unworthy of my Source, then why did the Source create me?

We are God’s children. If our Source is God and He has created us, then we must not feel unworthy of Him. Only we should be humble, because it is through humility that God’s Light can be seen, felt and manifested.

Excerpt from Chapter 12: Gratitude

Only one quality can solve all your problems – everybody’s problems – and that quality is gratitude. Constantly offer your heart of gratitude. Every day count the petals of your gratitude-heart and open another petal. If you want to name the petals, they are simplicity, sincerity, purity, humility and so on. Gratitude embodies all the divine qualities. That is the only quality that will help everyone solve his problems and also run the fastest.

If you have a gratitude-heart, you will be able to receive the utmost. It is a gratitude-heart that can receive from above peace, light and bliss in boundless measure and also manifest them here on earth.

A gratitude-heart
Is to discover on earth
A Heaven-delivered rose.

Excerpt from Chapter 13: Self-Transcendence

My sense of perfection need not and cannot be the same as your sense of perfection. Everyone has to define perfection according to his receptivity, according to his realization of truth. But one thing that everyone agrees upon is that he has to make progress.

According to me, perfection is constant progress, which is always transcending itself. Otherwise, if I say that this is perfection, you will say no, something else is perfection. There will be no end to our dispute. My perfection need not be your perfection, but my self-transcendence will always give me satisfaction and your self-transcendence will always give you satisfaction. Where there is continuous satisfaction, glowing satisfaction, illumining satisfaction, we have to know that that is perfection. Perfection is in the satisfaction that glows and grows inside our hearts.

Self-transcendence is the only thing
A human being needs
In order to be truly happy.

Excerpt from Epilogue: Happiness

When we, as human beings, are inspired, we do many good things for ourselves and also for the betterment of the world. If we are not inspired, then we will have nothing to offer to the world; we may even try to harm ourselves or others. Inspiration can bring us so much happiness and, if we are happy, then we will also get peace. Inside happiness abides peace. If we are happy, then we will not quarrel and fight with others. We will not find fault with them. If you are happy, you will be kind to me and I will be kind to someone else, and from there it will spread. Happiness comes from inspiration. That is my simple philosophy.

If you look at something inspiring, you get spontaneous happiness, and spontaneous happiness is spiritual happiness.

Reader Reviews of The Jewels of Happiness

“As he uses his experience as Peace meditation leader of the United Nations, Sri Chinmoy encourages people to find their enthusiasm for life, and with that, they will find love as well. The Jewels of Happiness is an excellent read with much to teach, highly recommended.”

Midwest Book Review

“There is tons of books on happiness… but this one is different! Rather than saying what you should do, how to behave, etc, it naturally and gently inspires you to be a better human being and then you gradually start to feel the real and lasting happiness deep inside you. Just listening to/reading this book uplifts you more than you would expect.”

Jayana

“Sri Chinmoy became cemented in my mind as a true literary giant. He presents such profound thoughts in an amazingly eloquent and simple manner. The mark of a true genius, I think, is the ability to distill profundity into simplicity.”

Rudy Andrews

“A beautiful book. Full of inspirational and totally practical words of wisdom to help and guide one through everyday life. Can be read as a whole or simply (my preference) dipped into. Its messages are full of hope, that seem to transfer readily to the reader with ease and optimism. Highly recommended.”

Rita Mehta

Supporting the International Day of Happiness

The Jewels of Happiness project is a proud supporter of the International Day of Happiness, which was declared by the United Nations General Assembly.

As part of the celebrations for the inaugural Day of Happiness, the first edition of the audiobook was launched at the United Nations.

How to order

Print and e-book

Purchase from Amazon » or call Heart-Light Distributors on 1-800-739-2885.

Order Now!

The audiobook is available from Youtube, Audible.com and iTunes