I don't have to tell you that happiness is a state of mind having nothing to do with material reality. A little girl making mud-pies in a puddle or a little boy playing five-stones with peach pits in the dust can raise radiant faces to an understanding adult.

Happiness is letting the child in all of us indulge in the joy of oneness with the world, with nature, with make-believe and with beloved others.

We obtain satisfaction from a job well done and contentment from material security, but happiness is a knack of seeing woods amongst trees. We simply have to stand back and ignore some of the confusing detail of briars and brambles to be able to discern a larger reality, the forest, in all its untamed wilderness and freedom.

We are strange creatures. Composites of practicality and imagination, we try to force ourselves into a limited mould of rationality. For what?

Does it make us any happier to think of the world as a cosmic accident than a playground created by a loving father for his spirit children?

If you feel safer with certainty and accept only what can consistently be demonstrated, then you must live with fear in a fragile world. You are alone, separated from all other forms of life and manifestations of matter. You are alone, reliant on yourself for sustenance and survival. You are alone, and when you die the world ends. Life is a brief period of struggle, acquisition and decay, a flicker of light in remorseless, stifling night.

If you listen to your spiritual self, that part of your brain created to enhance survival by allowing you to be attuned to more ephemeral communications, you will perceive a different reality, one inhabited by artists, musicians and poets.

It is a reality increasingly acknowledged by science.

Children have always had access to this reality. They have to be trained to see consistency in a practical world.

We have allowed ourselves to be robbed of that reality and have to learn all over again how to let ourselves go, to feel, to be and to accept understanding by intuition.

One of my friends once mused about the reality of God.
Finally he decided that, as a good insurance broker, he must live as if God existed. "Because", he said, "If I live a good life, satisfying my better instincts and at peace with my fellow men, I can lose nothing but fear.

When I die, if He does not exist, I will never know.

But if I live badly I will hate myself, fear others, become increasingly self-destructive in an impossible search for fulfilment and then I may have to face for eternity the knowledge that I was wrong."

It is easy to make judgements without all the facts. We can discount paranormal and paraphysical phenomena as unproven, as coincidence, as psychosomatic, as sheer imagination. But the fact that we name them at all is proof of their existence.

Scientific method discounts anecdote in favour of measurable results. But the paranormal and paraphysical - which include coincidence ,synchronicity, prescience, intuition, spontaneous healing, the placebo effect, the power of prayer and much, much more, these most powerful manifestations of our connectedness with all the energy of life promise great reward for study.

Those times when we appear to achieve least in material terms are often the most productive in terms of quality of life.

Have you never postponed a task to play with a child or listen to a distressed friend? Did it honestly feel like a waste of time?...... more.....