Levenson, Lester; Dwoskin, Hale. Happiness Is Free, Sedona Press, page 8-10.
I was born July 19, 1909, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, into a middleclass family as a very shy person. I tried to do things the way they were supposed to be done—doing the right thing, getting a good education, and being the best in my field. My natural inclination was toward science, especially the science of the world, and of man himself. I graduated from Rutgers University in 1931 as a physicist, after which I worked twenty-some years in physics and engineering. In physics, I worked in research and development on measuring instruments and automatic control, connected with Brown Instrument Co., which later became a subsidiary of Honeywell. And in the engineering field, I worked as a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a construction engineer, a heating and venting engineer, and a marine engineer—actually, fourteen different fields. I also went into various businesses, including restaurants, lumber, building, and oil, intertwined with engineering, wanting to make money, wanting to make it in the world.
At that time, I did not know what I now know—that what I was seeking was actually the answers to life itself. Nothing that I had worked at would give me that answer, and as the years went by, I became heavy with depression and with sickness. By 1952, I had been through constant illness—I even had jaundice three or so times a year. I had an enlarged liver, kidney stones, spleen trouble, hyper- and hypo-acidity, ulcers that perforated and formed lesions, and to top it off, I had at least ten years of migraine headaches. This all culminated in 1952 when I had my second coronary thrombosis. After the second coronary, I was told I would not live much longer—that I might die any day and shouldn’t make the effort to take so much as a step unless I necessarily had to. I was extremely fearful of dying, but I said to myself, “You’re still breathing, Lester—there is still a chance.” So I sat down and began thinking on an “around the clock” basis.
Having lived forty-two or so years, and having reached the end of the line without happiness, without health, I realized that all the knowledge I had accumulated was of no avail. I had studied Watson’s behaviorism in the 30s and Freud’s in the late 30s and early 40s. I had studied the philosophies. I had studied logic. I studied economics. I studied all the major fields of man, and with all that knowledge there, I was at the end of the line. This made me realize that the accumulated knowledge of man was of no use. So I decided to start from scratch. Forget all that knowledge. Begin from point zero and see what you can pick up. So, I posed the questions, “What am I?” “What is this World?” “What is my relationship to it?” “What is Mind?” “What is Intelligence?” “What is Happiness?” I began by asking myself, “What do I want out of life?” And the answer was happiness.
Investigating further, I went into the moment when I was feeling happiest. I discovered something which to me was startling at the time. It was when I was loving that I was happiest. That happiness equated to my capacity to love rather than to being loved. That was a starting point. I began correcting all my thoughts and feelings in that direction from that of wanting to be loved, to that of loving. And in that process, I discovered another major thing that kind of shocked me. I saw that I wanted to change this entire world, and that was the cause of my ulcers—or one of the major causes. In realizing how much I wanted to change things in this world, I saw how it made me a slave of this world, I made the decision to reverse that. And in the process of following out these two directions—actually unloading all the subconscious concepts and pressures in those directions—I discovered I was getting happier, freer, lighter, and feeling better in general. As I saw this direction was good, I made the decision that if a slice of pie tasted this good, I wanted the whole pie. And I decided not to let go of this direction until I got that entire pie of happiness, and with it the answer to, “What am I? What is this life, and what is my relationship to it?”
This decision allowed me, as I claim, to get the answer to life itself in a matter of only three months. I believe if I can do it, anyone can do it if they have that much “want to.” In that three-month period, all the ailments I had in my physical body corrected. All my miseries dropped away. And I ended up in a place in which I was happy all the time, without sorrow. Not that the world stopped pushing against me, it continued—but I was at a place where I could resolve things almost immediately. Having cleared out the negative fears, all the negative “I cannots,” I would focus right on the answer to every problem, and get it very quickly. And so, my whole life turned around from being depressed and sick, to being happy all the time, and being in perfect health all the time. One of the things that happened in this process was my identification with others. I saw that we are all related, we are all interconnected, each mind is like a radio broadcasting and receiving station; that we are all tuned into each other unconsciously— that we are just not aware of it. As a lot of the suppressed energies are let out, this becomes obvious to us and once we identify with everyone else it is just natural that we want everyone else to discover what we have discovered. That life was meant to be beautiful . . . meant to be happy all the time with no sorrow. And to be with perfect health.
And so after reaching that high point of understanding in 1952, I have wanted to help others to discover what I had discovered.