real life and the search for happiness
May 1, 2008 by katinkaspiritual
I’m wondering whether the search for happiness is at all a reasonable search. Don’t get me wrong, I want happiness as much as anyone. But sorrow is part of life, and facing sorrow and working through it (having a healthy cry for instance) works better than putting on a happy face.
I’m writing this blogpost in response to a review in Scientific American, May 2008, which mentions that 90% of Americans report that they are happy. Yet Pablo Sender says:
A common feature to most human beings is the pursuit of happiness. A second common feature is their failure in the pursuit. Our modern culture created an almost infinite amount of “happiness-producer-objects”. Technology, comfort, money, fame, a career are publicized as producers of happiness. We usually see even our relationships as no more than another object to bring happiness. But we are not happy.
(source)
The book reviewed in the Scientific American of May is by Eric G. Wilson. He takes a different approach. The title is self-explanatory: ‘Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy‘. He says, I’m paraphrasing from the quotes in Scientific American, that to be happy in a sad world is to be unrealistic, unauthentic and in denial.
I believe he is to some extent right. It is relevant to note that in the four truths the Buddha taught, the word happiness isn’t even mentioned:
- Suffering exists
- Suffering arises from attachment to desires
- Suffering ceases when attachment to desire ceases
- Freedom from suffering is possible by practising the Eightfold Path
The main message of the Buddha was about sorrow, not happiness. The end of sorrow (or suffering, or stress) isn’t the same as happiness. Freedom of suffering sounds like happiness, but is perhaps closer in actual fact to serenity. So how does all this related to everyday ecstasy?
Chris
Govert
Pablo
katinkaspiritual
latebrake
mitdyob
I think that the key to this subject is the “pursuit of happiness” and the “attachment to desires”.
In my experience, I have found that my happiness is indirectly proportional to my expectations. The more expectations that I place on people and things, the more disappointment comes into my life.
When I choose to be happy and look for happy and good things, that is the life that I am able to enjoy.
I am not saying that we must overlook the fact that bad things happen to good people. We must work thru the problems and we will be able to be happy.
Happiness is not a process, it is an event. We cannot live our life in the pursuit of this intangible. We need to live our life as a display of this lifestyle.
Buddha said “Life is suffering.” But there is also an Eastern saying, “Keep a green bough in your heart and the singing bird will come.”
The point of the researcher was partly that there is so much sadness in the world. Poverty, illness, war, crime… How can we be happy knowing all that? And is happiness authentic if it ignores all that?
This reminds me of the following quote:
Now bend thy head and listen well, O Bôdhisattva - Compassion speaks and saith: “Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shalt thou be saved and hear the whole world cry?” from Blavatsky’s Voice of the Silence
There is a marquee in front of a church I pass on my way to the TS in Wheaton. This week it says “Who is rich? He who is content”.
Suffering occurs when one perceives lack. If one understands that what happens (in the world or to one’s self) is Karmic, and lives in acceptance of that Karma, one is content, one is rich. My teacher has often said “Learn to walk above your Karma, as if on stilts”. Understand that happiness is but a brief respite from that perception of lack.
I don’t mean that we should be passive in our acceptance; we should do all that we can to alleviate suffering. Sometimes all it takes is a smile..
Physiological models may reveal quite a bit more than abstract philosophy seems to quickly grasp. The pursuit of happiness over sorrow is little more than a disdain for cyclical balance, by those who are ignorant of the natural cyclic functions of psyche and body.
I suggest that extremes in pleasure or pain cause degeneration within the cellular tissue, thereby functioning as an age accelerant. Excessive pain causes active cellular degeneration (atrophy) and excessive pleasure causes passive cellular degeneration (atrophy).
Excessive pain may be medically defined as psychological and/or physiological pain which actively inhibits functional bodily activity (such as a toothache, headache, earache, etc. which is so bad that one can’t drive a car, read a book or take showers), whereas excessive pleasure may be medically defined as psychological and/or physiological pleasure which passively inhibits functional bodily activity (such as narcotic usage that inhibits driving a car, reading a book or taking showers).
Pursuers of happiness (over and above sorrow) simply enhance their own predisposition for mental and/or physical illness, insofar as they tend to upset their own natural pain/pleasure cycles through an imbalanced assertion of psychological and/or physiological self-manipulation.
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
-Albert Camus
That’s a great quote. I’m using it on my new Ultimate Questions squidoo lens Thanks.