what i’ve lately reached that human beings in their nature are greedy thats why they always complain and none have reached the extreme happines and satisfaction… Because every smile calls another and if we just give up when we reach a success or a goal inorder to lockup the pleasure we are feeling and dont let it go than we are weak and even what we are trying to keep feeling it,i mean happiness, will fade away with time because nothing lasts forever so thats life: always aiming for a great happiness that would stay our company for the rest of our lives but we cant find… so i wanna know if anyone consider himself really happy and if not do u think heaven or paradise is actually present to provide us with total happiness and forever???
I think you just described addiction in so many words.
That being said, perhaps happiness isn’t something that should be sought as we do a “fix”. Rather more of a recognition of what gives you purpose and breeds morality. What is paradise if not a place, or state of being, that allows you to forget the influences and pressures that govern your life? Death, even without a traditional “heaven”, would seem like a total state of unawareness in that respect. The question to me seems: Is death a total absence of awareness, or a movement to a different state of awareness?
Either way, I’d like to think that our awareness of this world - as we know it - would become moot or forgotten. That certainly constitutes happiness to me; however who’s to say I will be “aware” in any capacity to recognize that?
Happiness is a mindset. Some people can be happy most of the time, or basically all of the time.
Each person’s feelings are unique.
I can be happy all most all of the time. That doesn’t mean that I’m not unhappy sometimes, it just means that when I am, it’s usually a matter of choice.
Happiess, for me, seems to be a matter of results vs. expectations. What makes some happy makes others sad. A person calls themselves happy when they feel satisfied. Satisfaction comes in a variety of forms and as such happiness is attained via a wide range of behaviors which facilitate this sense of satisfaction. It’s essentially a matter of standards of livings vs. experiance. But its also worth noting, i think, that standards can evolve over one’s lifespan and as such attaining a continuous sense of happiness can be elusive. Relative to the standards of living on has, different sets of ideals can help foster a sense of happiness or depression, depending on the results attained.
Do you know what happiness is? The more you repeat that question in your head, you really don’t know. Deliberately look at happiness. What is doing the looking? How do you look at it? What instrument in the area of mind is looking at ‘happiness?’ You don’t dare say that you can’t specifically locate that place in your mind, because if you can’t you might lose happiness. … so you think of some experiences of happiness that came along in your life. Then you say, hey how did I just do that? I seemed to have located happiness, but what just located it? It was you putting memory into service to go back into your experiencing structure’s past.
Now, when you translate sensory input by means of your experiencing structure or whenever memory neurons are activated, thought is born. When thought is born, you are born. That ‘you’ wants to continue on and thus constantly utilizes thought to give continuity to itself. Here, you have to be careful as you go deep into what is the phenomenon of separation.
When you constantly use thought to get happiness, happiness then becomes a goal. When procedures of the goal are analyzed, you discover that what you should or must do to achieve the goal keeps you occupied to a point where the actual unhindered experience of happiness is well nigh impossible. There is a separation between some cause that has to be mustered up and put into operation to get happiness (stimulus) vs. the spontaneous occurrence of a sensation that is latter captured within the framework of the knowledge you have of it (response). When the knowledge is linked to the experience, that knowledge can be used repeatedly to create the experience again and again …… And then, the extended experience reinforces the knowledge. That is an artificial stimulus - response system, a system that has been exploited by many a mind boggler. The true stimulus response is one unitary movement that cannot be separated. But in that unitary movement there is no ‘you’ there to separate the stimulus from the response, no thinker to use thoughts to intrude into the affairs of the senses to gain a profit. Hence the concept of ‘being lost in happiness.’ But how can you be lost in something where the ‘you’ is not there? You wouldn’t know that you were lost.
Which leads me to the following: There is no question of your seeing things as they are. You can’t see things as they are. You never leave any experience or feeling you have alone. You have to capture and interpret that feeling within the framework of the known. You are happy or unhappy only as you have knowledge about and experience of happiness and unhappiness. So everything has to be brought within the framework of the known before you can experience it. The movement of the known is gathering momentum within you. Its only interest is to continue. There is no entity, no self there to give itself continuity; it is just the movement of thought, the self-perpetuating separation. It is mechanical. Anything you try to do about it only adds momentum to it.
i dont think its a matter of choice! because the outer happiness can be choosed and acted but what am meaning this peace and total satisfaction and happiness any1 would reach wich is absolutely not decided!
Our life is like ‘as it is’, it is less like ‘as it should be’. Once many of our false problems, false solutions, false searches, false seeking are dropped, a major chunk of ‘friction’ that we are witnessing today may at once disappear and we may breathe in a fresh air of relief. Life is more like an eternal cycle of change; and never may we desire for the so called ‘eternal happiness’ – that’s the very opposing and conflicting nature and progress of the flow of this life force.
When you mention, heaven or paradise being present, present where? Here on earth now (or as a potential), or latter in an afterlife at a different locale?
This reminds me of a quote from Nietzche’s Geneology of Morals, nobody seeks out happiness, only the englishman does that. Happiness in itself is never actually a goal, more so happiness is the word we use describe the feeling of satisfaction within certain periods of one’s life. I never wake up and say, “i want to get me some happiness today” but i will go get a beer , hang out with friends, play my guitar, all of which i say make me happy for that period of time. Afterward boredom or if one is unlucky depression or sadness set in to fill the gaps between satisfactions.
This is the only reality I have, the world as it is today. Some other extreme reality like permanent happiness that man has invented has absolutely no relationship whatsoever with the reality of this world. As long as you are seeking, searching, and wanting to understand that reality, call it by whatever name you like, it will not be possible for you to come to terms with the reality of the world exactly the way it is. So, anything you do to escape from the reality of this world will make it difficult for you to live in harmony with the things around you.
We have an idea of harmony. How to live at peace with yourself – that’s an idea. There is an extraordinary peace that is there already. What makes it difficult for you to live at peace with yourself is the creation of what you call “peace,” which is totally unrelated to the harmonious functioning of this body. When you free yourself from the burden of reaching out there to grasp, to experience, and to be in that reality, then you will find that it is difficult to understand the reality of anything. You will find that you have no way of experiencing the reality of anything, but at least you will not be living in a world of illusions. You will accept that there is nothing, nothing that you can do to experience the reality of anything, except the partial artificial reality that is imposed on us by society.
We have to accept a few meanings of things as it is imposed on us by the society because it is very essential for us to function in this world intelligently and sanely. If we don’t accept that reality, we are lost. We will end up in the loony bin. So we have to accept the reality as it is imposed on us by the culture, by society or whatever you want to call it, and at the same time understand that there is nothing that we can do to experience the reality of anything. Then you will not be in conflict with the society, and the demand to be something other than what you are will also come to an end.
The goal that you have placed before yourself, the goal which you have accepted as the ideal goal to be reached, and the demand to be something other than what you are, are no longer there. It is not a question of accepting something, but the pursuit of those goals which we have accepted as desirable, is not there any more. The demand to reach that goal also is not there any more. So, you are what you are.
When the movement in the direction of becoming something other than what you are isn’t there any more, you are not in conflict with yourself. If you are not in conflict with yourself, you cannot be in conflict with what’s going on in the world outside and around you. As long as you are not at peace with yourself, it is not possible for you to be at peace with others.
I hear ya …… Boredom: the thought that there is something more interesting, more meaningful to do than what you‘re doing now. Wow, what a bitch to deal with, huh? I mean you really can’t complain, we have all our basic needs, but there’s a paradoxical feeling that there should be something more. Boredom’s not really experienced in your conscious thinking or conscious existence, so from where does it originate?
When you mention, heaven or paradise being present, present where? Here on earth now (or as a potential), or latter in an afterlife at a different locale?
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no i dont think there is a heaven or paradise present here im meaning a latter life some where not like earth!
One interesting concept concerns the rise of self-consciousness in human animal, and how knowledge of our impending death has affected our brains, and even our DNA code. If you put a dog in front of a mirror, he will never figure out that he is looking at his own reflection. If you put a higher primate in front of a mirror, such as a chimpanzee or human child, the higher primate will eventually use the mirror for grooming purposes because he recognizes himself in the reflection. Man’s self-consciousness is so highly developed that humans have come to realize that our life expectancy is short, and that our personal demise is inevitable.
Other animals fear death, danger, and pain, but most have no real understanding of time and the inevitability of their own destruction. Non-human higher primates may possibly have some perception of the time-death equation, but that has not been proven scientifically as far as I know. The time-death equation that adult human animals understand becomes a constant source of anguish. A strong survival instinct is built into our DNA code from our evolutionary journey. When the survival instinct collides with the self-conscious knowledge of our impending death, the human brain needs both a psychological and a neurological barrier to block the conflict and tension. There’s a theory that man has invented myths of God, soul, reincarnation, karma, and afterlife as a way to provide the brain with mental opium, a buffer to the constant ticking clock inside our heads that tells us that our inevitable destruction and decomposition is getting closer every day.
The psychological need for a feeling of immortality is so great that our religious tendencies have become part of our DNA code. It is claimed that humans who believe in the supernatural religions tend to be calmer, healthier, and thus live longer than the nonreligious. Believers also tend to show more bravery when courage is needed to protect their tribe. Genetic tendencies to have religious feelings are fortified over thousands of years of evolution through survival of the religiously fittest.
If your religious beliefs feel exactly right to you, it may be because your subconscious mind wants you to believe them so that you will have a better chance for health and a long lifespan. If you intuitively sense that you have been alive on planet earth before, perhaps that feeling of déja vu comes from your DNA code, not from a reincarnating soul, because DNA has been active on planet earth for at least 3.8 billion years, and we are all created and united by its existence.
…so much speculation.
I’d say your ideas are fine as theory - you do have some interesting points. However, I’m not sure we do, or can, ever really ‘know’ 98% of what you’re postulating.
Perhaps religion is a source of comfort as well as an illusion of control by suggesting that there is a realm of experience beyond death and we can choose to take part in it. A “strong survival instinct” seems built into ‘nature’ in general to me.
If you think about it, death was likely a source of curiosity before it was of fear. Perhaps it is religious speculation that created said fear. If an animal has no concept of death, how can he be afraid of it? We fear what we can experience first – like pain and loneliness. The point is that, in all reality, we have no conception of death ourselves; we fear because of the effect that death has on the living (rather than those who are actually deceased). I don’t think we have a psychological need for immortality as much as we do for power. That way, even if we do not have the power to overcome death (which seems to have become fairly obvious), we still have power over the pain and loneliness we expect to come with it. I would think that our real fear isn’t “death” as we know it (void) - because nobody has observed or experienced complete nothingness. Our fear is likely of what leads up to death, and the constant unknown of what occurs after, which we can only apply human understanding to. Thus we imagine pain and loneliness in death, and we look to fairy tales to answer questions that we can’t seem to let go of.
Religion is helpful simply because it distracts from these uber-important questions. I say ‘helpful’ because, while such a distraction promotes ignorance, it allows people to let go and focus on what matters - happiness. However, religion dictates the nature & degree of that happiness as well, so you have a trade off:
Religion takes the burden of death, so now you take the burden of religion. Worth it to some I suppose; thankfully not all…
Acceptance, on the other hand, allows one the same freedom without the trade-off. The problem is that we are so plagued by curiosity that the possibilities frighten us (possibilities of pain, loneliness, etc.). To accept that takes a great deal of strength and character, yet it offers the least amount of restriction on your living happiness.
We can only fear what we understand. Why would Christians mourn and weep over death with such grandiose ideas about “heaven” and such? Call it tradition or whatever, but it boils down to the realization that we ‘know’ nothing about death or there after. To me, these people live only in death because the concept of “death” consumes their lives.
The illusion of control. Let go of it, I dare any one of you. I have been trying my whole life only to find that my self-deceit knows no bounds. There is something comforting about being deceived in the same way that you deceive yourself. Religion thrives from that comfort, which - as you and Marx said - is opium for the mind. A temporary feeling of contentment where one feels discomfort, followed by a nasty bout of withdrawal.
Certainty: something that is certain to happen.
When you and I and our neighbors are all seeking certainty in permanent happiness without one moment of unhappiness, when every individual is seeking certainty for himself, there can be no certainty in this world. It’s because you are all the time searching and not allowing what is there to express itself without the restrictions that the thought of something more meaningful, more purposeful, or more interesting places on you.
Unlike physical fear, that we and all animals have used to preserve survival and the possibility of reproduction, there is a fear of losing what you have and what you know. That’s psychological fear found in self conscious humans. If you lose what you know, you lose all that you identify with and the loss of your own identity is something that is very frightening to you. There is a trust that your knowledge and thinking will see you through (as it has when you were successful in ventures in the material world through trial and error), and deliver the happiness whenever you want it. But you know jolly well that this is not always the case. So the search remains there indefinitely: how to find that way, that method. Thus this statement from stat,
Fairly and that’s as good as it gets usually. So yes.
Well said my friend. Perhaps happiness is not something to be obtained, rather it is something to be recognized.
Maybe this is also why addiction grips so many people, and causes such a general malaise. The more you associate sensory pleasure with happiness the less you recognize your ‘living happiness’, or the aspects that are true sources of positivity in your life.
The funny part is that I think we’ve already discovered our method, as you stated in the previous quote. Letting go of your doubts to embrace that which seems most important to you – finding beauty in the certainty of your uncertainty (and vice versa 
).
Certainty: The most uncertain of all concepts.
Happiness, what a silly word.
My belief on being happy is that first happiness comes from all different things for all different people. What makes me happy might not make you or anyone else around happy or as happy as it did me. I think what people need to do is truely figure out what will make them happy, not for just the short bursts of laughter which cause happiness from watching a funny movie or tv show. But really look inside yourself and find those things that will make you truely happy. Like accomplishments, fullfiling dreams and goals, etc. I dont follow religion because I think too many people put too much into God. I do believe in God and accept Jesus as my savior, but I dont really agree with alot of the Bible and my views on religion are alot different than others. I think God put us all here to live a life that we choose, not one influenced by others or forced into one because of whatever situation. But a life that we want to live, one that we choose. I think as long as it brings happiness to you, its okay to do, as long as youre not hurting anyone else in the process that is.
Personally right now I am not truely happy, but I am happy and positive. I dont let the negative things in life bring me down that much but yeah they still can sometimes. But I am on the path to what I feel will truely make me happy and in the end that is all that matters. Doesnt matter how people look at you while you live your life, it only matters what you see in the mirror in the morning. If youre not happy, get out, leave, dont look back. Sometimes its necessary to go away from everything you know just to find what it is that will make you happy. For me, inner peace and a higher state of enlightenment will be what makes me happy. But I also want to teach others to chase after what they want, kind of like what a Bodhisattva does, they teach instead of reaching the highest state of enlightenment, they sacrafice that so that they can teach others how to get that in life. Thats what would make me truely happy.
However I dont have enough knowledge or experience in life to be able to do that, Im a long way off, but even being a student of knowledge and life is making me happy for now. And by the way I believe in 2 ways to go when you die, either heaven for eternity, or reincarnation to give life another go if you didnt like how it turned out for you. Like I said I do believe in God, but the words of the Bible to me with my personal beliefs just dont make sense, if God wants you to truely be happy, why so many rules? Thats why I love philosophy over religion, philosophy is mearly a matter of thinking about life, with religion, its more of a set of rules of things you cant do in order to get into heaven. And yet God is supposed to forgive everyone, and give everyone free will. My thoughts on religion can go on for days, and it all boils down to the fact that I cant understand or get a straight answer, so I no longer try. I just know what I feel to be true for me, and I go with that.
Just look deep inside yourself and find what it is that will bring true happiness, then go for it.