Reflection 7
I resonated with the concept of horizon of likes. We always have things we don’t like seeing, the places we don’t like visiting and the people we don’t like meeting. We somehow know with the past experiences that meeting this particular person is going to cause unhappiness. We also know about situations and places. In a way we can control our happiness by being on one side of the horizon of our likes, whenever possible. We always associate things, places and people with happiness. The objects surrounding these things also get associated with happiness. For me, hearing again the music which I heard at a happy function, can invoke a similar feeling of happiness. Also, I still get unreasonably happy when I listen to the music which I enjoyed as a child. The most common example is, the majority of people becoming happy around water. One of the reasons for it being that we spend our first nine months of life immersed in the watery environment of our mother’s womb.
Happiness is always considered as an end and not as a means. ‘And they lived happily ever after’ is a sentence with which most of the fairy tales end. The message given is that everything was worth it if the end is happy. Many cultures, and societies try to push us towards happiness. Happiness is the end goal for which I am doing anything and everything in my life and also most of the people on this planet. May it be ways of earning money to buy happiness or efforts to look a certain way to get complimented. It’s interesting to see how society pushes us towards happiness and dictates the ideal path to be followed for achieving it. We are also taught when to feel happiness and when not to feel it, to qualify as a ‘good’ person. Many children will inherently laugh when someone slips and falls. But elders teach them not to be happy in others’ sorrow. Hence we are taught to care more about the happiness of a society than the individual happiness. So anything that disturbs the peace of families or societies is considered bad. Societies hesitate accepting queer people because they don’t conform with the social norms of happiness. Traditionally, happiness is associated with heterosexual marriages and the subsequent birth of children. We see so many happy endings depicted in movies and stories through heterosexual marriages. This has associated the happy ending of the first half of our lives with heterosexual marriage. We see it as something which would make the couple happy, their families happy and the surrounding people also happy. That is the reason why still in many conservative cultures, families force individuals to get married.
Every advertisement is telling us to be more happy. To get a new technology which will make your life easier and hence make you happy. To get a subscription of listening to unlimited songs, which would give you unlimited happiness. To get extremely delicious food and a more comfortable couch. Then there are also promises of long term happiness. For example, joining a fitness club which will keep your body more healthy or learning a skill which would get you a job. I wonder if these things are not letting us be happy in inexpensive ways by making us imagine our future happiness in the way they want. That also brings up the question, if happiness is the most important feeling. As humans, we crave for meaning more than happiness. In many cultures sacrifice and grace are more important than happiness.
I would also like to reflect on what the Indian philosophy says about worldly happiness. As we see the worldly happiness is associated with external objects and hence we desire to acquire those external objects to be happy. But the desires never get completely satisfied even after the objects are acquired. After having the things which I once desired, the happiness associated with them becomes the new normal of my life. They no longer give me happiness and I set a new standard for becoming happy and then this goes on and on. Also the things which can give me happiness, have power of giving me equal and opposite sadness. As removing them from my life, takes my life one level below my normal. Also, worldly happiness is conditional, ephemeral and so many situations can affect its certainty. Hence it is recommended not to chase worldly happiness but rather chase the inner bliss, which is said to be the property of our own consciousness. Inner bliss, is told to be unconditional and everlasting. It is told to be experienced in meditative states where the mind isn’t active and hence the inputs from the sensory organs cannot distract you. It is not something to be achieved but just realized, like the bottom of a glass containing muddy water, which was always there but can only be seen once the water becomes calm.
