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"My aspiration to be happy and overcome suffering
is part of my fundamental nature, as it is part of yours."
Dalai
Lama
"Let us then endeavour to disperse
those clouds of ignorance, those mists of darkness, which impede man on his
journey, which obscure his progress, which prevent his marching through life
with a firm steady grip.
Let us try to inspire him with
courage - with respect for his
reason - with an inextinguishable
compassion for truth - with a remembrance of Galileo Galilei -
to the end that he may learn to
know himself - to know his legitimate rights - that he may learn to
consult his experience, and no longer
be the dupe of an
imagination led astray by authority - that he may renounce the
prejudices of his childhood -
that he may learn to found his morals on his nature, on his wants, on the real
advantage of society - that he may dare to care for himself - that he may learn
to pursue his true happiness by
promoting the happiness of others - in short, that he may no longer occupy
himself with reveries either useless
or dangerous - that he may become a virtuous, a
rational being, in which case he cannot
fail to become happy.
In short, man
should learn to know, that happiness is simply an emanative
quality formed by reflection; that each individual ought to be the
sun of his own system, continually
shedding around him his genial
rays; that these, re-acting, will keep his own existence constantly
supplied with the requisite heat to enable him to put forth kindly
fruit.
The happy man is he enjoys the benefits bestowed upon him by
nature: in other words, he who thinks for himself; who is
thankful for the good he
possesses; who does not envy the welfare of
others, nor sigh after imaginary benefits
always beyond his grasp. " - Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron
d'Holbach
bliss
contentment
joyful
satisfaction
the emotional state of being
happy
emotions experienced when in a
state of feeling good
agreeable feeling or condition of the soul
arising
from good fortune or propitious
happening of any category
Happiness is
generic, and is applied to almost every category of enjoyment except those of
the animal appetites;
felicity is a more formal
word, used more sparingly, in the same general sense, but with elevated
associations;
blessedness is applied to the
most refined enjoyment arising from the purest social, benevolent, altruistic
and religious affections;
bliss denotes still more exalted delight, and is applied more
appropriately to the joy of the feelings an individual
expects to enjoy in
heaven and in
communion with the Creator
and Sustainer
"He who for the sake of happiness
hurts
others who also want happiness,
shall not hereafter find happiness.
He who for the sake of happiness
does not hurt others
who also want happiness,
shall hereafter find
happiness."
Dhammapada
Cognitive
bias produces logic processing errors making it nearly impossible to predict
what will make an individual happy in the future.
The path to
happiness lies before us and we begin our journey but
there are many obstacles along the
way.
Subconscious
impulse below conscious awareness chooses for us which path we pick at each
fork in the road.
Imagination has shortcomings.
It is perhaps inevitable that
as we look down each fork in the road we will incorrectly predict the
experiences we will have traveling down the road.
Experiences we
anticipate will make us
happy fail to do so and experiences we have dreaded cause less pain than we
imagined.
What we imagine will make us happy in the future is very
likely to be incorrect in that we tend to misperceive reality and build a
mistaken view of the future on this
incorrect perception.
The
main reason for this is attitudes, interests and emotional needs change over
time.
Pleasurable experiences are especially pleasurable the first time
they happen, but the pleasue provided wanes with repetition.
This is
how our imagination of what will please us in the future fails us.
We
are equipped with a hedonic thermostat that is constantly resetting us back to
our emotional baseline while we are constantly imagining novel experiences.
"When we have an experience on successive
occasions, we quickly begin to adapt to it, and the experience yields less
pleasure each time.
Psychologists calls this
habituation." -
Daniel Gilbert
"Happiness is when what you think,
what you say, and what you do are in
harmony."
Mahatma Gandhi
If, for whatever reason, one does
equate happiness with pleasure, then
the paradox of hedonism
arises.
Consciously
pursuing pleasure interferes with experiencing
pleasure.
"Happiness
cannot be pursued; it must ensue." - Viktor Frankl
"I realized that
one's happiness was only to be attained by not making it the direct end." -
John Stuart Mills
"Most men pursue
pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it." -
Søren
Kierkegaard |
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"I should
not, however, infer from this that the pursuit of pleasure is necessarily
self-defeating and futile; but merely that the principle of Egoistic Hedonism,
when applied with a due knowledge of
the laws of human nature, is
practically self-limiting; i.e., that a rational method of attaining the end at
which it aims requires that we should to some extent put it out of sight and
not directly aim at it." - Henry Sidgwick
"Happiness is an actually
attainable goal, if we can only
learn to detach ourselves from knee jerk responses to what we have learned to
view as desirable, as well as to what we think we must avoid at all costs. The
true, attainable happiness is
the state of consciousness that allows us to embrace whatever comes our way
with equanimity."- Peter Clothier
What is the true secret to happiness?
Low expectations !
the myth of
happinessWritten into the Constitution
of the United States of America is the right of all Americans to pursue
happiness. At this time and place happiness was considered to be of an
individual nature. An individual could be happy or unhappy.
Blueprints
for happiness were invariably based upon individual experience involving the
exercise of mind or body and almost always, even in the case of
Epicurus, on some sort of
discipline.
With the advent of collectivism these blueprints were
replaced by a vision of collective
material well-being, happiness lifting all boats by the infinite progress
of the global
corporate derivatives and futures markets!
Happiness is owed to all
and consists in a collective increase of
wealth.
Happiness is
exclusively material in nature.
The myth of the ability to attain happiness
through material possessions is all that enables the vast majority of
mankind to regard life as worth living in MICE culture.
All activity
must be subordinated to the exclusive aim of increasing material
wealth.
Anyone who challenges this material myth of happiness is at once
looked upon by all his social associates as an enemy and
branded as too
negative.
"We all have the tendency to struggle
in our bodies and our minds. We
believe that happiness is possible only in
the future. The realization that
we have already
arrived, that we don't
have to travel any further, that
we are already here,
can give us peace and joy. The
conditions for our happiness are already sufficient. We only need to allow
ourselves to be in the present moment, and we will be able to touch them. What
are we looking for to be happy? Everything is already here. We
do not need to put an object in front of
us to run after, believing that until we get it, we cannot be happy. That
object is always in the future, and
we can never catch up to it. We are already in the Pure Land,
the Kingdom of God.
We only need to wake up and realize we are
already here." - Thich Nhat Hanh
gross national
happiness
The country of Bhutan, the last
surviving refuge of traditional Himalayan Buddhist culture, uses Gross National
Happiness (GNH) is an attempt to define quality of life in more holistic and
psychological terms than Gross National Product(GNP).
The term, Gross
National Happiness, was coined by Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck in 1972.
It signaled his commitment to building an economy that would serve
Bhutan's unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values.
The four
pillars of Gross National Happiness are the promotion of equitable and
sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural
values, conservation of the
natural environment, and establishment of good governance.
Gross
National Happiness is a qualitative discussed in tandem with the Genuine
Progress Indicator which, unlike Gross National Happiness, attempts to quantify
well-being and happiness.
The two measures agree, however, that well-being is more relevant and
important than consumption.
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is presented for educational purposes only.
This website defines a
new perspective with which to engage reality to which its author adheres. The
author feels that the falsification of reality outside personal experience has
forged a populace unable to discern propaganda from reality and that this has
been done purposefully by an international corporate cartel through their
agents who wish to foist a corrupt version of reality on the human race.
Religious intolerance occurs when any group refuses to tolerate religious
practices, religious beliefs or persons due to their religious ideology. This
web site marks the founding of a system of philosophy named The Truth of the
Way of the Lumière Infinie - a rational gnostic mystery religion based
on reason which requires no leap of faith, accepts no tithes, has no supreme
leader, no church buildings and in which each and every individual is
encouraged to develop a personal relation with the Creator and Sustainer
through the pursuit of the knowledge of reality in the hope of curing the
spiritual corruption that has enveloped the human spirit. The tenets of
The Truth of the Way of the
Lumière Infinie are spelled out in detail on this web site by the
author. Violent acts against individuals due to their religious beliefs in
America is considered a "hate crime."
This web site in no way condones
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already occurring due to the international corporate cartels desire to control
the human race. The international corporate cartel already controls the world
economic system, corporate media worldwide, the global industrial military
entertainment complex and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the
elevation of self-centered behavior and the destruction of global ecosystems.
Civilization is based on cooperation. Cooperation does not occur at the point
of a gun.
American social mores and values have declined precipitously
over the last century as the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and
more power. This power rests in the ability to deceive the populace in general
through corporate media by
pressing
emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population through
prior corporate media psychological operations. The results have been the
destruction of the family and the destruction of social structures that do not
adhere to the corrupt international elites vision of a perfect world. Through
distraction and coercion the direction of thought of the bulk of the population
has been directed toward solutions proposed by the corrupt international elite
that further consolidates their power and which further their purposes.
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