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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
hedonic
thermostat 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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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
created 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 Life - 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
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and is responsible for the collapse of morals, the elevation of self-centered
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American
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the corrupt international cartel has garnered more and more power. This power
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by pressing emotional buttons which have been preprogrammed into the population
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