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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 inspire him with
courage to respect his reason and
an inextinguishable love for truth -
with a remembrance of Galileo
Galilei:
to the end
that he may learn to know himself;
to know his legitimate rights and
dare to care for himself;
that he may learn to
consult his experience;
no
longer be the dupe of an
imagination led astray by authority;
that he may
renounce the prejudices of
childhood;
that he may learn to found his wants to
the real advantage of
society;
that he may pursue true happiness by promoting the happiness
of others;
in short, that he may no longer occupy himself with
reveries either useless or
dangerous so he may become a virtuous rational being.
Man
should learn happiness is simply an emanation formed of reflection.
Each
individual ought to be the sun of his own system, continually shedding around
him his genial rays keeping 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.
He who thinks for himself is
thankful for the life 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 arising from
a propitious happening of any category
Happiness requires satisfaction of
natural rights;
Felicity, a more formal word,
comes with elevated associations;
Blessedness is
applied to the refined satisfation arising from honest socially benevolent
altruistic affections and actions;
Bliss, exalted delight, is appropriately applied to
the joy an individual
expects in heaven 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.
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 likely to be incorrect in that
we tend to
misperceive reality and build a
mistaken view of the future on this incorrect perception.
The reason
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 acclimate to it, and
the experience yields less pleasure each time.
Psychologists calls this
habituation." -
Daniel Gilbert
If one
equates 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 Mill
"Most men pursue
pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it." -
Søren
Kierkegaard |
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"I should not
infer the pursuit of pleasure is necessarily self-defeating and
futile.
The principle of Egoistic Hedonism, when applied with a due
knowledge of the laws of human
nature, is practically
self-limiting.
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.
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.
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 exclusivly to increase material wealth.
Anyone who
challenges the "material wealth is the only path" myth of happiness is
looked upon by social associates as
addled and branded as
crazy.
"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 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 web site is not a commercial web site and
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 violence. To the contrary the intent here is to reduce the
violence that is 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 coöperation. Coöperation
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.
All views and opinions presented on this web site are the views and
opinions of individual human men and women that, through their writings, showed
the capacity for intelligent, reasonable, rational, insightful and unpopular
thought. All factual information presented on this web site is believed to be
true and accurate and is presented as originally presented in print media which
may or may not have originally presented the facts truthfully. Opinion and
thoughts have been adapted, edited, corrected, redacted, combined, added to,
re-edited and re-corrected as nearly all opinion and thought has been
throughout time but has been done so in the spirit of the original writer with
the intent of making his or her thoughts and opinions clearer and relevant to
the reader in the present time.
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