The other thing that occurs to me concerning happiness is that many feel that happiness is something "bigger than" or "more important than" a simple feeling or emotion. To say that smoking cannabis makes you happy will almost certainly cause some to react that I am trivialising happiness. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anything you do that causes happiness in your life becomes one of your values, and what you value you strive to obtain. If you already have it, you will want to protect it and keep it.
There is a problem though, on two fronts. 1. Things run out. If your happiness depends on something "material" like cannabis or coffee or real estate, you will sooner or later exhaust your supply of it and find yourself running around trying to restock your supply. This is not itself always a particularly happy experience. I often find myself going a version of insane trying to find parking at shopping centres and waiting in long, slow queues to get to the checkout, for example. I have never fully understood why life and survival are totally predicated on "obtaining stuff" and "protecting stuff" and "consuming stuff." We are happy when we have stuff to consume and when we run out of stuff we then render ourselves unhappy going after it again ( well, at least I do...) The ridiculous and perpetual cycle of "Be silent. Consume. Die." 2. Happiness, being a quale, cannot persist, possibly because of 1. (above), though entirely more likely due to the tiring effect of neurotransmitters in the brain. For some reason, the brain develops a tolerance for its own chemicals and happiness ceases to happen after a time because no mental state can persist indefinitely. Just as it is highly unlikely that a fit of anger will last forever, it is highly unlikely that happiness will either since mental states require resources to run and the more powerful the quale, the more resources the body consumes. Just as those who smoke cannabis every day find quickly that it requires more and more of the substance to achieve the desired euphoric effect, any means of achieving happiness will sooner or later not work at all. I mean, after you have bought half a dozen blocks of apartments in Tasmania, is a seventh really going to make you happier than you were after you purchased the sixth? Happiness, for those who love to philosophise it into something other than a simple quale, will be recognisable as that state of mind that does not cease. In other words, no one ever truly experiences happiness since no one - not even the jolly joyful Dalai Lama - has ever experienced a quale that never ends. To take a Buddhist page out of his book though, it becomes the foundation of wisdom to try to seek happiness by means other than running around trying to obtain and replenish "stuff". This is surely because any belief in matter and materiality leads to the pain and agony of what I am struggling to describe here. It may be that my fascination for Bruno's Comp is due to its kernel of doubt concerning the "supreme importance" of matter and the material world. Comp makes me happy. I have yet to fully understand it. Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
