Table of Contents
Background
The recent buzz in the corporate and startup world is the word happiness. In social media, particularly on professional networks like Linkedin, happiness appears to be the next huge buzzword. No matter what you do, you have to be happy.
Looks like Happiness is the next “big nonexistent problem” that enterprises are promoting to first draw a lot of attention of people towards this, then explaining to them that they don’t have it and thereafter selling the happiness pill to them in exchange for a lot of money.
Even those who do not understand the technical meaning of happiness would know that losing a lot of money to corporates will certainly make only corporates happy.
Therefore I decided to write this post to answer the question “what is happiness” such that, it remains a pointer of information to be shown to those who try to sell “happiness”, as well as for those who want to pursue “happiness”.
The question “what is happiness” can be answered from different perspectives like Psychology, Philosophy, Neuroscience, Endocrinology, Evolutionary Psychology, Ethology, Evolutionary Anthropology as well as from philosophical and spiritual perspectives.
I will break the answer into three distinct parts: The spiritual and philosophical part, the evolutionary and biological part, and the social part. I will start with the philosophical part because this is where a common man is gaslighted to believe that happiness is some star from a distant galaxy that needs a sophisticated coaching rocket to reach.
This post will be simple enough for you to go back and teach your kid about happiness, yet it will be complex enough so that professional happiness merchants do not hide behind “You don’t understand the human aspect of it/or scientific aspect of it” while selling happiness pill.
1. Feeling Happy and Happy Emotions
Emotion vs Feelings
Feelings are mental experiences of body states, which arise as the brain interprets emotions.
Emotions are themselves physical states arising from the body’s responses to external stimuli, while individual emotions are temporary, the feelings they evoke may persist and grow over a lifetime
Emotions
Most often, emotion is defined with reference to a list: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise. They are instant reactions, more of a reflex. Say for example you see a friend after a long time out of nowhere, you will be surprised. But you will feel happy. When you see your job appointment letter, you may feel very joyful. This is also instant happiness. When you hear the news of the death of a public figure, you become sad. When you are working on a critical project and some sales tele-caller calls you, you may feel angry. Seeing the garbage piled up near your apartment can make you disgusting or angry.
The interesting thing to note here is that Emotions do not enter your mind. For instance, no matter how many numbers of times you see an old friend, no matter how many times you are surprised, you will not remain in a surprised state. It will quickly pass. Similarly, if you hear a good joke, you will laugh at that moment. You may again laugh at a later stage while sharing the joke with someone else. But, you will not keep laughing for the entire day.
Emotions are experienced by the body through hormonal regulations which are developed as a process of genetic evolution. These are mostly very low-level of genetic reflexes.
Most often emotions are expressed through facial expression and body posture.
Good actors, and even many times we too can fake our emotions. For instance, many husbands, when they see the mother-in-law visiting their home may smile at her but in reality, would be too frustrated. You may be very happy seeing your good result, but you may keep a neutral face before your friend who hasn’t fared as well in the exams just to not to make him feel bad. Expressions, therefore, can be very misleading when it comes to interpreting the emotion of a person.
There are also jokes about the actors, whose expressions do not change as much with different emotions.
Some humor, some surprise gifts, some good news all make us happy at that moment.
I am sure, seeing the above poster Huge Laurie would definitely bring out a smile on your face and make you momentarily happy.
What is important here to understand is that:
A happy feeling and happy emotions are not the same.
Feelings
let us put a broader discussion of happiness aside for some moments and start from feelings.
You must be really low with the knowledge to come here to read this. Aren’t you? Don’t try to hide your anger. Not only you are low on knowledge and wisdom, but you are also an angry person, with no control over your thoughts and emotions. Probably you hurt a lot of people. Don’t you?
How do you feel? Bad? Agitated? Well, sorry for the above lines. I wanted you to feel bad. I apologize. You felt bad because as you were reading these letters, your brain was processing the information. This reaction was triggered by your brain and not by sensory organs. If you did not know English, the above line wouldn’t have made any difference.
But when you were reading the above statements a moment back, can you recall the way your brain reacted? If you have been able to notice this change (The Happiness Sellers will not even have to reach till this point, they will jump to comment, straightway from the title).
But, as you are here to invest valuable time in your life to understand happiness, you are much deeper into the subject. How many people even take time in today’s world to even try to answer the simplest of the questions?
Feel happy about yourself, you are a rational person, not like the others. You read, enhance your knowledge and make a better sense of the world. You analyze facts critically before making a decision. I really appreciate your effort, time investment, and willingness to learn. You are way better than those who live by their opinions.
Even if you do not know in deep what is happiness, I am sure you would have felt good from within after reading the above statements. Because your brain processed the information and created a happy feeling.
Feeling good is happiness, not feeling so good or feeling bad is sadness
(is that all?).
Simple right? So what needs to be done for you to feel good? Even a simple appreciation can make you feel happy.
When you share a post on social media and many people read it, share, appreciate you, you feel happy. Not so happy or a little sad when your post does not attract that many readers. Right? Instagram photos, Facebook, and LinkedIn give you an opportunity to be “happy”. When people appreciate you, you are happy and when they criticize you, you are not. When you get something desirable, you are happy and when you do not get it, you are unhappy. When you come back home after a long day’s work and see your child, you are happy, may not be that much when you see your mother-in-law (gender irrelevant).
Even though, your brain processes information to generate these kinds of feelings, their relevance in life is pretty low. So, the brain doesn’t put too much weight on these feelings. Feelings stay a little longer than emotions but not long enough to make any behavioral changes in you.
Let us call this form of happiness, which is instant, which we can feel immediately an Instant Happy Feeling.
As the name has it, we get this within a very short period of time, but it also remains in our brain for a very short period of time with low relevance.
We will come back to what a happy emotion is at a later part of the article. Let us understand the concept of feelings in little more detail.
Gilbert has presented a very good model of different types of feelings, which are based on instant sensory inputs.
1) Perceptual: Someone feels the temperature of the bathwater.
2) Exploratory: I feel in my pocket for my keys.
3) Sensory: We feel aches and tickles.
4) Of general condition: We have a non-localized feeling of being depressed, lazy, or sleepy.
5) Of tentative judgment: The philosopher feels there’s a flaw in the argument.
You can get instant happy feelings when you taste good ice cream, find the car key you were searching for which was all along in your pocket, your partner gives you a hug, you come to an AC room after walking in crouching heat for some times, when someone says that you are intelligent.
There is another category of feeling, like feeling self-confident, feeling self-righteous, and feeling triumphant, which we will learn a little later. Such “feelings” do not have any instant environmental variables affecting them but are much to do with beliefs.
Say for example you start sharing your worldview and every time you share, a lot of people come and condemn you for your views. You will feel a moment of sadness. However, if this pattern continues, you will start generating sustained feelings of self-doubt. That self-doubt may lead to a longer period of feeling bad or feeling low.
Similarly, when you share something light-hearted and people comments that you are making them smile, you will feel self-satisfied.
Sustained observation of a particular type of feelings converts it into a belief.
Once you get the belief of happiness out of certain pattern, the brain will make an attempt to motivate you to repeat the pattern as it would motivate you to avoid the pattern where it believes that you may have negative emotions.
When you watch a comedy show, it makes you feel happy. The brain knows it. Thus it will motivate you to watch the show over and over again. When you see a toxic person, he would make you feel disgusted. So your brain will encourage you to avoid the person.
In short,
Seeing, hearing, touching, eating, drinking, thinking something good, will make you experience positive happy emotions. When emotions are processed by brain with your life’s context you get a feeling. When the feelings are repeated, you develop beliefs. Experiencing positive emotions over a sustained period of time will give you happy feelings and belief about happiness.
Is this all the happiness is all about? No, it is not. Feeling good certainly, make us happy, but to understand happiness in a much deeper level, we will have to go much deeper into the subject.
When you “experience” something good, it results in a happy emotion. When you allow the happy emotion to be processed by your brain, it becomes a happy or good feeling.
The cat image might have instantly brought out a happy emotion in you, but the short sales joke above might last a little longer.
Good visuals give us happy emotions, good stories give us happy feelings
2. Happiness from the Consciousness Perspective
Consciousness Vs Self-Awareness
Many a time people use concepts like consciousness and deep spirituality to make a simple subject appear very complex and one that needs the expertise to understand. Before we go to these big terms, let us do some foundation building.
The fact, that we are alive and to be able to distinguish ourselves as an independent identity and to be aware of the world around us and about ourselves is consciousness. Self-Awareness is the awareness of consciousness. (Oops, too complicated).
Let me simplify it further.
Look at your palm. If you are looking at your palm, then you are conscious. You know where your palm is. But, if you are looking at your palm but are not sure whether the object you are looking at is, in reality, is your palm or a tree then you have doubt about your consciousness. If you do not have that doubt and you are absolutely sure that you are looking at your palm then you are self-aware. It means you don’t doubt your consciousness.
If you are reading this article with the objective of understanding the subject of happiness then you are conscious. If you are absolutely sure that you are reading this article for the purpose of understanding the subject, or for any other objective, then you are self-aware. However, if you are reading this without knowing why you are reading this in the first place, then you are conscious but not self-aware.
When someone likes your post and you feel happy, you are conscious. When you also are certain that people are doing as expected and that your consciousness is true, then you are aware.
Putting it in simple terms then,
Consciousness is the agreement to our sensory truth, Self-awareness is the trust on the consciousness.
Whatever you see, hear, feel, touch, and understand are all consciousness. Then why consciousness is so complicated?
You see a glass of water. What you are going to do with it? Will you drink it? Will you wash your face with it? Will you pour the water in the tree pot? Will you put some beans in it? Is there poison in this glass of water? Is the glass of water pure enough for drinking? Is it safe for drinking? Who kept this glass of water?
You see, seeing a glass of water is the basic form of consciousness. However, your brain has to analyze it from several other perspectives to even understand what it has to do with this water.
The sensory truth and the collective interpretation of that truth in the context of a decision is then consciousness.
When you see a homeless hungry person sitting outside the dominos you just had your meal at, how do you consider that truth? A homeless person? A Jobless person? A worthless person? A hungry person? An incompetent person? A suffering person? That is your consciousness. What are you in contrast to that person? What you will now do after seeing that person? Walk past him? Buy something for him? Mock him? That is your self-awareness.
We are not philosophers and therefore a broader consciousness definition is enough for us to to be aware of consciousness.
Now we can simplify consciousness as simply
Consciousness is a means of understanding what you see, hear, touch, feel and deciding what to do with that understanding.
It becomes then very obvious that the more you read, study, interact with people, learn and analyze, your consciousness will improve. You will analyze a sensory input from several different angles. Bringing your past memory, observations, and knowledge into analyzing a sensory input is called a perspective.
So if you had touched a hot glass of water ever earlier, your skin might have got burnt and when you see a hot glass of water, you will most probably not touch it. This is a low level of consciousness. You also know that the hot glass of water has limited germs. So you can drink it slowly, it will be purer water. That is a little higher level of consciousness.
Happiness and Consciousness
When someone likes your post, you are happy due to you are low level of consciousness. I can bet you that you don’t remember a majority of these likes and comments. You don’t even know who is the person who liked your posts. Number matters. More the number of views and likes, the happier you are.
Now, suppose you had given a solution to a problem in a post. After some days a reader of yours comes and tells you that he implemented your suggestion and he got benefitted in a certain way and he thanks you. What happens? You feel happier, you remember this for a long because you understand fully well how your work has contributed to someone’s life. You feel self-satisfied.
This happiness comes from a higher level of consciousness. At that level, your consciousness is not only looking for any environmental trigger but also taking into the context of your beliefs.
Conscious happiness is a form of good feeling that we get when we know the exact cause of happiness in no ambiguity.
You recommended someone for a job, he got the job, and he thanked you. This is Conscious Happiness. You are taking a seminar where 100 people are attending, you become happy seeing the number. That is Instant Happiness(Joyful emotion). When some of the attendees contact you back at a later time stating the way your seminary changed their life, then the happiness you get from that is a Conscious Happiness(feeling happy).
Instant happiness is easy to get and is fast but lasts for a shorter period. Consciousness happiness, on the other hand, takes longer time, more effort but it lasts longer.
When you dress well and prepare well for a presentation, you feel self-confident. You are walking down the street and see a person’s wallet slips out of his coat pocket. You run down, you pick it and give it back to the person. You feel self-righteous. In all these feelings, you will feel happy. But this happiness will be pushed to your memory by the brain because this is conscious happiness.
A sensory or environment triggered good feeling gives us instant happiness whereas a consciousness driven feelings like self-confidence, self-satisfaction give us prolonged happiness because they stay in the memory.
It, therefore, needs no explanation or further motivation to tell you which form of happiness is worth your pursuit? Conscious happiness, of course.
But then why we value instant happiness? Because constant happiness takes time and needs a lot of effort, we may feel unhappy till we get there. Instant happiness tells you that yes, you are happy.
Why conscious happiness is long-lasting? Because this experience is put into memory by your brain so that you can think about it many times in the future and be happy.
Both Emotions and Feelings are part of Consciousness but overall Consciousness also takes into account of past memory and beliefs.
Conscious happiness, therefore, is a higher level of happiness that takes into account low-level emotion, a little higher level of feelings, and still a higher level of beliefs.
At this moment, it must be very clear that seeing someone likes your post will bring out joyful emotion, knowing that it improved someone’s life will give you a happy feeling, improving a lot of people’s lives through continues good post will give you a self-satisfaction, a higher level of conscious happiness.
4. Mental Happiness
Imagine a beautiful picturesque scene of a snowy mountain. Sunlight is scattering from the body of the mountain. There are pine trees and a small narrow road between the trees. Imagine yourself to be walking down that street, towards the mountain.
If you read the above paragraph slow enough and allowed your brain to construct the visuals, then you might have found yourself walking down such a street. That is imagination. Imagination is a non-existent reality that your brain can construct.
What is so fascinating about the imagination is that you can experience emotions the same way that you do when you observe things in reality[1].
So we do not even have to be happy in a physical world, no one even needs to like our post, no one even needs to come and tell us how our offered help changed their life, you can simply imagine to happy and you will be. You can imagine certain events that will shoot your positive emotions and it will still make you happy. This form of happiness is called Mental Happiness, where happiness is not real, it is not from your memory, but it is being experienced by your body with the power of imagination. As the imagery constructed by our brain is temporary, such kind of happiness is also temporary. Due to your consciousness, your brain will soon realize that the experience is not real and therefore such happiness will be short existent.
But what if you somehow trick your brain to believe that what you are imagining is not actually an imagination but a reality?
You may not be reading any jokes or checking your social feeds for likes, you may not have any knowledge of anyone’s life being improved by your posts, and you can still feel happy by just thinking about how your post or your work must be improving someone’s life. Sometimes it may sound unreal, but if you practice thinking good things that make you happy even without any environmental triggers, it makes you a happy person in general. Why? Because memory happiness comes from the brain, hence it easily gets converted into a feeling. The sustained happy feeling will become a belief and you will start believing that you are a happy person.
Because we know that feelings and beliefs can grow over a period of time and that mental thought of happiness can give you such feelings, a sustained belief that you are a happy person will actually turn you into a happy person, where happiness will be a much consistent state that your body stays.
If you remember a good memory daily twice a day for even two minutes each at the beginning and end of the day, it will make you a lot more happy person as a whole.
5. Spiritual Happiness
What is Spirituality
Most of the Happiness and Spirituality merchants will also advise people to be more spiritual in their life. They will tell you that what you are working at is not fulfilling because there is no spirituality involved in it.
Yet, when you ask them the basic question of what is spirituality, they will falter and will tell you, this is deep, this is to do with spirit, soul, you have to pay a large sum of money to even know what is spirituality.
In this section, I will make sure that you understand spirituality and can explain it to your child also. So that you don’t have to buy this from the “Spiritualpreneurs”.
Spirituality is the personal expression of ultimate concern. Tillich (1957)[3]
Spirituality is defined by various schools of spirituality[2]. Spirituality is often explained from a historical context, philosophical context, religious context, and lately psychological, genetics, neuroscience context. Obviously, each school believes and wants you to believe that their version of spirituality is the right spirituality.
However, a good thing is that all of these schools at least agree on a Primordial spirituality. This doesn’t belong to any specific schools and none of the schools apparently oppose this.
Instead of going deep into academic explanation and understanding of the subject, we will just restrict ourselves to a basic understanding of the line of Primordial Spirituality so that we don’t hurt any school’s sentiments.
What is a spirit?
A spirit is the non-physical existence of yours.
What does that even mean?
It means that you somehow believe or rather force your brain to believe that what you are imagining is actually real. ie you make your mental and imaginary senses to be also part of your consciousness(where you earlier had senses, feelings, beliefs).
In mental happiness, you imagined a landscape right? What if you do the same exercise daily? Do you see the same landscape daily? If you visualize the same imaginary world continuously then that world is no more is imagination for your brain. The imagination becomes consistent. And the brain starts believing that your imagination is right.
What if, instead of such a landscape you start believing an entire world that you have not observed? Say, heaven? Say satans? Say, apocalypse? Say the existence of an ideal beautiful world? What if an imaginary world is created just like your landscape and is explained to your brain with such conviction that your brain can not simply accept that it is imagination. In order for the brain to accept imagination as a fact, that imagination has to be mixed with some reality. That imager world will then appear as good as your real world.
Spirituality in simple terms is a believable imagination influenced consciousness of your reality of yours(let us call a Meta Reality or an Abstract Reality or Hyper Consciousness(Emotions+Feelings+Beliefs+Awareness+Imagination) which doesn’t require physical sensory input for any feelings, but physical sensory inputs will be analyzed with the context of such a meta-reality. The abstraction allows you to simply put some real-world events into the model to make it much stronger.
Imagination is your constructed reality whereas spirituality is your constructed awareness. Your spirit is the independent non-physical existance of yours in that believable imaginary world.
When someone says “Do the work in a spiritual way” what does that mean?
Let us create an Ideal world in our minds. Say, for instance, a world where no one is sick. Everyone is rational. Roads are clean, traffic is less. Humans are more empathetic. Everyone is helping each other. There are lots of trees, and fresh oxygen. Let us say that people are smiling and cooperating with each other(you can imagine your world).
This is definitely not your reality. You don’t see any such thing around you. So your brain doesn’t even take a moment to understand that the world you are talking about is fake.
Now, what if the work you do, you do to establish one fact of that world? Then another? Say, you are a healthcare startup and you have started solving a problem in healthcare. Rather than thinking how much money it is going to bring to you if you can somehow make your brain believe that look, this work that I am doing will create a world where no one is sick. As you keep working, just keep telling your brain that “look brain if I do this, that world will have no ill and sick people.”
Now that is what is Spirituality in work. You constructed a meta-reality through a set of beliefs and are living your life to bring that meta-reality closed to reality.
What is Spiritual Happiness then?
A spiritual happiness is the happiness generated by your brain when it’s belief on the spiritual world is strengthened.
You believe in God. You also believe that God will come and help you when you are in pain. Suppose, you are standing in a dark road alone, in the middle of the night. Out of nowhere, a police vehicle comes, which never patrols this road, but today it did and it gave you a lift.
Your brain now understands this as a kind act of God. It feels happy because of its belief that God will help you is validated.
6. Deep Spiritual Conscious Happiness
In order for your imagination to be strong enough for the brain to believe it as spirituality, it has to be strengthened by different sources, different people. So, even though you are perceiving a world that you have not yet experienced, you feel that the world could be real because many people tell you that they also believe in this world and that this world is right. So, you get information about your beliefs from other sources, people, and books (your consciousness), and that makes your spiritual beliefs all the more strong and an integral part of your consciousness itself. Now, this is no more a Meta-Reality. This becomes part of your reality and consciousness. This is now called Spiritual Consciousness.
Spiritual consciousness is simply a hyper-integrated-reality of meta-physical consciousness and spiritual beliefs.
The more knowledge you acquire, the better picture of an ideal world you can create and you can make your brain believe. If spiritual beliefs come from religion, then you are a Religious person, you do things that are as per the teaching of your religion. When you construct your Spirituality from self-knowledge, beliefs, understanding, and beliefs borrowed from different scientific and religious beliefs then you become Deep Spiritual.
Deep Spirituality is, therefore, a hyper-integrated-reality of yours which is constructed out of multi-disciplinary beliefs, multiple different perspectives of your consciousness and strong self-awareness.
So, next time when some Happypreneurs, Spiritualpreneurs, and Cosciousnesspreneurs try to sell you their version of Deep Spirituality, simply understand that they have literally zero sense of deep spirituality. Because by definition a Deep Spirituality should incorporate as vast a school of perspective as possible into your spirituality.
You can be Deeply Spiritually Happy when you create a good enough ideal world from the best of the ideas borrowed from different schools and associate your work and happiness with this spiritual foundation.
The more you add to the beliefs and knowledge to your spirituality, the more confident you will be about your own spirituality. The more you are able to clearly distinguish between your low-level emotions, your feelings, thoughts, your beliefs, your consciousness, and your awareness the more deeply spiritual you will become. The process of increasing your spiritual depth is also called enlightening.
The more enlightened you get the happier you will become. Now, because the process of enlightenment is an extremely highest level of happiness and it can separate between low-level emotions to high-level spirituality, enlightenment will not make you smile the way a joke does, but it will change your face, your eyes, the way you walk, carry yourself. Enlighten will slow down your talking, and increase listening. Reflexes will be replaced by more profound reactions. Your smile will appear more mysterious(because this has gone through several layers of happiness analysis).
The ultimate level of Enlightenment is termed Moksha in Hindu Vedic Spirituality. It is said to be a state where your consciousness includes every perspective of the universe, every living and non-living object’s perspective, every thought, every idea, everything that a universe has. It is a state where you can analyze the perspective from your gene to your organ to your family to your society to your nation to entire humanity to the entire biosphere to your planet to your solar system to your galaxy to your universe. This is a sustained state of happiness because you have broadened your views to the entire universe and nothing can make you sad anymore. Because even in the event of sadness you will find learning and incorporate that into your enlighted spirituality.
At this level of enlightenment, your spirit becomes so vast that it can no more be contained in a small biological unit like a brain. Your mind is as vast as the universe and you become part of the universe, free from the cycle of life and death. The spirituality you created becomes so strong that it lives even when you are not around.
Even though the Moksha appears to be a far-fetched complex thing, what is good is that if you orient your life towards a Moksha, you will feel happy about your life itself. It is what is called life satisfaction. If you are satisfied with your life, you will feel fulfilled and will be happy(at least that’s what philosophers and highly enlightened souls have documented in their observation).
If your spirituality and consciousness are on the path of improvement, then your mind is still inside your brain. When spirituality improves, then your mind moves more towards a meta physicality from current physical existence inside the brain.
Now that you know the fact, next time anyone tells you your mind is not in your brain, ask them what that means.
Why Meditation brings more happiness?
This is a sub-topic I wanted to add because mediation is offered as a happiness pill. So, before consuming this pill you should also know what meditation actually means. Meditation is the process of becoming more aware of your mind’s metaphysical existence. Due to our day-to-day activity, we often do not get a stronghold of spirituality because a lot of decisions are still to be taken on reflexes.
When you sit in a lonely space, focus yourself on a specific object and concentrate your thoughts to remind yourself about 1) Your emotional reactions 2) your learning from them 3) Your feelings 4) your beliefs 5) Your Consciousness 6) Your awareness 7) your Spirituality then you are meditating.
The more you meditate, the more you become aware of your spirituality and your decisions are more and more taken from the perspective of your spirituality.
Remember, meditation is not a ritual, it is simply a way you tell yourself about your metaphysical world.
Because your ultimate goal is to become more spiritual as an end goal of deep happiness, the more you remind yourself about this reality, the more you practice it, the more you get aware and thus happy.
7. Pain, the counterintuitive happiness
Once you read about happiness, you may intuitively think that happiness is all about avoiding sadness and pain. It is important to understand that if you are not hungry, you can not enjoy your food. If you are not tired, you may not have a deep sleep. If you are not thirsty, water will mean nothing to you. If you have not achieved it, you will not feel triumphant. If you have not lost money, you will not know the value of money.
Pain is a momentary mental or physiological trait that doesn’t give you happiness at that moment, or doesn’t give you good feelings at that moment.
Sadness is a lower level of consciousness. You scored poor marks on the exam, and you feel sad. You failed to get a job, and you feel sad. Someone scolds you, you feel sad. You watched a sad movie, read a sad novel, you feel sad. You hear the story of the demise of a loved one, and you feel sad.
Pain, on the other hand, is a higher-level consciousness of sadness where you know that the sad state is essential to reach a larger goal of happiness. As such your body and mind suffer but you also know that this is essential.
If you are searching for happiness and your mentor scolds you, you may feel bad and stop visiting him. This will not make you happy as you missed out on the knowledge front, which will be needed to lift your consciousness.
If you want to raise funds and the first investor told you to know, you might have felt bad(sad). But, if you avoid pitching to any other investors in the pursuit of happiness, then you are missing on the larger goal of happiness. Why? Because you will miss the opportunity to add to your belief of “achievement”.
If you are a sportsman and want to win a championship, you might have to train extra hard, for hours. Such intense training may cause you immense physical pain. But if you stop avoiding that pain in the pursuit of happiness, then you will not win the tournament, because it will deprive you of adding to the beliefs of self-confidence, which will result in a defeat and thereby deprive you of a higher state of happiness.
Thus one of the most important aspects of your journey to achieve happiness is pain awareness and pain acceptance. When you convert your pain awareness to a belief that this pain will bring you happiness, then the pain needed to get happiness also becomes part of your happiness pursuit.
Becoming happy in no way is avoiding pain. An intense journey of happiness leads to intense pain.
Conclusion: How to be happy?
1) Start with the lowest level of happiness, ie happy emotions. Start doing things that make you happier instantly. Planting trees, helping others, listening to music, singing, coding, doing business, selling
2) Increase those activities that result in happiness in your day-to-day life such that happiness becomes an addiction.
3) Bring your thinking into what you are doing. Try to find the answer to why and attach everything you are doing for happiness to a larger cause. This will convert your happiness into a belief.
4) Accept the sadness that might become part of your journey. Accept the pain as part of your journey and become pain-aware and pain-happy.
5) Become more aware of your beliefs by frequently bringing them from memory and thinking about them.
6) Become more conscious about your reality, beliefs, and awareness.
7) Think good things and make yourself happier through mental happiness.
8) Gather information, from books, videos, coaches, teachers, and people you meet. Improve your sensory observation and keep adding to your knowledge. This will improve your consciousness without yourself having to experience everything to learn.
9) Once sufficient knowledge is gathered, create an ideal world mental model. You can also borrow this world from different ideas and ideologies like religious ideology.
10) Start associating your work and day-to-day life events more with this larger world. Strengthen this world.
11) Slowly but surely come out of reacting from (1)-(9). Stop reacting to momentary anger and sadness, then your feelings, then your world views. The higher analysis of your reaction to an event goes, the more spiritual you will become. The more spiritual you become, the more satisfied you will become. This satisfaction will lead to a sustained state of happiness.
If you are at a low level of Consciousness then first get a high level of awareness of that low level of Consciousness. If you are at a low level of spirituality then get a high desire for a higher level of spirituality. Make your beliefs stronger than your feelings and emotions. Then make your spirituality stronger than your belief. Finally, make the enlightenment(improving spirituality) the goal of your life. This should make you happy and fulfilled.
In another post, I will walk you through the biological aspects of your happiness, the neurons, the microbiome, and the hormones so that you can bring perspective to your consciousness about happiness.
You see, you don’t have to empty your bank to understand what is happiness.
All the best for your journey towards happiness.
References
[1]Lang, Peter J. “A bio‐informational theory of emotional imagery.” Psychophysiology 16.6 (1979): 495-512.
[2]Waaijman, Kees. “What is spirituality?.” Acta Theologica 27.2 (2007): 1-18.
[3]Emmons, Robert A. “Is spirituality an intelligence? Motivation, cognition, and the psychology of ultimate concern.” The International Journal for the psychology of Religion 10.1 (2000): 3-26.
[4]Gilbert Ryle, Feelings” in Collected Papers, Volume II (London, England: Hutchinson, 1971), pp. 272-286.
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