The most profound state of happiness is achieved by the following means.
To be free to exercise choice and to be able to act upon that choice.
To do meaningful works in an environment where those works are validated by the appreciation of others.
To function within a meritocracy, wherein the individual is accredited their true worth based not upon fiscal, financial or familial position.
To be free of the blight of the cult of celebrity whereby the mundane and meaningless is elevated to the position of venerated article of faith.
To be one of a kinship, a gathering of kind whose collective aim is mutual improvement wherein the object of association is progression of the best in each and thereby development of that which is sacred to each individual as their birthright and that which they hold in custodianship for all the human race.
To be able to celebrate the uniqueness of each person without the pettiness and insecurities that plague human interactions, to allow that person to flourish and evolve in their own right.
It is a step in the right direction, I believe. Freedom from the avalanche of dogmas and ignorance that render us all hamstrung and incapable. Personal liberation allied to personal responsibility must surely be the objective of any sound thinking adult.
I’ve been corresponding with a man in Houston, Texas who has formed the opinion that I am an apologist for slavery, England’s colonial past and live in an isolated bubble. That is my fault, I have given that impression somehow, though I’m not sure precisely how. My argument was that John Lee Hooker, along with other prominent black musicians, received a better mainstream reception in England in the early 1960s than in the US. Oh boy, that put the cat among the pigeons.
To those of you who know me, this is quite amusing. To any of my former students you might even find it strange but then ever was it so.
What intrigues and fascinates me is the fact that I can actually have a private dialogue with someone occupying a different world to me in a common setting. It is only by celebrating the diversity of each of us as individuals that the human race may move forward or be forever hamstrung by its collective past.
History is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying. Like the moment when you realise that you are no longer a child and that as a self electing adult you can influence the way that the pendulum swings in human affairs. This is a liberation and a responsibility. We are all responsible for our own actions, thoughts and deeds and free to act as we so choose.
In this context, happiness is the fruit of our endeavours. Its active proselytising is a useful thing on the part of any individual and I acknowledge anyone who by their life’s work seeks to spread enlightenment.
For the record, I don’t condone slavery, apartheid, colonialism, bigotry or any of those parasites upon the body politic of human affairs. However, I don’t bury my head in the sand either and pretend that they don’t exist. The true art to living a life is to not allow those things to take root in oneself, that is the real challenge.
I love Vermeer, things moved through this man that are exquisite. Truly a genius. I thank the powers that be that they have given me faculties to appreciate what Vermeer did and to know of it and to be able to place it within my own mental assembly as a point of reference. We all have something for each other that surpasses the confines of spatial and temporal bounds. Thank you, Jan.
I went on a young offenders prison visit yesterday. There was so much going on that it could be written about for hours. To keep it concise, I asked one of the prison officers with some twenty years experience what had been the major changes in his time.
He said that it was undoubtedly the rise in violent offenders and those involved with substance abuse. He also commented on the increasing diminishment of respect shown toward female members of staff expressed in language and attitude.
This is what is happening in the western world and probably what is to come in the developing world. There is a defecit in self respect, fulfilment, satisfaction, development and subsequently intrinsic happiness.
Stuart Laidlaw Faith and Ethics Reporter
When you reflect this Thanksgiving weekend on the good things in life, don’t stop there. Take a hard look at the things that make you unhappy, as well. Then compare the two.
“It has to be honest,” says Ulrich Schimmack, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in happiness studies.
Focusing only on the good things, he says, may bring only a fleeting happiness. “You’re getting it at the cost of have a distorted reality. And realism is good.”
Schimmack says Thanksgiving can be a good time for many to really grasp that the good in our day-to-day lives outnumbers the bad.
But Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, another happiness professor, says gratitude is not just for Thanksgiving. She likes the idea of counting blessings so much, it’s worth doing on a regular basis.
“It’s like losing weight. You have to stay on the diet and exercise regularly for it to work,” says Lyubomirsky, author of the bestseller The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.
In her research, Lyubomirsky asked one group of subjects to keep a gratitude journal. For 10 weeks, they regularly jotted down the things they were grateful for – relationships, nice meals, a good day at work. Another group was told to write down daily hassles and annoyances.
The result, not surprisingly, was that members of the grateful group was happier and more optimistic. More than that, however, they spent more time exercising and reported feeling healthier, with fewer headaches, coughing or nausea. They even had less acne – a point Lyubomirsky makes with teenagers.
“Young people have a tendency to take everything for granted,” she says.
Just as Schimmack stresses that gratitude has to be honest, Lyubomirsky says it’s important to pick a strategy for expressing gratitude that works best for you. In another study, she found that subjects told to write in their grateful journals three times a week were less happy than those doing so only once a week.
So, true gratitude can’t be forced.
Schimmack and Lyubomirsky are part of the growing academic focus on happiness. The field has it’s own publication, the Journal of Happiness Studies, Pennsylvania State University has an entire department dedicated to it and mass-market books are hitting the shelves.
“It’s really an explosion in the field,” says Schimmack, who was trained in Germany and is based at U of T’s Mississauga campus.
Despite the recent burst of activity, he says happiness studies remain largely misunderstood. Too often, he says, people want simple answers, such as the notion that money can’t buy happiness or that selfish people are truly unhappy. These are gross oversimplifications, he says.
“Do we really believe that Donald Trump is unhappy deep inside? I don’t think so.”
The things that make people happy, even for the antimaterialist, tend to cost money, Schimmack says. Want your family to be healthy? Insurance and a safe car cost money. Enjoy camping? Tents and sleeping bags cost money. Want to send you kids to college? That costs big money.
“A lot of the people who think of their lives as being nonmaterialistic often spend more money than the people who are materialistic,” Schimmack observes.
“People in Canada and the United States will say, ‘Money is not important to me.’
Manna from heaven is assumed in a materially based world to mean physical food. I have trawled the recipe books, from Ramsey to Ronay, Blumenthal to Craddock and all stops in between and there is none for manna. Different people posit different ideas: herbs, esoteric foodstuffs, specific pastries and sweets but all are barking up the wrong tree.
You see, manna is a description of learning, it is the amalgamation of knowledge and experience and that is the true foodstuff of heaven or the gods or whichever cosmology you subscribe to. To learn is all, to become a greater being as a result of one’s learning and the application of what one has learned is the greatest pleasure accessible to any of us.
Learn something new all of the time. Look at those things you are familiar toward with new eyes. Imagine you were a stranger in a strange land, imagine you were the pilot of a UFO stopped here temporarily to refuel or whatever they make temporary stops for.
See your life through different eyes, grow and change, become something bigger and better than you are already. That is manna, manna from heaven.
My inbox is constantly inundated with spam originating from Uraguay. If you’re anything to do with this, do me a favour, switch off your machines, it’s just a little tedious and serves no purpose whatsoever.
Subjective - that’s what we are. A man wins the lottery, he is happy, a woman loses her purse she is unhappy. We are influenced by things around us. We are like sheep herded by the dogs of cultural nuances. Whatever is happening in the world drives us, whatever the zeitgeist is colours what we think, feel and do.
Is this the totality of the human condition. Is this what we, as individuals, are obliged to engage with? Is this what you would choose to engage with?
The factors of this are simple enough. Yet they consume us as surely as though they were a monster. Let’s take a reality check here.
We are born. There is no choice in that, we are actuated by the actions of two people over whom we had no direct influence. We are born into a world that we had no part in creating, we enter it as an already up and running system. We did not create the Universe which upholds the planet we appear upon and we did not create the planet that sustains and supports our life. So we are born innocent, we are not culpable in any sense for where and how the world is or isn’t, what it may or may not be.
We grow and are educated by the world we find ourselves a part of against its criteria. We are given an education based upon cultural requirement. That education either ignores or does not deal with the most fundamental issues raised by our existence and, again like the sheep earlier, we are driven by the dogs of cultural imperative to the pens and enclosures that it wants us to occupy.
There is an old folk tale concerning the people of Hamelin in Germany who were plagued by a rat infestation. The legend tells that a man, a musician, turned up in the town claiming to have the ability to charm the rats and lead them away from the beleaguered town. He made a deal with the burghers of the town and cleared Hamelin of the rats. When the man claimed his payment the town’s leaders reneged upon the deal they had struck.
The man left the town and returned later whereupon he played his pipes and enchanted the children of the town, compelling them to follow him. He lead them into the mountains where the legend has it they entered a cave and were never seen again. Two children survived, one who was deaf and the other who was lame and unable to match the pace set by the piper.
The meaning and interpretation of this tale is fascinating in itself but the significant feature here is that the children became fascinated and enchanted by the tune that the piper played, they danced to his tune and followed him to a place of his choosing where he had them at his mercy.
Let’s shift the story and cast ourselves as the children and the world as the piper. Do you see how you dance to a tune that you never created? How you are fascinated and entranced by a world you never made? Is there anything wrong with this? No, of course not, but, the point here is that you are not in control of your own destiny.
You become the marionette of something else that pulls your strings and makes you dance to its tune. The question here for you concerns the nature and intention of that which holds your strings in its thrall.
I say this simply because we are in the midst of, according to whose media stream you drink from, the most severe economic crisis ever, cataclysm, doom and gloom and all the rest of it. If you are in the west or a wealthy nation, let’s talk turkey for a moment, you own too much, eat too much and are absorbed by a false sense of entitlement. It’s OK, that’s what the world wanted you to become and it’s what you became. How do you solve the problems of the world? It’s simple, you go shopping! (Excuse me, did I hear that right? That is actually the advice being given by certain world leaders at the moment)
We could all do with slowing down, gross consumption has made us fat fools and lazy incompetents, do I exclude myself from this? Of course not, I’m in the same culture as everyone else and therefore not immune to what ails it.
The lifebelt is this: whatever the economic system does, however the markets react, whatever the situation regarding your personal equity, the Universe goes on. It really doesn’t matter - yes, it has immediate worldly ramifications, absolutely, and if it’s your livelihood that’s threatened then you have already decided I’m an idiot - but in the bigger picture it is of little consequence other than to the life you give it by thinking about it. This is a man made problem that doesn’t exist except in a conceptual universe of notional profits and losses.
The Universe has invested in you and implores you to be true to your birthright as a human being rather than a wage slave. What is the one poignant thing about the rat race? It has to end, there is no such thing as a race that never ends - remember our ancestor in Hamelin who lead the rats away, he actually charmed them into the river where they all drowned. The only thing about the rat race is - it is run on a carousel so you never see the finish line and usually it’s too late, by the time you realise it the moment has passed, you have given your life to a fickle master that probably never even knew you existed.
Make your truths permanent, base yourself upon foundations that do not shift like the sands in a desert, whatever anyone tells you about finances, derivatives and so on, it is all nonsense, if everyone cashed in their chips the system would be exposed for the house of cards that it is. Confidence is the key, your confidence is better invested in the Universe whose ways are timeless and true, unchanging and constant.
Found this article from AP interesting, it’s all grist to the mill of happiness, background information, food for thought:
By Eric Gorski and Trevor Tompson, The Associated Press
An extensive survey by The Associated Press and MTV found that people aged 13 to 24 who describe themselves as very spiritual or religious tend to be happier than those who don’t.
When it comes to spirituality, American young people also are remarkably tolerant - nearly 7 in 10 say that while they follow their own religious or spiritual beliefs, others might be true as well.
On the whole, the poll found religion is a vital part of the lives of many American young people, although with significant pockets that attach little or no importance to faith.
Forty-four percent say religion and spirituality is at least very important to them, 21 percent responded it is somewhat important, 20 percent say it plays a small part in their lives and 14 percent say it doesn’t play any role.
Among races, African-Americans are most likely to describe religion as being the single most important thing in their lives. Females are slightly more religious than males, and the South is the most religious region, the survey said.
The poll’s mission was to figure out what makes young people happy. And it appears religion helps.
Eighty percent of those who call religion or spirituality the most important thing in their lives say they’re happy, while 60 percent of those who say faith isn’t important to them consider themselves happy.
“If you believe God is helping you, then everything else isn’t as important and you can trust that there’s somebody there for you no matter what,” said Molly Luksik, a 21-year-old ballet dancer in Chicago and a Roman Catholic who attends Mass weekly. “Just going to church and everything … it’s very calming, and everyone is nice.”
Sociologists have long drawn a connection between happiness and the sense of community inherent to most religious practice. Lisa Pearce, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, said religion can indeed contribute to happiness, but she cautioned that the converse also can hold true.
“It’s easier for kids who are happy and have things going well in their life to find the time and energy to participate in religion,” said Pearce, co-principal investigator for the National Study of Youth and Religion. “It could be kids who have bad experiences in church end up leaving and being unhappy with religion.”
The poll also asked young people to choose between two statements about their views of other faiths.
Sixty-eight percent agree with the statement, “I follow my own religious and spiritual beliefs, but I think that other religious beliefs could be true as well.” Thirty-one percent choose, “I strongly believe that my religious beliefs are true and universal, and that other religious beliefs are not right.”
The latter statement is more likely to be the position of young teens 13 to 17 and those who attend religious services weekly.
However, tolerance is the rule overall. That doesn’t surprise the Rev. Paul Raushenbush, associate dean for religious life at Princeton University and author of “Teen Spirit: One World, Many Faiths.”
Young people eat lunch and play soccer with peers from other belief backgrounds, while adults tend to self-segregate with others of like mind, he said. Sweeping immigration reform in 1965 transformed America into the world’s most religiously diverse nation, and young people grew up with the second generation of the immigrant wave, he noted.
“This shows that it doesn’t require a lack of conviction in your own faith tradition to think someone else might have a similar type of conviction in their own,” Raushenbush said. “There is no sense of, ‘This diminishes my faith.’”
Traci Laichter, 14, went to Jewish preschool. Her grandparents are Holocaust survivors. Her family keeps kosher and displays a mezuzah - a little box holding verses from the Torah - on the door of their suburban Las Vegas home.
Her faith is strong and she believes it will last, but that doesn’t mean she thinks other faiths are devoid of truth.
“I believe whatever you believe is true to you and it really shouldn’t matter what other people think,” she said.
About 75 percent of those surveyed say God or a higher power has some impact on their happiness. At the same time, 90 percent believe happiness is at least partly under their own control.
“I think you do have control over how you are going to feel on a particular day,” said David Mueller of Lockport, N.Y., a 20-year-old college student who attends an evangelical Christian megachurch called The Chapel.
“When it comes to events in your whole life, it’s already somewhat laid out for you,” he said. “You can stray off to another path. But where God wants you to go, you are going to get there.”
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The AP-MTV poll was conducted by Knowledge Networks Inc. from April 16 to 23, and involved online interviews with 1,280 people aged 13 to 24. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.
How does it go? We stand in our own patch of diamonds but see it not…
Ever watch a dog chase its own tail? It’s great and the dog is usually oblivious to what it is doing, it gets so lost in the thrill or the passion of the chase.
Today I went for a walk with the head honcho, she who must be obeyed, the little woman, ‘er indoors. You know the person I mean, right? Well, we have a route that we take, down along the waterfront, along the jetty and out into the sea, it’s just under five miles there and back and we can crack along at some pace when we need to, it’s a real cobweb blaster, the negative ions of breaking waves, particularly when there’s a swell as there was today, and the salty breeze have a healing effect.
A huge ship was leaving the mouth of the river and heading out to sea, it looked modern as it had a very ‘of the moment’ feel to it, almost a stealth cargo ship, obviously designed to cut gracefully through the waves and weather whatever seas it might encounter. We sat on a bench on the breakwater and looked at the ship beginning its voyage. I don’t know if it was a coaster or about to cross an ocean but I fancied the thoughts of the seamen as they left the haven of the river and moved away from the land. I have ridden out storms at sea and know the joy of placing your feet back on firm ground, so I wondered about their collective experience, the combined encounters of the crew with the elements.
We were discussing the financial repercussions of the current economic situation, and how it might start to affect people’s habits and their spending patterns. We were considering how much sympathy members of the public might have for city high fliers who had for years traded the markets with other people’s money and paid themselves huge bonuses - we thought: not much. I explained that for every winner in the markets there has to be a loser, profit taking and successful trades by their nature mean someone else has taken a hit.
The markets are at once a complicated but also very simple place. The difficulty arises, as we are experiencing now, when all that hypothetical intrinsic value is suddenly exposed as worthless. Paper money, figures on computers but not ‘real’ in the tangible sense that a gold ingot is real or a treasure chest is real. This is when confidence wavers and the single most important element of the fiscal and commercial system that we currently enjoy/endure is confidence. Without confidence people will not invest, there is no speculation and the capital markets run dry. People become uneasy, they worry and they hold on to what they think they’ve got. The irrigation that cash flow provides to the economy is directly analogous to the need for water in agriculture.
So we looked at the ship and my best beloved said, “The ship of the financial markets, sailing on an ocean of misery.”
image: lenka p
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