What makes you happy? How long does that happiness last? Can you hold onto happiness? Is there something more lasting than happiness — perhaps joy, self-esteem, bliss, or purpose? What do you want out of life — do you just want a happy life while it lasts, and would even that satisfy you? These questions are at the core of life. If you are human, they are at the core of yours.
According to the “World Happiness Report” based upon Gallup data, young people in the United States are unhappier than their older counterparts. We’ve got many more modern comforts compared with our ancestors, we have more ways of pursuing pleasure than ever before, and we have more knowledge at our disposal than we can ever absorb. So why is happiness dropping?
Put frankly…
Frank Peretti, an entertainer who combines humor with serious thought, presented a fictional account of modern education. It’s a shame to edit it so severely, but you still get the idea. ”Kids, welcome to Biology 101…The first thing that you need to know is that you are an accident…All the dust and the gas in the galaxy floated around for who knows how long … and they bumped into each other and they said, ‘I know, let’s be organic.’ …And they became little gooey, slimy things … they became higher forms of life … and finally became what you are today. It’s from goo to you by way of the zoo. Now as such, you don’t really have any reason for being here. Your existence is pointless and the universe won’t mind a bit when you die. And when you die, you just become so much compost … Oh, okay, class dismissed. Head on down the hall now, kids, down to that new class they’re starting this week on self-esteem.”
Perhaps we are educating kids out of happiness. Certainly something is going in the wrong direction. More knowledge; less happiness.
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
We have that phrase enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. It does not say we have a right to happiness, only the right to freely pursue happiness. As young children we pursue happiness in its pure form — each moment we want to be free of pain and having fun. Then we get a bit older and start thinking ahead: what will make us happy now and later today. Eventually we learn of the value of delayed gratification, where we can get what we think we want in life by working hard, not necessarily enjoying the work at the moment but realizing we will be happier because of the fruits of that work. We realize that pursuit of happiness is more complicated than we first thought and requires effort, but we still pursue it.
We go through life trying to make life better. Yet we run into a paradox: the more we pursue happiness, the less of it we attain. We often put energy into pursuits that we regret later, that not only did not make us happier, but wasted time and energy. Do we really know what makes us happy?
Happiness is rather like hunger or thirst, which can be satisfied for a moment but soon wants more. Happiness can be here one moment and gone the next. Chasing happiness is rather like chasing butterflies which flit about in unpredictable ways, and if you manage to catch one, now what? Pursuit of happiness will lead you every direction, and when you catch it, it won’t last, so the chase continues. The happiness paradox is like the pleasure paradox, also known as the paradox of hedonism: when you pursue pleasure, you tend to get less pleasure overall. If you eat really tasty food, you enjoy it less as you continue to eat more, and eventually you can’t keep eating. Any pleasure fades if you continue to pursue it. Likewise, happiness is elusive.
Do you mind…
What gives us the ability to anticipate and pursue happiness is our minds. Unlike animals which only know how to live in the moment, we can imagine the future. We can craft events in our minds which we believe will lead to happiness, and we can fret over things which might happen that will bring us sorrow. Those events may never happen, but just imagining them can signal our bodies — we can anticipate future good or future trauma, and our bodies “hear” signals from our brains birthed from thoughts our minds have concocted. What plays in the theatre of our minds is, in some ways, real to our bodies. We seem to have no limits to how much we can experience of worry and fear from that theatre — sadly we are capable of worrying constantly. But we can’t maintain happiness constantly, at least not by pursuing it, because it is so elusive and transitory.
Aristotle thought happiness consisted of at least two aspects: hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (a life well lived — what we consider as “purpose”). Today, we know that the brain has “pleasure centers” — primal areas which provide “reward” signals when activated. There are also “hedonic cortex” areas (orbitofrontal, insula, medial prefrontal and cingulate cortices) which link higher level thoughts with pleasure and happiness. This is explained in a review published in Social Research (New York), where researchers link pleasure, happiness, thought, and meaning. They are able to see, through modern technology, when primal portions of the brain activate with pleasure or “liking” something, and correlate with higher thought centered in frontal cortex regions. “It is potentially interesting to note that all these structures either have close links with frontal cortical structures in the hedonic network (for example, nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum) or belong to what has been termed the brain’s default network, which changes over early development.” According to the researchers, the “default network” carries self-representations (self image/self-esteem), internal modes of cognition (thought) and perhaps states of consciousness. These areas of the brain drive pleasure and happiness. They also cost energy, and since pleasure and happiness are fleeting, continued energy expenditure is required to maintain the thoughts that drive these areas of the brain.
This concept of the energy cost of maintaining happiness being unsustainable is explained further in a review article published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being. Researchers from the University of Toronto (Canada) and the Jeonbuk National University (South Korea) explain that “pursuit of happiness puts unique strain on mental resources.” This ongoing effort has multiple impacts: worse self-regulation and lapses in self-control, less perseverance with challenging tasks, and a chronic depletion of resources, resulting in reduced personal happiness and well-being. If you pursue happiness enough, you burn out from the effort, are likely to have lowered self control which could lead to damaging behavior, and are less likely to stick with the hard tasks that can lead to greater long-term fulfillment. That means a strong pursuit of happiness will, in the long run, result in unhappiness.
Scientific research can look at the brain, do sociological studies, and generally understand the impact of the pursuit of happiness on an individual and overall society. What it can’t do is to look at the spirit. It can look at the physical heart, but it cannot look at the spiritual heart. There is a way to achieve Aristotle’s “a life well lived”, and it is through the spirit/heart rather than the plotting/scheming brain. The “peace that passes all understanding” comes from the spirit. Joy is a gift given to the spirit. A life well lived means living for and fulfilling purpose given by the giver of spirit. That is communicated through the spiritual heart, which, if we can learn to hear it, to tune in to what that spirit is saying, we can have abiding joy regardless of our momentary happiness. We can enjoy life and look forward to what is beyond.
Looking for love in all the wrong places…
This heart is not the “heart” that is glorified in romance novels. That worldly heart is not listening to the spirit the Father gave, but instead emotions produced by the mind-brain-body connection. The spiritual heart that is guided and tuned in to the truth leads to joy, while the heart or emotion center that listens to the world mind is misguidedly wandering in search of happiness. It does not know the truth, as evidenced by the general lowering of happiness as the average person listens to the crashing ocean waves of the world mind — it cannot hear the quiet drops of water in the still pond of spirit. We can turn our thoughts to Him, but only our hearts can hear Him. Pursue the truth over happiness, and you will get both. Pursue happiness over truth, and you lose everything.
Dr. Nemec’s Review
Happiness is the opposite of sadness, whereas joy has no opposite. Happy and sad come from the mind of this world, but joy does not come from this world. It comes from the spirit. It comes into the spiritual heart. Happy and sad are emotions generated from thoughts.
Joy is a State of Being. It is the very nature of God, your Father. When you experience joy, it has no opposite because you are experiencing God — your Father being in you and you being in Him.
As the research shows, the more you pursue happiness, the more burned out you get and the less happiness you end up with. Why? Because happiness is the opposite of sadness and they are both generated from the mind: thoughts being generated through the brain and then entering the body. So anything that comes from the mind has an opposite, and you can’t have one without the other. That’s the way this system works. We seek happiness, hoping and wishing that we can stay away from sadness, but it’s a cycle in this world. You don’t get one without the other.
Joy is not of this world. It doesn’t have an opposite. It takes no energy to experience it because it doesn’t come from work. It is natural in a relationship between you and God your Father. This is not like a relationship in the world that has love and hate, good and bad, happy and sad.
This is a relationship that always was and always will be. It is only found in your spirit, which is your true identity. And this relationship was formed in the unconditional love of God, your Father.
Being in the world, but not of the world
We live in a world that is based on happy and sad, good and bad. This is a world of the mind, but there is another world, the one true world — it is the world of the spirit. It is the world of the Family of God. In this world, there is no opposite. Unconditional Love has no opposite. Joy has no opposite. This world is right now, but it cannot be accessed through the mind — only through your spirit, only through your spiritual heart. So in this present world, you will live in good and bad, happy and sad, love and hate, but you will not put your attention on any of them. You will not seek to be in one and stay out of the other, instead you will seek what is real truth and unconditional love. This is your Family, the one that you may not know, but they absolutely know you and love you with all of their being.
The way home
The family is knocking on the door of your heart, of your spirit. All you have to do is open the door and they’ll come in and the celebration will begin, which is joy unspeakable, no matter what the circumstances in the world or the mind. All you have to do is start listening to your spirit and stop listening to the mind of happy and sad.
If you seek me, you will find me when you seek me with all of your heart — when you seek me in your spirit instead of trying to seek me from your mind. This is because I’m right at the door knocking. All you have to do is open it up and let the celebration begin.
