Happiness

HAPPINESS?

The intellectuals and philosophers have tried to define happiness or give a meaning to happiness. It is not an easy task because it is a state of mind or it is a feeling. It is hard to tailor happiness in words. It has no body and not measurable.

Oscar Levant thinks it is not some thing you experience but some thing you remember. If remembrance is happiness some times it is too painful. Happiness and pain is in contradiction with each other. The other intrinsic problem is that unless you can give a definition to some thing that is just the opposite of what you want to define it is difficult to make sense out of it. In this case we cannot define sadness or gloom. That is also a form of mental state or feeling.

To make a mental picture is a concept and to explain a concept about feelings is distortion of its originality. As some one has put it," that awareness of universe is called conceiving and what we know about universe is a conception." If we take this as the nearest statement to conception and conceiving, we have to ignore the process of evolution of universe and human mind. Ghani has rightly said that human mind is a child of a change. It invariably wants a change every time and is not contend in stagnation.

Happiness is not a station you arrive at but the manner of travel to the the station as said by a thinker. This statement leaves the discussion wide open.

Gandhi has described happiness when intentions, expression and achievement are at harmony with each other. If my understanding does not mislead me that means harmony between conscious and subconscious.

Dr Khurshid Alam London 5/4 2012