5 March 2002

Do you look to yourself for happiness?

You say:
"It's in there somewhere, isn't it? I'll find it, if I just keep looking."

But the search is in vain. Your light of human reason is a mere tool, your churning emotions are reactions to conditions surrounding you. Where would you have picked up joy? Is it a birthright? A gift from a benevolent god?

Happiness is no man's birthright. But everyone is capable of it. Just as everyone can catch a cold or feel the warmth of sunshine. It is a matter of learning/finding a place in the world and how to deal with its everchanging manifestations.

Two scenerios:

1) Winter's dark is passing. The chain of gray day after bleak gray day is broken by a soft spring sun. You sit on a park bench, eyes closed, face to the sun, feeling the bright warmth, seeing red through your closed eyelids. It feels good. You are momentarily happy.

2) August and the sun glares down from a muggy sky. If you go out at all, say to watch the kids at the park, you find the shade of a tree to hide from the sun's brutal rays. Where is the happiness the sun stirred only a season ago?

Definitions:

Soul - Name for intellectual and emotional processes within a body. It is who and what we are, the resident of our body. Everything not directly physical, even though physical sources may produce certain emotions (i.e., adrenalin, pheramones , drugs, etc..)

Body - Our physical body. It's unclear where the line is drawn between body and soul.

Ourself - Our united soul and body.

World - Everything outside of ourselves.

Mood - The cumulative result of intellectual and emotional activity within a body. The interaction of soul and world. Reactions such as happy, sad, confused, etc. produce that mood.

God - Did you actually think I would define this? Well, I give it a shot anyway: The concept of something good. The ultimate good. A label, a hope that things can be better, etc. If it sounds a little Anselm-ish, it is. When I first read his ontological proof of God, I snickered and payed it scant attention. But it is sound, if not especially real. Do things have to be True to have meaning? Can't little fudges here and there make things better?