Friday, September 7, 2012

RLS and HIP

Staying on the topic of Happiness...

The human condition of Being Happy seems to me to be possible in at least a couple of independent ways:
1.  Happiness can arise from a condition where the confluence of our thoughts, actions, and living, and the outcomes of this living, are in agreement with our plans, desires, and hopes.  Right Living creates the Right Life, hence you are Happy.  I like to think of this as organic Happiness, meaning that it arises from actions we take, we make it happen because we are in control of our lives, and we are responsible for it.  Lives out of control are rarely Happy, and the people in those lives may only feel Happy in very limited ways, and only from certain perspectives.   I call this the Right Living Scenario, or RLS.
2.  Happiness can arise through the application of electrical or chemical stimuli.  Experience tells us that Happy Hour was properly named if a quantity of alcohol, the drug of choice for many people, is applied in the right dose to create the sensation of Happiness, however limited in scope it may be.  Other drugs can be used, I'm told, that have greater effects than ethanol but the side effects may create unHappiness.  Happiness In a Pill, or HIP, is the name I will give this form.
3.  Is there a 3rd form of Happiness? 
  The Happiness Box Experiment is really just another form of HIP, I think. 
  Are you Happy when you sleep and dream? 
  Can you be Happy in the sense we mean here if you are not conscious? 
  Are you Happy if you have no memory of Happiness later? 
  Can we anticipate Happiness and be Happy in the anticipation?  What if we think something will happen that will make us Happy and today we are happy in that anticipation, but the thing does not happen and the anticipated Happiness we planned for never materializes?  Does that negate our anticipatory Happiness (because it was never a genuine Happiness, anyway)?

The application of philosophical thinking has an impact on RLS, but not on HIP.  Arraying the many facets of our lives, examining them, assessing them with respect to our intentions and the outcomes we would like to see and then looking over our lives and how the way we live is or is not in harmony with these outcomes is what BQ is all about.  It makes sense to be philosophical with respect to RLS.  It makes no sense to be philosophical if we want to talk about HIP, unless the point is to examine our personal use of HIP in the context of our goal of RLS.

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