Part 2 - What, then,
is Happiness?
If scientists, materialists or scoffers were more self-honest,
they’d simply have to admit that these questions are outside the scope of their
inquiry or their personal interest. Just about any “man on the street” can
supply the most obvious answer to the purpose of life: we want to enjoy life
and to perpetuate that enjoyment. It’s happiness we seek, silly! Most men and
women, looking at life’s wonders, mystery, complexity, order, and beauty, see
that the cosmos is veritably bursting with intelligence. The observant and
aware human experience is sufficient to tip the odds strongly in favor of
creation being both a product of, and directed toward increased awareness of,
Consciousness, Intention, and Purpose! Albert Einstein, one of the greatest
scientists who ever lived, was in awe of the universe and saw beauty and
intelligence where other more pedestrian observers see how to make better bombs
or grow food more profitably.
Most weekend-Darwinists would fall into the trap of admitting
that mere existence isn’t enough, at least not for them personally! “Sure, I
wouldn’t want to be in a coma or paralyzed for life. I’d want to enjoy life!” In
any case, they can’t help but allow a higher purpose to enter which I will call
simply, happiness. Right there they’ve forfeited the match by admitting to
something, “happiness,” that cannot be defined and that constitutes a
non-material reality -- in fact, a reality which is a product solely of
consciousness and feeling! Bingo, ‘ol boy! I think I’ve just won!
And if you’d be tempted to say that happiness is the result of
material satisfactions (home, hearth, money, pleasure, success, etc.) I would
counter with the well established fact that the human experience discloses
ample examples of people under the most harrowing conditions of pain, suffering
or lack experiencing happiness (in the form of joy, contentment, and focus)
like the full moon appearing in the sky, untouched in its beauty by earth bound
devastation. The potential for human consciousness to transcend seemingly
impossible physical conditions can never be circumscribed. Score one for
metaphysics, I say!
You might still object by saying that desiring happiness (in
any form) doesn’t make life necessarily meaningful, just purposeful? Hmmmm,
hair splitting, are we? Even a scientist would say you have to limit your
inquiries to what you know and can test. The meaning of life isn’t likely to
found in a rock or in outer space. The very inquiry suggests consciousness
& intelligence and, besides, intelligent or not, it is we who are asking
the question, not the rocks or the whales. So we must be the measure of the
response and the inquiry into whether and what is happiness and whether our
pursuit of it is meaningful!
In any case, to admit happiness into the discussion is
certainly a crack in the materialistic egg of strict Darwinism. You might
object that seeking happiness doesn’t answer the question for the lower life
forms and their respective stages of evolution. Hmmm, I would say, really? Are
not earthworms and plants “happy” if they get sustenance and favorable
conditions for living? Well, ok, we can’t say for sure they are “happy,” but as
their simple needs are more fulfilled they are at least, well, “more
fulfilled!” It’s at least as good as your survival of the fittest theory, I’d
say. It supplies at least a motive, as it were, for their compelling interest
to survive. Survival for its own sake has no logical explanation by itself
without the squishy appearance of consciousness and feeling. A kind of
primordial, “What’s in it for me?”
I will admit that we have yet to grapple with what is
happiness. For one question that remains is not so much why we want to be happy
(that is intuitively and innately self-evident even if beyond logic and
reason), but what parameters foster this happiness. A murderer might imagine
(presumably does) that killing his enemy will make him happier in ridding his
life of some terrible pestilence. But remorse and regret may set in,
afterwards, or the hangman’s noose, descend. Either way the happiness achieved
by the murderer may be fleeting, at best. But, let’s explore the nature of
happiness in another section.
Positing that happiness is the goal and purpose of life isn’t
all that much of a threat to anyone, now that we’ve dismissed the Darwinists
from the room, that is. It’s the atheists and the agnostics who are now left
standing, quietly muttering to each other and suspicious of what’s to come
next.
Our AA friends (agnostics and atheists) are suspicious because
once you introduce meaning or happiness into life, then a higher octave than
material fulfillments of the law of cause and effect is admitted into the
conversation. The causes of achieving meaning are as insubstantial and lacking
materiality as meaning and happiness itself. A metaphysical truth can only be
dismissed when one lives comfortably, if narrowly, under the umbrella of
materialistic, present life realities.
Right now, however, these baddies think that the meaning of
life is to “get mine” and the only cause and effect they care about is how to
cause mine to be got. Now I admit that some of ‘em are actually really nice
people who love whales, pets, lovers and mothers. They just don’t cotton to
that God thing. We’ll call this a sub-group of AA’ers, humanists.
You see: all of these people, nice or not, are wedded to the
idea that the only realities worthy of note are the ones that they are
interested in. Such realities are likely to be things they can see, hear,
taste, touch, or smell. The idea of a broader, intangible reality is, for them,
dismissible on the grounds of “Frankly, I’m not interested.” Even the billions
of galaxies or the bad things that live under their fingernails are generally
of little interest to this group of people. Maybe they love puppies or buy
organic produce, but these they can touch.
Is there a way to bridge the happiness motivation into
something less subjective? Can “God” enter the picture through the backdoor of
happiness? Let’s wait and see….stay tuned for Part 3 – Consciousness, God & Intuition