5 alternative definitions of Happiness, It's not what you think
What exactly is happiness? Is it a goal, reward, emotion, or just a state of being
We have always tried to define a very complex term like happiness more easily, but the truth is happiness is not a definite structural term that has a fixated meaning. It's a processual word that reinterprets itself when settings and mindsets change. For instance, if you feel a pall of positivity surmount you when you get more money, that will be the fixed source of your joy. It teaches you that the growth of money will lead you to joy. Happiness on the other hand is an abstract term, some people cannot be happy even after having millions of dollars, yet someone without making a three-figure check remains contended. So, the dynamism of happiness varies a lot from circumstances, beliefs, faiths, and growing concerns about self-worth.
What exactly is happiness?
To be fair, the best answer to this is if you feel joyful, blissful, and ecstatic you are indulging yourself in some happiness. The power of feeling bliss, and joy exuberates a sense of belonging and leads you to happiness as an indulging destination. The monolith superstructures have led to making materialism an essence of happiness. Happiness as we say has two arms broadening the horizon where the essence of being positive and being fruitful and truthful to the fate of humanity rests on both inner feelings of joy as well as outer.
In today’s age, too much control lay in the hands of others thus establishing a pure agency of happiness in these other persons who define your state of mind. That’s why happiness is either pure bliss or else better remain conditional to other people willing to make you feel good about yourself. How do we unleash both internal and external agencies on happiness? Well, for starters both cannot co-exist, one is anti-existential to the other, but both guarantee a degree of satisfaction, and it's open to you to choose.
Why defining ‘happiness’ is not equivalent to making loads of ‘cash’?
Experience whether a ‘trip’ or ‘going high’ will always outdo the monetary gains. The fact is a human being always craves good feelings as we react badly to negative ones, the identification of what remains to be defined as happiness, before searching for the depth of the term is crucial and pertinent. Try to always make sure to define something with absolute and impeccable certainty, you will be able to feed onto that sentiment. What do Human Beings love? Enjoyment and a mixture of good experiences, good food, fragrance, orgasm, and drugs. Money is the interlude to those things not the absolute, for happiness in its entirety is absolute.
While you hit yourself with extensive dopamine you become happy, but can’t we just build inhibitors or receptors to let the chemical exist in the synapses as long as it wants? Now we cannot, It is not possible to enforce something with absolute certainty when you do not have the self-indulged discipline to generate it. Likewise, your body through chemical means might get signaled with certain actions, but it's still unnatural and can ruin your brain losing things to perceive. Just as anti-depressants lead to generating another happy chemical Serotonin or better defined as blocking receptors and preserving in between synaptic cleft serotonin to exist and stabilize moods as opposed to receptors exchanging the chemical through the neural network.
When you give up these anti-depressants drugs, the hit can be pretty insane and can haunt you. The transition in any stage naturally evolves in you, and should not be enforced upon you, for the body’s molecular integrational intelligence can sense change and are firm to react if it's happening under strenuous duress. It can sense piracy in its interpreters if you unlawfully introduce a chemical.
5 alternative happiness definitions, obverse to what you think
Reality driven happiness
To start experiencing this form of happiness, you need to first differentiate between agents of happiness and happiness itself. Once you know what makes you happy is the first step. Because for everyone the range is often unequivocally on two extreme sides of the spectrum.
A homeless man thinks happiness is when you have a permanence of available residence. A person working a flourishing tech job might be getting his mood upset while making a mistake in creating one of his houses, an architectural glitch. So it matters that we recognize what makes us feel and how and not just the effect of the feeling.
How do we achieve parity here? Simply devise ways in optimizing the understanding of the source and the conclusive feeling. Make sure to identify patterns of trying to indulge too much in conditional happiness of sleeping with a sex worker, indulging in too much of drugs so on and so forth.
Try to owe much of your agency regarding the matter and feel grateful for small things like a good meal, spending time with family, reading a good book, etc.
Unconditional happiness
Obstruction of happiness stems from many things, but it surely intensifies well when the issue is at a primary basal level. Happiness is limited or stopped for its application when it remains a conflict directly as opposed to the set of parameters you want to achieve.
Dreams, Ideas of the future, sense perception of your capabilities churns its always rotating wheels. It’s never to get stuck with someone, for no one is permanent in this world, nor emotional trauma, disappointments, and a life marred with dejection that’s simply not equivalent to existence.
Unconditional happiness lays itself out by bringing in two key ways to define self-love, I would put out my effort 100% but not give results heed of importance, I will only try to control what I can control, not anticipate what I want. Always be rooted in reality and do not hope for dreams when setting out to work. Always be balanced in your approach to achieve outcomes.
Silent happiness
Since happiness is a churn that happens entirely on the basis of letting a human emotion revive on its own, silent happiness tends to show you the way forward and lay down a path for you to follow. Why do people meditate? I mean not everyone wants to attain enlightenment. People meditate to see what they are in their original form.
Our brains filter and process things according to our dictations re-written by previous generations or the household we are born into. Our culture, society, and religion teach a certain pathway and outlook towards life and this becomes an extension as well to our daily life.
Receptive activities like listening, introspecting, relearning, and meditating help us to explore our senses in a calm and immediately lead us to remain happy. With no filters attached, no veil to wear, and no curtains to draw.
Herbal dope happiness
This can be a tad bit tricky but psychotropic substances can also give you joy and bliss, but does the drug law of naturalism apply? To be fair, psychotropic substances have been used in many ancient cultures to initiate a process of self-repair, I will just share the Asian context. In the early day seekers and hermits from South Asia used to have Opium and Weed before sitting up for a long meditation session.
The mindbending and heavy altercation of neural existence creates a fertile field to incorporate resistance to the application of drugs. The more you can control your emotional bandwidth of these substances, the more primacy you have in dealing with the emotion fair and square.
The authority over such basal emotion creates further strengthening of spiritual authority in the attainment of enlightenment.
Spiritual happiness
Spiritual happiness is the pinnacle of all happiness. It helps to split the fog into parts and cover the hazy endings, further leading to generating pure happy feelings with no conditional attachments. In order to be spiritually happy, you need to shatter all conceivable notions there are regarding happiness and only see it as one entity in itself. Earlier in the Indian subcontinent, South Asia to be specific, has emanated dharmic religions such as Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism from its lands.
However, there is no definite construct for Hindusim, it should be said all philosophical understandings of the South Asian or Indian subcontinent. For Hindu, in itself refers to “a person who lives beyond the river ‘Sindhu’ or ‘Indus’.”
That’s how the Greeks came up with the name ‘India’, it was literally their pronunciation of the word ‘Hindu’. All these philosophies ideate on the principles of a soul called the ‘Atma’ meaning a subtler realist being embedded underneath you, covered in flesh and bones. The ‘Atma’ has no needs, or desires, and only craves to be one with the ‘Param Atma’ or ‘Brahman’ meaning the creator in itself, we all desire to be one with this supreme force and entity of which fissures and fractions exist in bits and pieces.
The context of happiness comes when we get enlightened or ‘moksha’, where we realize that the world is just a reflection of what we are trained and forced to see, not the ultimate reality but rather a colored one. Two important attributes of pious and transparent thinking are the ability to identify the water that exists, that is not rippled or forced to move. These broad waterlines are like filtered conditioning that human imprints in life, the certainty of material life, ego and need to assert, to procreate progeny, and things of that sort, this is also known as ‘Vrittis’. When the ripples do not project an identical view or any movement in the water and you can see it is still, a perfect gaze to view the contents placed at the base then the state is known as ‘Chitta’.
When Chitta overpowers your Vrittis, it directs you to enlightenment.
For one would ask, How does happiness factor in here? Simple, you become happy when you want. Then happiness means only internal happiness, there is no question of indulging in external happiness. Since to attain moksha all you need is to connect with ‘Brahman’ or the ‘Supreme Soul’. All the external conditions of happiness dissipate.
And moreover when you see reality in many forms, once everything starts unfolding you feel your cells open, your hearts broaden, and organs go for a twirl.
The process itself is so ecstatic that many people orgasm amidst the experience, you are blissful many times, even on the outside you look like a meek being who is always happy, compassionate, and empathetic almost always.
Wrapping up
We all pay so much heed to the requirements or agents of happiness that we forget that happiness in itself is a product of our own experiences that we feel. It is inevitably important to play with its existing preconditioning to widen the horizon and meaning of the term colloquially and unequivocally.
Thanks a lot for taking some precious time out of your schedule to read my work. If you like it, you can read some of the other writeups I have linked below. I hope you have a great day! Thanks for stopping by!!!
