We don’t really want to be happy…we want bliss
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Read the lengthy excerpt from The Bliss Experiment: Planting the Seeds of Bliss
What if you don’t really want to be happy?
Most of us spend a good deal of our time pursuing happiness — or at least pleasure. This strikes many of us as a perfectly obvious and natural thing to do. From the Declaration of Independence, which announces that it’s our “inalienable right” to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” to almost every nook and cranny of pop culture to virtually all contemporary self-help authors, few people appear to challenge the import of finding happiness.
What if we’re wrong? What if happiness shouldn’t really be our goal? What if happiness by itself isn’t even worthwhile?
Though we seldom think about it clearly, the reality is that happiness by itself isn’t at all what we really want, we only think that we do.
Ask yourself this: If I could grant you “happiness” right now but it would come to you with the condition that life itself is meaningless, that there is no purpose in life other than being happy, would you feel satisfied? Or, what if I could grant you “happiness” but told you that you would never have access to any kind of enduring truth? Would, then, happiness still feel like a victory?
The reality is that we don’t just want to be happy. We also want to know if life is meaningful and what our individual and specific purpose is within this framework of meaning. And on top of it all, we want to know that what we think, feel, believe and know corresponds to some kind of enduring truth about ourselves, humanity in general, and even the very Universe itself.
Without all three things — happiness, meaning and truth — life feels incomplete at best.
The good news is that there does exist something that encompasses all three of our life goals: bliss.
...Read the full article, and others like it at: http://edgemagazine.net/2012/06/we-dont-really-want-to-be-happy-we-want-bliss/
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