As intelligent omnivores with an innate hunger for purpose, I wonder if the foregoing assumptive definition of our species is culture-specific. I think of men who fled the complex mentation and rule-ridden “advanced” society. They speak, admiringly that, in the culture where they now live, a couple produce six children of whom two grow to adulthood, yet they are happy.
They live without air conditioning, lack of electricity or only a few hours a day of it and are content. The man left his complex Western women to find a mate of color and spice, or so he perceived her. She in turn found completion in his attentions and affection and her role in the home, the family, knitting together of the elements of domestici
We could as much choose as the central noun, heuristics, which in today’s pop-culture usually is stated as “hack” or “hacks” as in shortcuts to provide better access to what we desire, the attainment of self-chosen goals, a minor form of self-actualization. I suspect, however, that to achieve Democritus’ cheerfulness or Plato’s collective happiness, requires treating one another justly.
One could be happy, if, expecting little, and achieving little by external standards of status, one produced little but had a low threshold of contentment. In this perspective, the ‘problem’ or challenge of finding the the meaning of life or happiness was resolved. By not being attached to a higher expectation, the simplest pleasantries might be magnified into all that mattered. As with much else, where one puts the attention yields the overall contentment or lack thereof.
If the attention were to be focused upon disappointments, on “things that didn’t go rightly,” then plenty of “proof” could be found that life is absurd, and we inhabit a “vale of tears” punctuated by only occasional or fleeting joys. If, conversely, one felt great gratitude for, dwelt upon, and fixed in the memory the long stretches of time when events in the life were, if not sources or joy, at least sources of serenity, peace, and the absence of conflict, deprivation, pain, or turmoil, then the ‘proof’ is there that our purpose had been to experience a light of being and to share that light with others, for whom it might not have come.
Now all this speculation about happiness does not just have to do with the overall value judgement as to whether one is happy or sad, whether one’s life has been basically joyous or tragic. It may have to do with whether or not we think that this collection of experiences adheres to itself in a web of meaning or not. In the end, was it “about something?”
This is where technological man looks at the person riding a bicycle to his job from his village to shop a few miles away and assumes that the rider is happy. Looking from within the air conditioned sedan, the colonist does not see the tropical sweat soaking the shirt. Seeing the nearby Indios, the recently rural retiree from Quito views his neighbors’ walking to town carrying produce and writes in his blog how “happy” the “simple people” must be.
This posture evinces an envy of those with less technology and more physical friction and strain in their lives, whose bodies are more in contact with the earth. Sure, their ill-fitting shoes may hurt. They will walk on with the bundle of fruit, to sell to buy rice and beans. They walk, even with arthritis or back pain. They do not complain- why would they? Who would listen or care if they did?
Their stoicism is not being happy with their lot in life. It is, rather, a defense against the hardship. They vote with their feet, globally, moving to the city where resources are nearby and livelihood often involves less physical strain. The swelling urban populations in any developing society belie the puerile assumptions of the colonist or first world transplant that acceptance of their conditions equates to satisfaction.
So, let’s return to the notion that in the aggregate, life satisfaction (at least one recent poll listed Norway, {far from a primitive society} as the most content of people) can be judged by how many moments were of pleasure as opposed to how many were of pain.
Two parallel tracks must be evaluated here. Firstly, what proportion of our experiences was hardship, toil, and discomfort, versus what proportion was comfort, pleasure, and ease? Secondly assuming that each were evenly represented, on which state of being did we choose to focus our attentions, our memories, our recollections? The lens through which we experience either track is our web of social relationships and our life posture, our underlying assumptions about how the trajectory of one’s existence is supposed to take place.
The nihilism and pessimism of 19th Century “naturalist” novelists, Russian writers like Gogol or Tostoi, or French existentialists seemed rooted in helplessness or unending struggle, pain, and deprivation. What if whether we feel as a whole that our lives were worth repeating, or something to be grateful for, or of an overarching value or the opposite is even in part internally determined? As YouTube presenter, Elvira Bary points out, the social fabric does not mitigate the pall of fear and deprivation in contemporary Russian life, from which she emigrated, and is little changed from what it was in Tsarist times.
She is like a contemporary Solzhenitsin, showing the Slavic village where personal safety is as reliable as one’s connection to the local strongman. Add to this that social services are minimal and hardship is maximal. Winter heat in your apartment block fails when pipes burst because the utility workers were drafted to fight for the messianic autocrat’s vision of a rebuilt empire. Roads likewise, are in poor shape, healthcare is a two hour drive away, and over half your neighbors lack indoor plumbing. (The latter was frequently seen being trucked back into Russia from occupied parts of Ukraine as loot). Even here, while many people turn to vodka or heroin, many others find solace in stoicism or joy in small pleasures.
It may come down to three determinants of happiness: where we choose to put our attention, and the degree to which we are attached to the experiences, to the outcomes, and where we set the bar by our standards or expectations.
To speak of happiness or life satisfaction, consider another phenomenon: reincarnation. One of our frequent discontents is that we do not normally, without regression hypnosis or retrievals of memories in dream states remember past lives. There is so much perspective that we would have if only we remembered what we had done, how we had lived in prior incarnations. We would be more purposeful, better informed, kinder, gentler, more benevolent. This view is what I usually hear from friends with a metaphysical bent.
I wonder, now, in my seventh decade, if this is true or not. For those who choose to imagine a loving sky parent, they might assume that the amnesia upon reincarnating is a mercy. The painful experiences are more easily remembered. There are long stretches of pain drudgery and ‘just barely surviving’ that characterize most human existence. If we were reborn with a keen memory of what came before, this might threaten the continuance of our species. There would result a great increase in suicide and a decrease in those choosing to bring others into this life to experience the same. Worse, parents with memories of prior lifetimes of oppression, hard labor, marginalization, uncurable lingering illnesses, and privation, would share this reality with their offspring, who then would tend to decide not to become parents themselves.
Now, that is the sky parent version, the Bedouin campfire story version that is considered “Western” theology. I tend to think of it a bit more naturally. If, as Charles Forte posited, we are “owned” by something, then we are likely farmed, much as a flock of geese or a herd of goats. If part of what is being farmed is the sharp release of intense emotion so that the Reptilian overlords can suck in the “loosh,” the squeezed essence of that suffering, then it makes sense that the herd be relatively healthy and reach maturity for an optimal harvest. If, as the Gnostics posited, above the “Archons” (Reptilians and Grays), there are the shape-shifting Draco (“angels”) and above them is “God” the Royal White Draco to some or Cthulhu in other versions, then all the way up the predator hierarchy, we are a better product if we are born with amnesia. We are thereby easier to placate, to manage, and, when ripened, harvested for the suffering released from our fading forms, the ‘loosh’ which is the sustinance of the Reptoids.
For the farmers, it may be a matter of natural selection. They would not have to have forced this amnesia to emerge in our incarnation process. It might have happened through natural selection. Those who lacked the memories would die off earlier, not struggle as hard for mere survival and to create more strugglers. Those who had the amnesia would imagine themselves more easily fulfilled or happy and be more likely to live longer and choose to reproduce and to make the sacrifices needed to ensure that their offspring, in turn, would live longer enough to do their own reproductive duty to the farmers.
Now some might assert at this point that souls are immortal and inviolable. This is dogma, not anything that can be proven or disproven. If we looked at it as an extension of a law of thermodynamics, indeed, the iron in the body of the squirrel will not be wasted in the feeding trough of life. The cat or raptor who eats it will now have this essential metal- the substance is, as it were “immortal- it went on. This does not in any way mean that any coherent version of “you” continues.
To me intuitively, it is likely that some sort of soul harvesting goes on for our species where, yes, the soul energy continues, but as a part of the predator who consumed it. Put into the language of Bedouin poetry, this is framed as a “return to ‘Source’”. Any why wouldn’t we consider the herdsmen as Source, their design to assure more product, us, as a well thought out plan, and proof of “intelligent design?”
So, some may recycle, growing in strength, complexity, perhaps creating flavor for the herdsmen and butchers much as we age wine or cheese to enhance its richness and complexity. Others may lack the maturity of many cycles to warrant harvesting and be allowed to cycle more times before being considered ‘ripe’ for soul eating.
I do not consider this model particularly grim. It is simply a working of nature, as are we. We can hope, of course, that other species now interfere with the Reptilian-Draco-Cthulhu order into which we were born. We get inklings that there is cosmic conflict, that the foregoing do have competitors, opponents in the form of Nordics, Arcturians, and other benevolent races who wish to see us emerge from the cycles of “sin”, improvised suffering, guilt, trauma, and the degradation of our faculties which feeds the machinery of monsters.
I’m ready for a change, as I imagine many others are, even if they can’t yet see, or do not want to see, the larger picture. We can for our part, seek with our energies and intentions to attract the benevolents. We can try to focus on the positives in our short episodes of existence and thereby, I hope, make ourselves less tasty to the infernal machinery. We can reach out to the benevolent ones as did our polytheistic or pantheistic ancestors through meditation, prayer, and right living to bring about the time of our liberation from the managed herd. Who knows? That time may be now.