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 four 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, who found completion in his attentions and affection and her purpose in the home, the familyknitting together of the elements of domesticity.
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 our self-chosen goals, a minor form of self-actualization. I suspect, however, that to achieve Democritus’ cheerfulness or Plato’s collective happiness, based upon treating one another justly requires more than a few hacks.
One could be happy, if, expecting little, and achieving little to an external standard, one produced little but had a low threshold of contentment. In this perspective, the ‘problem’ or challenge of finding the happiness was resolved. By not being attached to a higher expectation, the simplest pleasantries might be magnified and the method might define the outcome- where one put the attention yielded the overall contentment or lack thereof.
If the attention were to be focused upon disappointments, on “things that didn’t go righty,” then plenty of “proof” can always 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 of 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 so readily.
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?” In this vein of consideration, even if a life’s experiences were a collection of displacements, alienations, or other types of suffering, but a person made a great breakthrough that she knew would someday have to be realized and attributed to her, then her sufferings or deprivations were transmuted by the making of a significant contribution to relieving the suffering of the world, resolving a fundamental human problem, or creating a new technology of thought or materiality. In any of the foregoing, the person of years can look back over his shoulder and say, “It was hard and tough, but it was about something larger than myself. I feel fortunate to have been involved in assisting higher evolution.”
We easily look out over other cultures and misjudge what we observe. Technological man looks at the person riding a bicycle a few miles from village to factory job and assumes that this man is happy. Man in the air conditioned car with the nicely padded bucket seat admires the fresh air that the bicyclist “gets to” breathe and the exercise. It mirrors the paternalistic condescension of prior Eurpean colonists or tourists, claiming to have found the “noble savage.” The observer chooses not to see the tropical sweat soaking the shirt, the gas fumes from unregulated exhausts from vehicles passing his bike over those miles, nor the mosquito infested swamp outside his car window. Seeing the nearby Indios, the retiree from Quito who views his neighbors’ walking to town carrying produce tells his friends online how happy they appeared to be.
It is almost 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, with nature. Sure, their ill-fitting shoes may hurt. They will walk on with the bundle of fruit, even with arthritis or back pain. They do not complain- why would they? Who would listen or care if they did? Their stoicism is a defense against the immutable hardship. To speculate that this is a form of happiness misses the obvious. They vote with their feet, globally, moving to the city where everything is nearby and livelihood involves less physical strain. They want an easier life, even if it involves more crowded living conditions, more noise, more crime and pollution.The swelling urban populations in almost any developing society belies the puerile assumptions of the tourist or transplant that acceptance of their conditions is synonymous to happiness.
So, let’s return to the notion that in the aggregate, life satisfaction (at least one recent poll found Norway, {far from a primitive society} as the most content of people) might be judged by how many moments were of pleasure as opposed to how many were of pain. In other words, 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 nihilism and pessimism of 19th Century “naturalist” novelists, Russian writers like Gogol or Tostoi, or French existentialists seemed rooted in hopelessness 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?
Consider the grim culture of a Slavic village where personal safety is determined by how much you are liked by 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 to expand the empire. Roads likewise, are in poor shape, and you pay protection money to a criminal network to have personal peace. Even here, while many people turn to chain-smoking, vodka or heroin, many others find solace in stoicism or joy in small pleasures.
It may come down to two determinants of happiness: where we choose to put our attention, and the degree to which we are attached to the experiences, to our outcomes.
This view of the aggregate abuts another phenomenon: reincarnation. One of our frequent discontents is that we do not normally, without regression hypnosis or retrievals of memories in dream states or other extraordinary events remember our 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 loving. 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. What is painful is more easily remembered, the long stretches of pain drudgery and ‘just barely surviving’ that characterize most human existence would be cumulative. If we were reborn with a keen memory of what came before, there might be two outcomes not favorable to human continuance: a great increase in suicide and a great decrease in those choosing choosing thereby to bring other lives into this experience.
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.
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. Those who lacked it would die off earlier, not struggle as hard for mere survival or fight as hard to create and nurture 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. They would gladly make the sacrifices needed to ensure that their offspring, in turn, would live longer enough to do their 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. It is also wishful thinking. No one wants to just blink out like a burnt lightbulb.
So, what might happen to soul energy or soul as an “eternal” out of body identity? If we looked at it as an extension of a law of thermodynamics, 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. 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 greater energy of the predator who consumed it. Our identity is lost in a greater whole, that which consumed us. Stated in thelanguage of Bedouin metaphysics it is a “return to ‘Source.” And why wouldn’t we consider the herdsmen as Source, their machinery set up to assure more product, us, as a well thought out plan? The barn, the feed lot, the paddocks, the planned harvests of wars, of pandemics, of natural disasters are merely the machinery of harvesting, an“intelligent design.”
So, some may recycle, growing in strength, complexity, to flavor for the herdsmen and butchers. Others may lack the maturity of many cycles to warrant harvesting and be allowed to cycle more times before being considered ‘ripe.’
I do not consider this model particularly grim. It is simply a working of nature, as are we. We are intelligences become self-aware within that very same nature.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 beings 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 the 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 therefore, I suspect, make ourselves less tasty to the infernal machinery now in place. We can reach out to the benevolent ones as did our ancestors through meditation, prayer, and right living to bring about the time of our liberation from the herd. Who knows? That time may be now.