On 13 Mar 2014, at 09:19, Kim Jones wrote:
The other thing that occurs to me concerning happiness is that many
feel that happiness is something "bigger than" or "more important
than" a simple feeling or emotion. To say that smoking cannabis
makes you happy will almost certainly cause some to react that I am
trivialising happiness.
*and* trivialising cannabis. Perhaps.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Anything you do that causes
happiness in your life becomes one of your values, and what you
value you strive to obtain. If you already have it, you will want to
protect it and keep it.
There is a problem though, on two fronts.
1. Things run out. If your happiness depends on something "material"
like cannabis or coffee or real estate, you will sooner or later
exhaust your supply of it and find yourself running around trying to
restock your supply. This is not itself always a particularly happy
experience. I often find myself going a version of insane trying to
find parking at shopping centres and waiting in long, slow queues to
get to the checkout, for example. I have never fully understood why
life and survival are totally predicated on "obtaining stuff" and
"protecting stuff" and "consuming stuff." We are happy when we have
stuff to consume and when we run out of stuff we then render
ourselves unhappy going after it again ( well, at least I do...) The
ridiculous and perpetual cycle of "Be silent. Consume. Die."
2. Happiness, being a quale, cannot persist, possibly because of 1.
(above), though entirely more likely due to the tiring effect of
neurotransmitters in the brain. For some reason, the brain develops
a tolerance for its own chemicals and happiness ceases to happen
after a time because no mental state can persist indefinitely. Just
as it is highly unlikely that a fit of anger will last forever, it
is highly unlikely that happiness will either since mental states
require resources to run and the more powerful the quale, the more
resources the body consumes. Just as those who smoke cannabis every
day find quickly that it requires more and more of the substance to
achieve the desired euphoric effect, any means of achieving
happiness will sooner or later not work at all. I mean, after you
have bought half a dozen blocks of apartments in Tasmania, is a
seventh really going to make you happier than you were after you
purchased the sixth?
Happiness, for those who love to philosophise it into something
other than a simple quale, will be recognisable as that state of
mind that does not cease. In other words, no one ever truly
experiences happiness since no one - not even the jolly joyful Dalai
Lama - has ever experienced a quale that never ends.
To take a Buddhist page out of his book though, it becomes the
foundation of wisdom to try to seek happiness by means other than
running around trying to obtain and replenish "stuff". This is
surely because any belief in matter and materiality leads to the
pain and agony of what I am struggling to describe here.
It may be that my fascination for Bruno's Comp is due to its kernel
of doubt concerning the "supreme importance" of matter and the
material world.
Comp makes me happy. I have yet to fully understand it.
I think cannabis is only an amplifier of life sense, so that it makes
you better appreciate what you already appreciate: it opens the life
appetite.
I think that comp is more like salvia. It opens the appetite for
afterlife, prelife, and beyond. It illustrates something else, "a
different view on reality", and I am not sure most people appreciate
it (even as an "hallucination").
I mean it is like with wine, or logic, you must educate your sense of
appreciation, and there are variety of happiness possible.
Yet, happiness is a protagorean virtue, there is no rule, no
algorithm. Only truth, and first person views. Happiness probably
obeys something like []h -> ~h.
There are many examples illustrating the fate of named ([])
protagorean virtues (although not in those terms), in Alan Watts "the
wisdom of insecurity".
The taoists are not bad on that, too.
You know I love the french (a bit cynical) poem:
'man had the good,
but he sought the best,
he found the bad,
and kept it,
by fear of the worst.'
Kind regards,
Bruno
Kim
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