Am I happy?

I don't know. I have never thought about it. The moment you think you are happy, you cease to be happy, don't you? When you are having fun and shouting with joy, what happens the moment you become conscious that you are joyous? You stop being joyous. Have you noticed it? So happiness is something which is not within the field of self-consciousness.When you try to be good, are you good? Can goodness be practised? Or is goodness something that comes naturally because you see, observe, understand? Similarly, when you are conscious that you are happy, happiness goes out of the window. To seek happiness is absurd, because there is happiness only when you don't seek it.Same with humility? Can you cultivate humility? If you repeat every morning, "I am going to be humble", is that humility? Or does humility arise of itself when you no longer have pride, vanity? In the same way, when the things that prevent happiness are gone, when anxiety, frustration, the search for one's own security have ceased, then happiness is there, you don't have to seek it.

I have faith in God similar to how I have faith in the sun. Not because I can see it, but because I can not see without it.
same goes for my happiness i would rather believe my self to be happy then to wish that i was not un-happy surly the looking for is greater then the finding ?

When you are conscious you become aware of your awareness. This means that you can observer yourself observing. In this way, during a moment of happiness, you can step outside of the moment and observe yourself being happy. I think these moments are particularly sobering, however, I don't see why they should take away from your happiness; that being said though, I agree that they typically do - I would add too that not everyone is capable of these moments. IMO this means that happiness requires a degree of unawareness or it requires your observer to be happy that the observed is happy. Being happy that someone else is happy is very contradictory to human instinct. Like a dog, humans can't be happy someone else has a bone, there is always a desire to take the bone away. As much as we would like to think we are not animals with animal instincts we are always confronted with the fact that we are. In the coarse of becoming a real person in the exostentialist tradition a person must come to terms with Kierkegaard's "dread" or Sartre's "misery" in that while we are not predictable we can be happy for ourselves when we are happy. In order to do this we need to be happy for other people. This is to say that when we see someone on a large fancy yacht, for example, living a life we could not imagine, then if we are genuinely happy for them we can also be genuinely happy for ourselves, when likewise, we observe ourselves being happy. Truly the only person that ever makes us unhappy is ourselves. If we can't be happy for other people and in particular strangers (those outside our perceived ego), then how could we be happy for ourselves? We can't; obviously.

C.S. Lewis is rolling in his grave

As for me, the more sun I get the happier I am, which makes for some pretty depressing January and Februarys.

Where do you start to look for truth without resorting to quoting or arguments based on traditions that evolved out of quoting? First, you begin by looking at the way the physical world works (mechanically, scientifically) and then you look at all the historical texts and documentation, myths and belief systems, available to you from around the globe.

Scientology??

And does Scientology make you happy.?

seeing as you like quotes so much here's one
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

People are just about as happy as they make up their mind to be

Morality is not properly the doctrine how we should make ourselves happy, but how we should become worthy of happiness.

I sure hope you are happy, China!

Scott Free ,

First ,I'd like to say that my post is a part of my personal observation and is not a theory opinion or whatever. .I'm sure that many readers in this forum had similar encounters with .the Happiness.

When you are conscious ,you are thinking .When you "become aware of your awareness" you are aware of your thinking ( thought).
You can't "think" happiness ;it is not a product of thought.
Thought is a response of memory ,your knowledge ,past experiences .Everything in memory is past ,nothing new .all dead ;True Happiness is a Living experience.

That sort of doesn't make sense .


First of all there is no such thing like a process of becoming .
The What Is is What Is ,time will never change it to What it will be What it Should be.(time doesn't exist outside the thought).
A fool who wants to educate himself after 4 ys of studying will still be a fool ; an educated fool.

I hope you experience "happiness" too China.

Vereya ,
Hi Vereya ,Sure I,m happy ,just these few words that you send my way ,make me extremely happy .Obviously I,m sharing part of it with with You, my dear Friend , Spasiva .

Thank you Mickey , likewise .