From the last couple of weeks, you might be thinking the person is more inclined towards happiness; I don’t refute in any way that I am not. However, happiness and talking about happiness have taken a good amount of time in my life to make me realize what they really mean or what real happiness is. In this write-up, I’d like to talk about the dependence of happiness: is happiness dependable? Can’t it be independent? Although, I talked about extensively in my last write-up– happiness and state of being happy, what either of them means.
If I ask the pundits of happiness, “Is happiness dependable?” They would without any doubt say, “Yes, indeed, it is.” And I would not try to negate their point of view, since buying a new, branded car, a beautiful house, getting a promotion, and other things that are going to elevate us in one way or another bring happiness into our lives. But is that happiness long-lasting? Certainly, it isn’t. Let’s assume I bought a beautiful trending car, and buying it has made me over the moon. But, the ever next moment I saw the same car, which I had parked near a lane next to the coffee shop, where my friends and I were enjoying coffee as a treat, I saw the car had been scratched by some passer-by’s vehicle. Will my state be the same after coming across the scratches on my new branded car? No, it won’t be so; the dopamine level will surge, my mood will swing, and I shall feel obviously the opposite of happy.
So the happiness was short lived and depended on pity small trivial things; rather, I would say it was me who had made my happiness dependable on things, relating it to my job, my new hours, my new car, and other related things. Now, how shall I remain happy? How is it possible to remain happy when I have assigned my happiness to things over which I have no control? For that, I would like to share another example on the dependency of happiness.
I got a dream job, for which I had been dreaming ever since my childhood and for which I had worked so hard to achieve, but the very next moment I heard that a close relative of mine has passed (God forbid); shall I remain in the same state of mind in which I was earlier? No, obviously not.
I know you would want to ask me a question, “How shall we shun the dependence on happiness?” Simple: the happiness is not in buying a new car, building a beautiful house, or getting a lucrative job with a fat salary. You need to teach your mind that all these things as requirements, not agents of happiness. As the car after the scratch is the same, it provides the same comfort, has the same comfortable seats, the same power windows, and other stuff, but a small scratch has changed the whole state of mind.
We need to understand that if we want to remain happy that we have no control over external agents or agencies; the cosmos doesn’t work under our guidance or plan; nature and the universe plan our activities, and we have no control over them, like the weather of tomorrow, whether it shall be sunny, cloudy, or rainy.
You might have watched or seen people from different places sitting in front of the television or reading the daily horoscope before going out and playing their day, event, occasion, or some other things related to their life. However, I would never say, tarot-cards, horoscope, numerology and astronomy is waste of time, as they are based on pure science and who so ever has studied it too shall be using that science for his client/clients to predict future.
Since I have studied extensively about palmistry and I do know how it works, as a layman, I shall try to make you understand:
Palmistry is based on pure science, but its traces can be found in Vedic science and ancient science. The ancient science has assigned the some signs to the lines on the hand: life lines, headlines, heart lines, destiny lines, and some mounts. These lines are fixed, and every palmist reads them accordingly; no palmist will call a head line a destiny line or a heart line a life line. That means this is based on probability and can be right or wrong. Imagine a soothsayer predicting your future, which turns out to be wrong. What will his answer be when you ask him the same question? He will tell you that, brother, his prediction was based on Vedic science, and it is not his fault as he has read the science of palmistry, which is based on probability and possibility?
So, when we go to a future-teller, we by our choice make our operating system (mind), which is more powerful than Vedic science of future-telling, inferior and pave the way to believe in disbelief, which otherwise doesn’t exist at all and is based on illusion, which the Romantic poet, S.T Coleridge calls “willing suspension of disbelief.”
Now the question is: how will we get rid of this belief system? It’s really simple; your operating system and faith are more powerful than any soothsayers saying; it’s you who create happiness or allow others to create happiness or sadness for you; for a soothsayer, he is like every next vendor or hawker who has opened his stall for his sales; that’s why Islam has rejected it and called it nothing but a phantom.
So the choice is yours now, and the ball is in your court.
(The author is a regular columnist for the RK. Email: [email protected]//)
