Happiness & Chaos

Is happiness just one more future of an illusion?

From the premise of desire as an instinct, what conversation can we study about the existence of happiness?  If I am right about happiness, I ought to abandon its possibility and concentrate instead on how to make up for the lack of divinity, authority, and tradition that western culture tells me is my inheritance.

In large part, it seems that most of us are avoiding chaos, to the best of our abilities.  This avoidance may give clues as to the possible inconsistencies of sanity.  In this manner, we are avoiding what we do not like and this becomes our royal road to the semblances of goodwill. Happiness and sanity are scientific cousins of some sort. Both involve enough serenity, calmness to allow for the luxury of calculations on our way to naked pleasures.

Robinson Jeffers, an American poet, and stone-house builder attempted to leave a legacy to himself and to mankind in his search for happiness and other question of human significance.  He left us, Roan Stallion, and a house created of granite on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.  He had a passion and spent a life delivering on his wish. Happiness, whenever it is available, requires of us a form of deliberate intent.  Jeffers was most worried about man’s inhumanity to man, a complete breakdown of sanity.

We are most insane when we lack the ability to create a vision of pleasure.  With no object of desire sparkling the way forward by dangling shiny keys, we tend to meander into a kind of stew of chaos. 

The pathways are contaminated by overuse.  Stillness and solitude are what we need but the ego cries to survive not as captain of our ship, but for its own survival.  I am reminded of Hal who was charged with protecting the space mission, this AI man-made creature of technology, interrupted his programming to claim all the power.

Chaos is the fear of inevitably swimming in a dark sea of unknowing.  Chaos is a clue to the missing something.  It is a state in which getting anything done seems impossible.  Our mind seems to not be working with our brain. The mind is adrift as a cloud and the brain is bio-chemically under siege.

We feed, we digest, and we eliminate.  This and only this is the real plan.  It is not our plan, it is even unfair to call it a plan at all.  It is a destiny that is complicated by self-awareness, and it may well be more of a conclusion than it is a plan.  

We invest so much in the hope that things will get better.  We are really only entitled to life as it is, life on its own terms.  Like the great cathedrals of yesterday, our civilization will decay in some form and may or may not evolve in some other form.  History does not predict.  It informs us but it does not command anything.  Granite structures will decay in time, as we digest, so will we be digested.  In the long run, we take our place covered in the dirt of our ancestors as we become the agricultural playground for the seeds of our children.

In the midst of this life which we know will end, we aim to enlarge our lives often at the expense of our basic simplicity.  In so doing we fail our child by surcumming to major distractions. This over-reach promotes chaos  

When the mission is hidden by an impulse to accumulate wealth or knowledge we can be consumed by our project. Because in the end, it is the same for everyone.  There is time,  then there is eternal timelessness.  We are aware of one but not the latter.  

The simpleton and the genius each suffer in their own way.  We have not discovered the elixir that will take away the trouble of death.  We all suffer the consequences of ending life. 

It is with this backdrop that people enter into an analysis, an analysis that may be little more than a consultation or as deeply intense as an intimate relationship. 

One never enters long-term treatment. An analysis that continues to be useful can become a long-term analysis.