The pursuit of happiness

Image courtesy: lynndove.wordpress.com

(This post is not related to any of the epics directly..)

Why do we do what we do in life? Why do we go to work, have kids, go to the park for a walk, or study hard? While all these activities may have some intermediate benefits, the ultimate goal of all humans is happiness. There is not one thing that we do that is not in some way aimed at making us happier.

Let's of course leave cases such as masochism out of the picture for now, even though they can be explained without much trouble.

Just one Mahabharata reference related to 'happiness'. Kunti prays to Krishna (not sure when in the Mahabharata) to give her constant sorrow, because she believes that only when in sorrow do we tend to think about God. When happy, we may of course praise God, but the tendency is to tie that momentary happiness to our own accomplishment or activity - "I worked hard and got my bonus", for example. Mere mortals like us would, of course, never pray to God to deal us a tough hand. So, was Kunti an idiot?

As I write these lines, I feel like this post is going to be long winding, but I'll try to keep this concise.


Rebirth. To begin with, we must agree that our lives and transit through the material world necessarily involves a cycle of birth and death. That is, our present lives are not the first and last. I have a simple way of explaining why this must be the case. We all have a sense of natural justice, and even if a human grows up without seeing any other human (eliminate bias and influence), that sense of natural justice is going to prevail. For example, this 'lone' human is not going to kill indiscriminately because something might tell him that that is incorrect. Even when we know that some form of natural justice pervades the world we inhabit, we see injustice all around us. I am not talking about 'local' events here, but the 'full lifecycle'. That is to say, some criminals lead perfectly happy and affluent lives, while some honest hardworking people face nothing but misery. There's of course a continuum between these two extremes. So, if justice didn't prevail in this birth for some people, there must be at least one rebirth and a better model yet, a birth-death cycle that would account for all their good and bad activities. How the 'accounting' takes place is a longer discussion of course, with many schools of thought explaining how good/bad and heaven/hell work.    

Rebirth, of course, is a very difficult concept for us to imagine or accept. If I am going to be born again, am I going to have a different father and mother, a different spouse, different children, and am I going not going to be rich? Let me life the life I have now as well as I can, why should I worry about a rebirth or plan for it in any way? Who is going to count my bad deeds and punish me? I can explain why I cheated on my wife, etc. As a result, much of our pursuit of happiness is short-sighted. Most of us never give any thought to much beyond a good living in this life, and in many cases it is instant and other forms of gratification that we crave. However, the moment we acknowledge that some form of natural justice exists (whether or not we accept the existence of a supreme being) we should ideally start thinking beyond our current lives, and how things might work outside of our limits of knowledge.

Now, back to Kunti (and whether she was an idiot).
All the happiness we experience in life, whether momentary (like eating an ice cream) or extended (like romance) are very materialistic or physical in nature. Still, these 'happy' states are not impenetrable. You can eat one extra cone of ice cream and regret it because it numbed you, or hurt yourself while on a beach with your loved one. The human mind, of course, is accustomed to assuming that the current happiness will never go away, and we make that mistake over and over again.

Sure, everyone knows that life has its ups and downs, etc. based on experience, but most of us want to just put up with this (not knowing a way out), while secretly wanting eternal happiness.

Kunti prays to Krishna to give her constant sorrow because while the sorrow may be physical and material, if she can hold Him in her thoughts, that will be happiness and bliss (that is of a non-material kind). She rightly realizes that the only way to sail through both the ups and downs is to hold God in her thoughts. For, no other source can comfort one through sorrow. Even in times when we might consider ourselves happy (when we've received a raise at work, for example) news that a colleague received a larger raise will tell us that we weren't really 'happy' in the true sense of what we want in the 'happy' state. We ideally want happiness that is uninterruptible, and that state cannot be material or physical in any way.

So, no, Kunti was most definitely not an idiot. If God did grant her constant sorrow and sped her material and physical experiences, may be she would not have to go through a multitude of rebirths. When unaware of how many lives we may have lived already, this doesn't seem like a big deal to us, but once we do realize it, the feeling is not unlike doing the same exact thing at work every day for years and years together. Nobody wants that, and an escape is what we would crave. That is exactly what Kunti must have been shooting for - the concentrated experience that will get her through the material world as quickly as possible. And, of course, the non-material world would mean heaven and uninterrupted happiness for the good.