On the nature of happiness, misery, and peace.

PoorAt99

This topic has brought me more questions than answers, and I would very much appreciate the input of anyone else willing to share.

After much contemplation I have discovered, what I believe to be, a fundamental truth of the human experience. You cannot have true Peace or objectivity so long as Happiness and Misery exist in your life. I do not see peace as the balancing of happiness and misery, but the absence of both. I see peace and objectivity as one because for me to believe that I know something, but not objectively, causes great dissonance.

I believe that happiness and misery are tied so tightly together that they can be seen as one entity; two sides of the same coin or halves of a wavelength, in that both exist solely in contrast to the other and serve the same purpose within our Egos.

The ego, in this context, is the lens through which we view the objective world. It is the culmination of all that we have experienced, everything that we consider Me. This includes your opinions, fears, joys, desires, biases, purpose, passion, and even what is right or wrong.

For example: Imagine a building that you hold dear, say your childhood home or school, were to catch fire. Objectively, this is only particles shaking, timbers crumbling, and the opening of space on the street, but through our ego we see it as a tragic event. As a result of our attachment we see this as bad, it hurts, and we either give into that or desperately seek to find some optimistic way of viewing it.

I have decided to try and rid myself of my ego entirely, in hopes that I can see the world with true objectivity and experience peace.The cost for this is giving up all that I am and any notions of happiness in my future, though I am quite content with the decision. Initially I worried that this would mean losing everything that made me human, but I'm beginning to see that even what it is to be human is a construct of my ego. I simply want to be and learn, no more and no less.

I believe it to be possible through the means of simple observation. If I can see my bias/attachment and see how it distorts my view of existence, it removes itself.

I admit, it all seems very odd at first.

Thank you for reading this and please, if you find something that I have overlooked or that you would like to add/challenge, let me know.

CasKev

The Five Levels of Attachment deal with this nicely, I think, with respect to attachment to things, people, ideas, and even identity/ego. Zero attachment is difficult to achieve, because some of it is biologically driven (e.g. bond between parent and child). As much as you strive to artificially detach from the world and life, your biological needs will cause at least some discomfort, if not misery, and you will be giving up on many of the positives. Zero attachment with regard to identity/ego is likely achievable - once you are able to observe the attachment you've built up throughout your lifetime - but not necessarily desirable, with regard to the experience of pleasure and peace/contentment. The author suggests that there is a healthy level of attachment, where you view your life and identity more as a work of art, rather than a set of absolute beliefs and ideas. This allows you to form softer attachments that are more malleable and flowing, open to change. Accepting your human biological attachments and emotions will limit (or even eliminate, if you stop seeing grief and other 'negative' emotions as bad things, with all of the negative self-talk attached) the amount of suffering in your life.

Pfhorrest

↪PoorAt99

This all sounds very similar to Buddhism, which is all about how suffering stems from desire, so overcoming attachment is the way to peace.

Stoicism also has a lot in common with that.

PoorAt99

↪CasKev

Thank you, I will most certainly be looking into the Five Levels of Attachment, it sounds very much in tune with what I'm looking for. It's funny, I came to the conclusions that I did by relaxing and letting things come and go without effort but the way you worded this made it apparent that I'm trying to force these things to happen. I think I may have been approaching this in a counterproductive manner.

Do you have any insight as to how the ego/attachments play with optimism and pessimism? I have often worried that feeding one feeds the other and that a person could only make themselves miserable by trying to see positive in all events. When I see an optimist I feel they enjoy life more but when something hard enough comes along to break through it, they're beyond devastated. And as someone who had been lost in pessimism for many years, I handled tragedy and loss well but dulled myself from feeling any joy at all. They both seem like kinds of distortions to me, and I am curious to know if anyone has managed to balance the two(if they can be balanced, or if they're the same thing) as opposed to attempting to deny them entirely. I would still prefer to limit them as much as I can, but i believe that that will require the same type of control that a person would have to have to manage them.

PoorAt99

↪Pfhorrest

I've spent a lot of time studying stoicism in the past, but have only recently given any serious thought towards the Buddhist teachings. I would like to see how eastern and western philosophies tie together more. They have roots planted on opposite sides of the planet but seem to have so much in common. The more I look it seems that many on both sides have said the same things but in different ways and this baffles me because if they had never interacted at the time then it is all natural conclusion.

Possibility

Do you have any insight as to how the ego/attachments play with optimism and pessimism? I have often worried that feeding one feeds the other and that a person could only make themselves miserable by trying to see positive in all events. When I see an optimist I feel they enjoy life more but when something hard enough comes along to break through it, they're beyond devastated. And as someone who had been lost in pessimism for many years, I handled tragedy and loss well but dulled myself from feeling any joy at all. They both seem like kinds of distortions to me, and I am curious to know if anyone has managed to balance the two(if they can be balanced, or if they're the same thing) as opposed to attempting to deny them entirely. I would still prefer to limit them as much as I can, but i believe that that will require the same type of control that a person would have to have to manage them. — PoorAt99

I think it’s possible to experience both joy and loss without attachment. If you recognise joy as an experience of the fleeting present, then you don’t feel the need to hold onto it, but are instead open to experience the joy of the next moment, and the next, and so on. Likewise, if you recognise loss as an experience of attachment to a past experience of this fleeting present, then you realise that you are missing the joy of the next moment by looking for it in the past.

Gnomon

I do not see peace as the balancing of happiness and misery, but the absence of both. . . . I believe that happiness and misery are tied so tightly together that they can be seen as one entity; — PoorAt99

That's probably why you are unhappy. Your black & white belief makes happiness impossible. Philosophical optimism does not deny the duality of reality, but merely ignores the extremes of Good & Evil to focus on the attainable middle ground of OK. That's Aristotle's Golden Mean. Change your belief, change your attitude, change your mood.

If you are the driver of your car, steer for the middle of the road, not the ditches.

mask

The ego, in this context, is the lens through which we view the objective world. It is the culmination of all that we have experienced, everything that we consider Me. This includes your opinions, fears, joys, desires, biases, purpose, passion, and even what is right or wrong. — PoorAt99

I pretty much agree. We can sum this up as mask is lens. What I experience is --without my consent and beyond my control --first filtered through my 'ego,' which includes who I pretend to be for mirror or my ideal self-image (my 'mask').

When it comes to others, it's easy to see bias. And so we can distinguish between what's really going on and the distorted version that the other mistakenly takes (mis-takes) for the situation. As we mature, we also (hopefully) evolve our vision of the world so that we can see our own past self as biased in the same way. We develop a healthy suspicion of our own current understanding. We can postulate the filter mentioned in the first paragraph. 'I, too, am wishful thinking, distorted by hope and fear.'

As a result of our attachment we see this as bad, it hurts, and we either give into that or desperately seek to find some optimistic way of viewing it. — PoorAt99

But whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, evill; And of his contempt, Vile, and Inconsiderable. For these words of Good, evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so.
...
The names of such things as affect us, that is, which please, and displease us, because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at all times, are in the common discourses of men, of Inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signifie our conceptions; and all our affections are but conceptions; when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoyd different naming of them. For though the nature of that we conceive, be the same; yet the diversity of our reception of it, in respect of different constitutions of body, and prejudices of opinion, gives everything a tincture of our different passions. And therefore in reasoning, a man bust take heed of words; which besides the signification of what we imagine of their nature, disposition, and interest of the speaker; such as are the names of Vertues, and Vices; For one man calleth Wisdome, what another calleth Feare; and one Cruelty, what another Justice; one Prodigality, what another Magnanimity; one Gravity, what another Stupidity, &c. And therefore such names can never be true grounds of any ratiocination. No more can Metaphors, and Tropes of speech: but these are less dangerous, because they profess their inconstancy; which the other do not. — Hobbes

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm

I have decided to try and rid myself of my ego entirely, in hopes that I can see the world with true objectivity and experience peace.The cost for this is giving up all that I am and any notions of happiness in my future, though I am quite content with the decision. Initially I worried that this would mean losing everything that made me human, but I'm beginning to see that even what it is to be human is a construct of my ego. I simply want to be and learn, no more and no less. — PoorAt99

This reminds me of Schopenhauer. Becoming a kind of still lake that mirrors reality correctly via its passivity is a classic theme. But pointing that out doesn't subtract from the interest of the project. In my own way, I'm on the same page. For me the petty person has to continually die in order to make a colder more accurate knowledge possible. We learn to take the impersonal personally. To me this is still a mask, but it's the mask that strives beyond all idiosyncrasy (the transparent mask, the well-ground lens that lets the truth come through unmolested --or at least molested in a universally human and rational way.)

mask

After much contemplation I have discovered, what I believe to be, a fundamental truth of the human experience. You cannot have true Peace or objectivity so long as Happiness and Misery exist in your life. I do not see peace as the balancing of happiness and misery, but the absence of both. I see peace and objectivity as one because for me to believe that I know something, but not objectively, causes great dissonance. — PoorAt99

if you find something that I have overlooked or that you would like to add/challenge, let me know. — PoorAt99

What I'd politely challenge is the implicit identification of virtue with objective knowledge. Why should not knowing objectively be so painful, cause such dissonance?

Continual Successe in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call FELICITY; I mean the Felicity of this life. For there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense.
...
No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute knowledge of Fact, past, or to come. For, as for the knowledge of Fact, it is originally, Sense; and ever after, Memory. And for the knowledge of consequence, which I have said before is called Science, it is not Absolute, but Conditionall. No man can know by Discourse, that this, or that, is, has been, or will be; which is to know absolutely: but onely, that if This be, That is; if This has been, That has been; if This shall be, That shall be: which is to know conditionally; and that not the consequence of one thing to another; but of one name of a thing, to another name of the same thing.
...
Anxiety for the future time, disposeth men to enquire into the causes of things: because the knowledge of them, maketh men the better able to order the present to their best advantage. — Hobbes

As mortal, flesh-and-blood beings, we are thrown into our animal appetites. And into the more abstract appetite for knowledge and transcendence through knowledge. Objectivity seems valuable first as just a prudent theory of causes that allows us to thrive as social animals in the world. But the spiritualization of objectivity is like a flight from individual mortality into the relative immortality of a shared cultural heritage, the mind of the species being. As we lose our faith in God, 'He' gets transformed into Knowledge that's not just knowledge.

IMO it's the especially thoughtful people who suffer and react to this situation:

For being assured that there be causes of all things that have arrived hitherto, or shall arrive hereafter; it is impossible for a man, who continually endeavoureth to secure himselfe against the evill he feares, and procure the good he desireth, not to be in a perpetuall solicitude of the time to come; So that every man, especially those that are over provident, are in an estate like to that of Prometheus. For as Prometheus, (which interpreted, is, The Prudent Man,) was bound to the hill Caucasus, a place of large prospect, where, an Eagle feeding on his liver, devoured in the day, as much as was repayred in the night: So that man, which looks too far before him, in the care of future time, hath his heart all the day long, gnawed on by feare of death, poverty, or other calamity; and has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep. — Hobbes

So these thoughtful people create spiritual traditions that help them learn how to die (or learn how to live with a future that can only be disaster for the mortal individual.)

A Seagull

↪PoorAt99

for me to believe that I know something but not objectively causes great dissonance.

What makes you think you know anything at all 'objectively'?

Isn't it just your ego coming to the fore to think that you do?

In any case, why does it cause you 'dissonance'? Isn't it just a part of the human condition?

CasKev

↪PoorAt99

I don't see a need for optimism or pessimism, as both seem to be rooted in ego and attachment. Neither lens changes reality. Replace those ideas with acceptance, and willingness to change, and I think you will find you suffer far less, no matter what the stimulus or event.

Qwex

Ever heard of the face of suffering?

Without any strength regarding such subjects, you will be on the wrong side of this face.

A Seagull

Without happiness and misery there is no life. Peace is non-life, ie death.

On the nature of happiness, misery, and peace.

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