So everybody wants to be happy.
Everybody wants feelings, adventure, excitement, passion, romance, satisfaction, love, feelings of joy, feelings of ecstasy, feelings of elation, excitement.
Am I starting to repeat some of these words? But we all want positive feelings.
I mean, how empty would life be if we didn’t have this kind of sense, the chance to have these feelings.
I mean, that’s where we can really experience being alive in a very visceral, tangible way.
You know, if we didn’t have that, it seems like life would be almost like this kind of logical exercise.
I mean, imagine if you were alive, and you had all your thinking ability, and yet you had no emotions.
It would just be like “Oh, you know, I can detect that I’m alive.” You know, maybe you could say it’s “interesting”.
I don’t even know if you could even find it interesting without having some kind of feelings.
I mean, even the idea of something being interesting is like it evokes some kind of feelings of fascination and wonder.
So it’s so natural and understandable to really want to have these good feelings, and to make that really a focus of our actions, you know, just simply we want to feel good.
So you know, that’s almost like the default way to act.
It’s a very reasonable way to act.
But it seems like there’s something limiting about doing that.
There’s something off about it if we try to pursue feelings, if we try to set our sights on feelings, because feelings are always something that comes and goes.
It’s always something that is in motion, in change.
It’s always like the sensation of a change.
There’s never a fixed feeling.
And whatever we feel now, we will feel something different before too long, and other feelings will arrive.
So if we select certain feelings and not others, then we’re always going to be fighting against that change.
Now maybe if we really just focused on feelings, but we were open to all of them, then that really makes things a lot more flexible and easier to work with, because you can say, well, you know, “I just want to feel life.” And then you can be OK with having the ups and the downs, as well as the boring medium of complete boredom.
You can have all of them.
And you know, you always know that feelings are going to change and new feelings will come in, so that may be a very easygoing and easy to please approach to life, that you simply say “I’m going to enjoy these feelings.
Whatever they come, good and bad feelings, I’m just going to enjoy all of them as part of a celebration of being alive.” But if we want some of the feelings and not the others, then we’re constantly fighting against the change in feelings.
We’re constantly fighting to hold on to some and move away from others.
And because of the fluidity of all the feelings, I mean, it’s like trying to build with water.
It’s like digging a hole in the water, or trying to push a wave uphill.
It’s just constantly trying to resist change and trying to force things that are very fluid into a specific configuration.
So that seems to be incomplete.
But what if, instead of trying to hold on to a particular feeling, trying to chase a particular feeling, to always move towards a particular feeling, instead we simply allowed any feeling that comes to be, not try to hold on to a particular feeling, but instead turn the focus towards personal transformation, personal change of ourselves.
Instead of focusing on what I feel, we can focus our efforts on “What will I become?” And then the idea that I like is that we can imagine becoming a feelings generator.
We can make ourselves into a generator for the feelings that we want.
So we still are chasing the good feeling, we still want the good feelings as a goal, but instead of directly chasing good feelings and then trying to push water uphill and resist all the change and trying to force this particular configuration of feelings, instead our efforts can go into making ourselves into something that generates these feelings.
If we live in a good way, it seems like this can generate good feelings.
And then we can then enjoy the feelings as a secondary result.
Rather than a direct result that we directly grab happiness, instead we change ourselves into the sort of person who generates happiness.
So I’d be curious to hear if this idea- you know, how might this actually be done? How can we become a happiness generator?
#happiness #generatehappiness #indirecthappiness