Ultimate happiness. Think it can be achieved? If yes, how would you describe it?Mystery*
Buddha believed in ultimate happiness. He believed that to find Nirvana you must free yourself from desire. This is rubbish of course. To quote the great philosopher Will Young, losing desire means you ‘lose the highs to be spared the lows.’ 
As such all that can truly be experienced is an ultimate state of ‘meh.’ Besides, based on his depictions, Buddha was a fat, jolly man and a thin, serious one, making him a schizophrenic and about as trustworthy as Fox News.
You yourself are proof that ultimate happiness is impossible. Your smiles last for only a moment, normally a reaction to something good, such as a funny joke, or a brilliant Guru blog. However this state of ‘good’ lasts only a small amount of time. If it didn’t, each subsequent thing would have to be better than the last in order for us to feel as good about it, until the world became one happy, bouncy ball of bunnies and page three models. At which point there would be nothing to strive for. Everything would be good. And we would all be bored. With nothing to make us feel bad we would have no reason to feel good at all. And as a loud noise eventually fades into the background, so our good feelings would become dull and invisible. Plus, everyone would be smiling all the time which would just be disturbing.
Finally, it is impossible to define the Ultimate anything; one man’s trash is another man’s Blue Peter Model; ultimate happiness means different things to everyone: one person becoming happy would mean another could not. For example, my wife’s way of finding happiness is to nag me, where as mine is to hide on the top of my pole, listening to my iPod and pulling the ladder up behind me. The two are mutually exclusive, and it would be the same for everyone else. At most only 50% of the world could be happy at any one time; we would have to take it in turns and be happy every other week. And this would be far from anyone's idea of ultimate happiness, unless, of course, they were a little bit Buddha.
Hope this helps
6 Comments:
Happiness is a shallow thing to strive for. As you say, it's just a fleeting caress of the nipple. Seek the peace of the void, occasionally to be filled by the chirping of your wife. Man, you gotta let that nagging wash through your skin and tingle your bones.
i think that happiness is a moving target. maybe we should all be striving for is 'contentment'.
Mr Bananas - Oh! Is that what that is? I thought I was having a stroke.
Milk - Like the feeling I get when I pull on Second Life?
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Happiness is a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment
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