Happiness

At college someone once commented that the moment you realised you were happy the happiness started to fade. Certainly the happinest times for me have been the ones where I was not even aware I was happy. It is often/always in retrospect.

Following the Dao argument this makes perfect sense. If one was always "happy" one would never comment upon it, or never have reason to think "oh I'm happy". To become aware that one is happy is to compare it with an experience of unhappiness. So we may have been miserable and now when we remember we were miserable we realise we are no longer miserable so we realise we are happy. Likewise when we end a period of happiness and start to become unhappy - like when a party is ending - we realise that we have been very happy.

This seems to be the pattern that the cost of experiencing ourselves as an object is to become other than ourselves. When we look at someone else we can comment upon them because we are not them. But to do the same for ourselves is to reject ourselves, and take the perspective of someone else - it is always thus "inauthentic". To be truly ourselves is to be subject and to have no object. Self is empty. To have a relationship with another is to realise that they are truly subject and not object also. We should have no opinion about another that we "love" or have an authentic relationship with since the essence of that relationship is nothing. This is why I believe that sexual relationships can never be authentic... altho I do try to resolve this issue.

Being truly social as argued before is not something that can be measured. To think "I am sociable" or "I am loved" etc is to impose upon oneself the label of another person. We are alienating ourselves from ourselves. This is the danger of "society". True society has no form it is based within what is called morality - it is being Good. If you are Good, you are sociable by definition. If you are bad it does not matter how many friends you have, or how good your parties are, or how often you are out at night - you are a fake and all this is fake.

Thus seeking happiness and society are two more fake keys to Life. Pursue these and we become fakes; mere shadows and puppets of the real people we are underneath.