About human happiness
True Happiness and the feeling of happiness
(Translation from japan, from M. Yamagishi)
It`s stupid to live in a temprorary happiness (a feeling of happiness)
If weare looking back to the past thousands of years, till now, numerous heroes, wise and holy men appeared and by supreme effort, to bring about peace and happiness for the human beings, the ashaming sizuation of today continues.
It`s truely an instable society, a world full of mistakes. Unhappy and and uncontend people press each other hard. They distrust, envy and hate each other and fight against. Continous there are conflicts.
How many fools will end their days, working busy, to accumulate wealth and property, which soon vanishes in the air. How many fools will end their days, struggling against others for a high position, some time they have to give up. How many fools will end their days only because their livelyhood as a professor or to read sutrad with an empty mind, which they neither mean nor understand preaching from the pulpit.
People should be reigned by means of the people. How shall arise a good reign, when placed in the hands of statesmen, going to reach money and position. That are mostly wrong circumstances of living and by it, the stable happiness will be reached by no means,neither for us nor for the upcoming generation, whoare the renewal of our life. That is like to built a house on a decxayed reef or in a dried riverbed, which surely will be washed away, or it is the same to get intoxicated with morphium, opium or alcoholics for a short pleasure-trip.
Nowadays there are a lot of people who believe strong, happiness would be the sozial position or to live in high-class houses, all family members are sound, to have a lot of property and savings, to use others how they like it. However, they cannot be glad about calmly, because in the generation of their children or grandchilds may come the day, on which they in the contrary have to lament about and grieve for.
The word happiness is used in two kinds.
Without knowing that it will decay some time or accompanied by the fear, that it will be washed away. To believe firmly, the temporary feeling of happiness is happiness itself, it is only a passing happiness. You only mean to be happy. One call this "happinessfeeling".
Children of rich parents become poor to beggar, the economic growth changes or big landowner dilapidate to poor farmers, to an underpaid employee. Saved money changes into a bag of potatoes, brave generals with the golden glamour, brouht in their life in many struggles in the feeling, it is for my country, and high government officials, having the highest rank of the country, will be hang to death like a criminal and so on. If we think to the end of the kings, whose wealth and abundance and might become unstable, so, all has been the glamour of a momentary transient dream.
We love our children and even more our grandchilds, it`s the reason why our descendants are we, ourselfes. It comes from the social coherence and is anexpression of the instinctivly desire to live eternally. How intensivly we may grow now, if we think about, how it will be in the coming generations of our beloved aftercomings, can we be calm and satisfied and say , it is happiness or such a thing? All they are "happinessfeelings" for a short time, happiness of a dream, that will turn to grief if we wake up. should we think, it`s a done thing, because ever since then it is sayed: "happiness and unhappiness follow closely", "life seems a dream", "transient world", "vale of tears" and something like this? Is there no other way? Is this really the right shape of human living? Against this idea, we can answer with "no". Men surely is not so foolish.
We are able to catch the "true happiness", which will never change, so long as there are mankind lives.
The imperturbable, happy world, which is longing for by all human beings and which can be reached by all, will be realized. The true reason, she has`nt realized till today, is in giving up, in the half-heartedness and in the nescience and at it, that this problem, plenty reviewed, was abstract and there was no method, was fragmented, incomplete and from a low level. Essentially it is, why there are so many people, really not knowing, what is the decisive happiness. They dont want to know or they have a wrong kind of thinking. That is, why they do not know the real difference between true happiness and "happinessfeeling". Is`nt it a matter of fact, that so many people mix up true happiness and "happinessfeeling"?
There are so many people frome the "(happiness)-species of emotion"
One shall try to look at the faces of the people in the streets or in the train. Or if one tries to examine those, who dressed up to the nines and are proud, raceing with their luxury cars, or those, who are day by day in the news or in the newspapers, or examine wherefore they do something, do they really live in the awareness and knowledge, what is true happniess? Or if they earn their money hastily, those people, who have not solved fundamental questions, they are glad made a profit, or to be a personality and are saddened makeing a loss, who were friended till yesterday and now they stand against with sparkling eyes. Dear me, those are from the "species of emotion", those are from the "species of emotion" too. This status is so absurd and ridicouless, that one cannot look at. If one looks at the others or if I look to myself, the point is, always distinguish, if they or I myself am from the "species of emotion". Under the personalities, who have coloured the past and, too, under the merchants of today, building workers, farmers, statesmen, physicians and even priests, there are so many tricksters. A whole life full of lies and many mistakes, there are so many fools, who end their life, chaseing after a fugitive pleasure.
To believe hardly one could have achieve something, or that one do something for the world or somebody, or people, who are contend, because they believe, nobody is so happy like they, if one reseaches this carefully, than it will be questionable and one realizes, that it has been a mistake, it was nothing else as a passing, fading happiness, only a "happinessfeeling".
There is nothing more foolish, not really knowing the human life, not knowing oneself, not living the true way of life, indead, it`s a shame for the entire life.
There are remarkable many people, who are from the "feelingrace", who are remarkable pleased, to be elected to a representative or to a minister, or who arise against others proudly, if they become a proprietor of a business or accumulate a property. Even though next door deserving poors, weaks and sick people are weeping. To be only contend in the own house with healthiness, might and opulence, that is to graceless, it is like, if the cruel fate, that may come tomorrow in the own house, felicitates and celebrates. Even though the own husband, escaped from death, comes back from war, there are so many, who never come back. How one can be happy, where there are so many families, spending cheerless, lonesome days and nights?
One has to research carefully, what is on the bottom of the heart, if one is greeting with the words: "it`s all in a good cause, the taifun goes somewhere else, although others suffer from this misfortune.
Is it ok, if oneself is doing well? Is`nt is painful together? It seems, there are farmers, who feel better, when the cultivated rice of the neighboring land lay down. To be wrong, like, if one become happy oneself, if one see, that others fall into misfortune and things like that, that are confirmed habits of ths „feelingrace“.
In the same way, as one grieves, if somebody of the own flesh and blood trembling with sikness or frostiness arisen`t the request making a plan, that somehow, men of the whole world, getting away from the desaster?
As long as one does`nt reach this emotional state, in which one feel the pains of others as their own one and the own pleasure will be the pleasure of the others, the right, genuine, happy society never arrives. The hostility society is cold and in the world of the mutual robbery, one have to worry, that one day – if in the generation of our progenies - will be bereaved and in the world of killing each others, one has fear, to be retracted as a soldier, or that one get to a battleplace and will be killed.
With the hitherto and the common kind of thinking, many people mean, that one become happy, when there are a lot of goods, these lawful distributed and when one is safe and sound. But in this way, true happiness is far away. Even if you say, that it is rich with goods and even when they were distributed lawfully, the society of mutual hating and the hostile being in oposition to each other does`nt dissolve.
Since a long time, Religions and moralists preaching spiritual changements. They make the people whose possession is not enough, to be thankful, comparing with people, who are less wealthy. They make the people believing, that powerty- and disease-riddeness is an examination of god, or to be obsessed by a misfortune, is a divine relevation aso. They make people praying to god. They disorient uninformed people, it`s the same, that the true, happy society will not fulfill. The effective actual social situation confirms this.
If things, ,one do not understand, were declared with god, the paradise after death with Buddha, with distortion of words abstactions, which have no method or with citation and moralic arguments would grow the true utopia, it would be a unprecidented miracle. How intensive one tries to contradict, with the methods an argument of today, it was till now not possible to put it into practice.
Is`nt it, that we have to rise up just now, to practice keen selfcriticism and critical self reflection. Day by day we make a strong effort and working hard to cast out the fugitive and fading happiness, which sooner or later fades away like a dream, to wake up as soon as possible from the momentary foolness – to let inebriate from the transient feeling of happness – to capture the eternal, never changing happiness and to built up an peaceful World, which prospers forever? Must`nt we say, that exactly in this lays our true perspective of life, the reason, why we were born?
January 1955