Lecture-3

Continuous Happiness and Prosperity – the Basic Human

Aspiration

By: Priya Jaidka

3.1 Desire – Continuous Happiness and Prosperity Verify whether you want to be happy or unhappy. Verify whether you want to be prosperous or deprived. See whether the basic aspiration in that desire is happiness and/or

prosperity.

Prosperous means “successful/ financially good” and deprived means “ to stay away from something/ to remove from something”

We can understand Happiness as:

“ to be in state of liking is happiness.” and “ the situation in which I live, if there is harmony in it, then I like to be in that state or situation”.

Verify whether you want continuity of happiness and prosperity or discontinuity of happiness and prosperity.

We can understand Unhappiness as:

“to be in state of disliking is unhappiness” and “the situation in which I live, if there is conflict in it, then I donot like to be in that state or situation”.

Prosperity: it is the feeling of having or making available more than required physical facilities. Two things are important in prosperity:

1. Correct assessment of need for physical facilities, and

2. The competence of making available more than required physical facilities.

We can be prosperous if there is a limit to the need for physical facilities. If there is no limit, whatsoever is the availability with us, the feeling of prosperity cannot be assured.

A person has a lot of money but does not want to share even a bit of it. It means that person has “wealth” but he does not feel “prosperous”

Wealth is a physical thing. It means having money or having a lot of physical facilities.

3.2 Prevailing notions of Happiness and Prosperity-A critical look on it In present scenario, physical facilities are not seen in terms of fulfilling

bodily needs but as a means of maximizing happiness. This has resulted in wrong assessment of wants for physical facilities as being unlimited. Neither can we hope to achieve continuous happiness nor can we have prosperity, as we try to fulfill unlimited wants through limited resources. This effort is creating problems to all the levels. Some of the results of this trend are given below:

At the level of individual/self: Depression, psychological disorders, suicides, stress, insecurity, diseases, loneliness etc.

At the level of family: Breaking of joint families, mistrust, conflict between elder and younger generations, insecurity of relationships, divorce, dowry problems, wasteful expenditure in family functions etc.

At the level of society: Growing terrorism, rising communalism, spreading casteism, ethnic struggle, wars between nations, fear of nuclear and genetic warfare, etc.

At the level of nature: Global warming, water, air, soil, noise etc. pollution, resource depletion of minerals and mineral oils, loss of fertility of soil, etc.