This is the 3rd part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1 and part 2 and then come back here. Let’s continue the discussion as promised, let’s talk about the really small pleasures that you experience in life.
For some time, let’s forget the placebo effect and focus on the state of mind. Let’s consider a situation where you are eating your favourite chocolate. It is a delightful experience, you are enjoying the chocolate. Is this a happiness? Yes. Would you say this kind of happiness has nothing to do with the state of mind? The type of happiness we talked about earlier was naturally very easy to relate with the state of mind, but this one is a bit difficult. You would say who thinks so much while eating a chocolate. We eat it, we enjoy it, and we forget about it. And yes, you are absolutely correct. But within the next few minutes, I will prove it to you that it is the state of mind and nothing else in this situation as well that makes you feel happy.
Let’s consider two scenarios, 1st, the scenario where you are eating the chocolate and this is your first chocolate, you enjoyed it, you experienced happiness. The second scenario, you are eating the same chocolate, but this is your 10th back to back. Would you feel the same pleasure that you felt while having the first chocolate? Is your state of mind while having the 1st chocolate and the 10th chocolate the same? No. Since your state of mind is different, you don’t feel happy while having the 10th chocolate. You might argue that eating 10 chocolates is also a situation not the state of mind, it is the situation that’s causing the unpleasant feeling and not the state of mind. To that I would say, let’s consider an imaginary scenario where a person eats 10 chocolates but his memory about eating the chocolate is wiped out after eating every chocolate, won’t he feel the same pleasure on the 10th chocolate as the 1st one?
The situation is still the same here, the person eating 10 chocolates, but since the situation is not affecting the state of mind, the same happiness can be experienced again and again. Can the situation influence the state of mind? Of course yes, but the state of mind is the sole decider of whether the person will be happy or not given a particular situation. But you would argue that this is an imaginary scenario, how can I base my arguments on something that isn’t even real? Then let me give you a real example. Will each and every person in the entire world agree that your favourite chocolate is the best chocolate in the world? No. Why? Because not every person in the world finds that chocolate as tasty as you find. Why so? Because every person has different tastes. Where are those tastes developed from? Their past experiences. What a person’s state of mind will be in a given situation is defined by his past experiences of similar situations. Their state of mind will define how they will react to the same situation of eating a chocolate.
Let me give you another example from my own life. I am Jain and I hate eating cucumber. Recently I was on a vacation in Sikkim and finding Jain food there was a really challenging task. They used to cook the same food everyday and I was really bored of it. So I was hungry, we were outside the hotel we were staying in and a lady was sitting there with a stall where she was selling a variety of fruits and vegetables. She used to slice those vegetables put chat masala and salt on it and sell it. I ate cucumber there and really liked it. Now the people who know me well know that I would never eat cucumber, I just hate the taste of it. But the state of mind I was in, I really enjoyed eating it. You would again argue that the situation led to this. I would counter that with this. Our mind is the reason we tend to overeat when the food is very tasty even when we are full and our mind is the reason we stay hungry even when we know we want more food but the food does not taste good. It is when we are very hungry, our mind says that this is the limit of staying hungry, that’s when we decide to eat something we don’t enjoy. The ultimate decider is our mind and not our stomach. I have seen people staying hungry for 30 days straight surviving just on boiled water in my religion. Whether it is correct to do so or not is a topic for another blog, but the ability to do so, where does it come from? It is solely the mind.
That, I feel is sufficient evidence to prove that even in really small pleasures we experience in life, it is the state of mind and solely the state of mind that decides whether we will be happy given the situation or not. The situation and our past experiences influence the state of mind we are in, but they cannot directly control what we feel whenever we experience that situation. This again relates to the previous blog where I described at length about how I was blaming the situation rather than improving myself.
Now, you would argue about the kinds of happiness that are overwhelming, the happiness of becoming a parent for example, can a person be sad in such a situation as well? These situations make you forget every sadness you have, they just fill you with immense pleasure, how can state of mind possibly stop a person from being happy in such situations? How can such happiness be dependent on the state of mind? To find the answer to that, stay tuned for the part 4 of this blog series. Hope you enjoyed this one, until then, Ta-Ta.