Holy Happiness Movement
What does everyone want? Surely to be happy would cover everybody. Or you could say to be satisfied which is much the same thing. Discounting fringe folks who have a sadistic bent, what would it take for the rest of us?
Easiest are the people who can just decide to be happy — people who have an understanding that they are at choice and that suffering is optional. We can peel a bunch off with that.
What’s in the way for the rest of us? The most primary answer is the past and the future — it’s regrets and fears that consume us. With the remedy being to stay in the present, there are whole schools and spiritual traditions going back thousands of years that embrace that idea. That takes care of a lot more people.
What else? Obviously, food, shelter, health care, basic survival needs are primary issues where happiness isn’t the immediate goal, but for those who have survival handled what blocks their happiness? Psychiatrist David Viscott used to let patients come back once or twice after his assessment of their situation when he sent them out with instructions for overcoming their difficulty. That was the decide-to-be-happy cadre. For others, to jar them loose from unhappiness attachments, a good psychedelic trip is a prescription we know about for release of obstacles to being happy. A bunch more people could shift their base from that.
But here’s a new idea — everyone being in a group to review obstacles that come up and to help each other transcend them. Everyone wanting to be happy and willing to help each other succeed, meeting weekly in groups of eight, could be a new model that’s better than the couch where you can spend forever wallowing in your misery. If I ruled the world I’d get everyone in a Holy Happiness group!
I picture this report: “We agonized forever with our angst until the Holy Happiness movement, and our honesty with each other was all we needed to wake up and smell the flowers. The Nobel Peace Prize that the originators got was well-deserved for this simple movement of Holy Happiness groups giving humanity a positive, turned-on base from which to operate.”
For an inspirational visual, may we get to where this sort of reaction — here it’s to getting Novak Djokovic’s tennis request — could be a commonplace half-a-minute in everyone’s life.