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Dalai Lama and his thoughts on happiness

Das Buch der Menschlichkeit

Ethics for the new millennium

{my own translation from my Czech original}

Dalai Lama writes in his book about his travelling through different countries and about his feeling that everywhere people try to reach the feeling of happiness. He says he thought that people in developed countries would be happier due to higher level of technical equipment which preserves those people from hard work, which even nowadays must be carried out by people in less developed countries. To his surprise he finds out that it is not so and comes to the conclusion that here must be something inside of us what makes us unhappy and striving for happiness.

Dalai Lama has also noticed that in those less developed countries which have set up on their way to economic development, people have the same problems as people already living in developed countries. Above all they try to get products as TV, VCR, PC, and car and so on. On having got them, they immediately try to strive for another product. Spite that they are not happy, only suffer from stress of striving for new products.

I am not quite sure but I would suggest that the following idea might at least partially explain this kind of human behaviour.

People like other species live in groups, and it makes no difference what we call them, be it herd or a collective, the meaning being always the same. Each individual in a group when encountering a colleague wants to know who the other being is. Dogs have an introducing ritual based ob sniffling on the odours between the back legs and recognizing who is the leader and who is the subordinate.

In people this happens in a bit different way. People recognize their relative position to the encountered person according to the status symbols, such as cars e.g.

Here, several different ideas come together. First, it is really easy to recognize a new car from an old one, or an expensive car from a cheap one, and according to that, then, make assessments about its owner. Second, assessing a person by his or her property, by some kind of a thing, is actually a topic for semiotics, a science about signs. New and large car signalizes, is a sign for a lot of money, and a lot of money is a sign for success in competition. And third, competition, it is a part of our life; we compete with somebody on daily basis, be it winning the favour of the beloved person, or of the boss, the neighbour or the teacher etc.

This drive for competition originates, as I would assume, from sexuality, from looking for the right partner. First I thought only males did compete among themselves for a female, but, even females do compete among themselves for a male, in their own way. The one among males, who wins some kind of competition, will be admired and most probably will be “allowed” to have successors with her. Females do compete among themselves for the favour of male who is relatively in high position in the hierarchy of their group. His position guarantees the female money enough for trouble-free upbringing of her child.

The winner in a human group is rewarded in a way, will get a princess as a wife and a half the kingdom, or just enough money, or a function equipped wit power, or some other reward. The fact of being rewarded starts up the production of chemicals in our brain, which cause pleasant feelings.

Sex as a reward functions too, male is being rewarded by female using sex, for his attempts, for his winning etc. We are constantly under the pressure of competition and wish for being rewarded. I think that I have noticed well that this rewarding and competing can acquire most different forms, one of them being the amount of property and money.

Dogs recognize their relative position to each other, so even people do recognize that by signs, by property. The next possible reason for property accumulation might be upmanship by presenting one’s own property.

Human com petition and rivalry plus presenting acquired property might be a base for the feel of stress and for being forced to strive for further happiness. And this might most probably be what Dalai Lama sees as common to all people, regardless country of origin, regardless religion etc. We, people, have most probably forced this kind of behaviour upon ourselves.

As one known author puts that, we are really a specific kind of animals, the one which domesticates itself. We bring up ourselves and we have been doing so for long millennia or maybe for several hundreds of thousands of years, and therefore some of our habits are firmly burned into our brains, they only differ in their forms, depending on time, place and culture.

As soon as we recognize culture as momentum according to which the forms of our way of performing our habits , we come close to memetics, as one of the aspects of a meme is that it is a cultural information which might be reproduced, copied and which are stored and multiplied in the heads of humans.

Here we can see that when dealing with humans and their displayed forms of behaviour we come inevitably to sciences like memetics, semiotics, linguistics and further sciences. We can then say that looking for human happiness is in fact a memetic and semiotic form of displaying several thousand years old domestication of humans, his competitivity, his rivalry and his behaviour under given cultural conditions.