Happiness, Soul Mates, and Karma
7-31-00
Happiness:
I said awhile ago that "happiness is almost always beautiful." What kind of stupid remark is that? Of course it's always beautiful. True happiness, anyways. True happiness is like true love or true beauty: infinite and indescribable. Being indescribable, these three things are actually pure, perfect, and unified. Thus love is happiness is beauty, and every other combination (for more variation, throw in Truth, God, and anything else you see as being infinite and perfect).
The problem is that so many people confuse temporary pleasure with real happiness. There is a major difference between the two. Namely, anything temporary is by its very nature finite, whereas true happiness is not bounded. I once discussed this, interestingly enough, on the way to a band competition last year. Pleasure without happiness was likened to casual or gratuitous sexual activity, which can have a very negative long-term effect on somebody.
Happiness without immediate pleasure (except for a small, sick segment of society which I'm sure exists nonetheless) was likened to holding back your girlfriend's hair as she throws up in the toilet. While perhaps not the best possible illustration, the unpleasantness of anything related to vomit drives the point home. While the experience may be very unpleasant, the act of helping a loved one through a problem leads to happiness, at least within the relationship itself.
Like I said, I'm sure there are plenty of other examples that would illustrate the idea without driving the lack of immediate pleasure home quite so strongly. However, I don't think any of these examples are needed in this case. The point is that happiness is different from pleasure, and true happiness is as beautiful as true love or Truth itself.
Soul-Mates:
Now, for the issue of soul-mates. More specifically, the idea that there is a person for each of us who can make us happy. This is connected with the thing on happiness because my friend said such a person exists, and that it's beautiful when he or she is found, just before I said the comment about happiness "almost always" being beautiful. Personally, though, I'm a bit skeptical about this idea of soulmates, at least as far as a one-to-one pairing of every human being goes.
I don't think humanity can really be divided up into separate individuals, so why should it be divided into pairs of individuals. While I'm sure each of us does have somebody who can make us happy (as my friend no doubt discovered, prompting her aforementioned statement), I think it's by no means limited to only that one person. We're all connected, so one person's influence on our happiness may be given more credit than it deserves, given the influence on both people by everybody else they have ever known.
Often, the idea of soulmates is linked with reincarnation, in that people are together in several past lives, so they're meant for each other in this life. I think each of us is the Universe as seen from our particular vantage point (the karmic viewpoint, if you will). Therefore, some of us are going to have vantage points closer to certain people's than we have to others'. This proximity of vantage points is related to having similar karma (or, more accurately, is another explanation for similarities in who we are). Thus, people who have similar karma may manifest this similarity in memories that appear to be from previous lifetimes in which they were together (such memories are often recovered through regression hypnosis). Such people may get along in this life than either will with other people, but while it is possible that one person is closer to us than anybody else (karmically speaking), few people have only one possible soulmate.
Certain aspects of the present involve records related to what we call this lifetime, and, for some people at least, certain aspects relate to what we call previous lifetimes. Either way, it's still just what we have in this present moment. Reincarnation, then, is not so much an explainable process through which we accumulate karma, but part of the explanation itself for such karma.
Karma:
Karma, in a nutshell, basically involves absolutely everything about a person. Memories of the "past" and guesses about the "future" are all results of our particular karmic viewpoint of the entire universe. Thus, karma ensures our individual uniqueness, and therefore would dissolve along with all other concepts when we lose the notion of self and achieve enlightenment, at which point we become One with God, or Truth/Mind/Reality/whatever.
I suppose I should then have said the karmic viewpoint is what determines everythign about us, and karma is what determines the viewpoint itself. Attempts to explain karma in more depth always rely on concepts about the past and the future, including past lives linked together through a cycle of death and rebirth. But the "past" is purely a result of our memories, and the "future" is extrapolation based on patterns within those memories. Therefore, it can be said that the memories we presently have determine our past and future, which determine our karma, which determines our unique viewpoint, which in turn determines the very memories we're basing all the rest of this on to begin with.
Trying to explain karma, the past, the future, memories, dreams, and so on will ultimately give rise to just this kind of closed loop of reasoning containing all these concepts, from which no progress can be made. Getting rid of the loop altogether, then, is the only way more progress can be made from this point. The immediate next step in such a progression is enlightenment itself, because breaking any one of the links in this circle will dissolve the whole thing along with out notions about self and permanence.
Thus, the way to achieve enlightenment is to not bother with memories of the past, anticipation of the future, or concepts of karmic law and viewpoint, and to reside only in the present moment. Not what we think is the present, mind you, because that is largely based on more recent memories of circumstances we still hold to be true. Instead, we must focus on our actual state of mind itself. Other people or places, if their situations can only be explained through extrapolations from our current state of mind, are not important. We can only free ourselves from suffering by being fully aware of this moment. Everything we are is contained within this moment, as is everything we can become.