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Balance
Happiness vs Sadness

Balance

Sornn
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Posted 10/30/06 - 12:22 AM: Subject: Balance	#1
True Balance Many will say that the meaning of life is happiness. That finding what we prefer, what makes up happy, and what works best is the way to live. That is a popular belief. Another popular belief is that for everything that goes up, something comes down therefore balance is inevitable. In this case, to be happy, do you have to be sad? I would think that, to find something you like, you would have to eliminate the things you don’t like. You are given two objects, one makes you happy and the other makes you sad. You have experienced both paths so now you are capable of making a decision. Would this then mean that… to experience true happiness, to be completely happy with your life, you would have had to experience complete sadness? Would you say that… in order to value what you have, you had to have lost something equal or greater to the amount that you have? I am lead to think so. You cannot see how far the fall down is until you’ve been to the top. Vice versa too, no? You can’t be sad until you’ve been happy. All this leads to my other question… where did it all begin? Somewhere, you would have had to experience a loss or a gain. That experience, since the second it happened, whenever it happened, has been able to be a base for all the upcoming experiences. Would this mean that… people who have, since the start, experienced bigger feelings of happiness/sadness, have a wider zone of emotions? They have gone the extra yard, and they know how much worse it gets, which can only mean they know how much better it can be too, no? Of course many things could alter when jumping from one emotion to another, but when you start with wider possibilities, you have a bigger chance to excel further. This is what I am led to think. To feel truly happy, to be blissful… you have to feel truly sad. Be in Agony. And if this is the case, why are we all misled to only seeking happiness? Could our solution be to march into the other direction? Sometimes the best solution is the worst.

Dusty
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Posted 10/30/06 - 05:45 AM:	#2
I have heard a quote that helps to sum up the main idea you are working with here. "Before you can see heaven you must see hell". I believe this could be true, if not for all then to many. People like comparing things and to judge the value of a worthwhile experience you would measure it up against one that is not so good.

sensabile
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1 of 1 people found this post helpful Posted 10/30/06 - 07:46 AM:	#3
Sornn wrote: I am lead to think so. I think you're being a little hard on yourself here but self-criticism is healthy. My criticism: people can have mixed feelings about something, therefore (some, if not all) feelings must be independent of each other; therefore, happiness and sadness needn't be considered opposites on a scale, so to speak. Also, your argument can be turned on its head--due to its probably dependence on relativity--that to know great sadness we must first know great happiness.
For the winner there was a big three-legged cauldron to stand over a fire - it was worth a dozen oxen by the Greek's reckoning - and for the loser he brought forward a woman thoroughly trained in domestic work whom they valued at four oxen. -Homer's The Illiad Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? -Mark 9:50

Sornn
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Posted 10/30/06 - 12:21 PM:	#4
sensabile wrote: Also, your argument can be turned on its head--due to its probably dependence on relativity--that to know great sadness we must first know great happiness. Yeah, this subject is very very relative. I was putting a hypothetical situation to help put down my thoughts. I had mentioned the above though, "You cannot see how far the fall down is until you’ve been to the top. Vice versa too, no? You can’t be sad until you’ve been happy." This is why, since one can't live without the other, I wonder how and where we first kicked off. Where did our first emotion come? And how could it have come without the aid of the other? Could we of felt... happy and sad at the same time, and that it was the base to the stretch of our emotions? I would agree with you when you say that feelings must be independant of each other, and therefore happiness and sadness shouldn't always be considered opposites. In your opinion though, would you think that we must stride in all directions to feel the pull of a certain direction? Or is having one over the other enough to fully understand the length of this certain one?

osibe
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Posted 10/30/06 - 12:33 PM:	#5
Pleasure and pain (outside of emotions) are purely physical, they are not inter-dependant. I can have pleasure without any reference to pain, it is not that somehow the pain is within the pleasure, or that I remember past pain and activetly relate it, or even that pleasure is just the absence of pain. Once these pleasurable or painful experiences are had and then remembered we then place emotions (how we interpret such physical experiences) over them, this is usually done without a second thought, or even that ability of questioning. From here we relate the "level" of such emotions and tie them to our physical sensations this is an illusion though. Is it really "worth" it to have a greater appreciation of said emotions, I would say no. Ignorance ultimately is bliss, we only have this skewed viewpoint because of what we are forced to know and "realize." I believe the viewpoint that pain or suffering is necessary in life is just an apologist's viewpoint, it is a rationalization of the supposed "human condition." To justify the worst parts of life and attempt to compute some "benefit" from them. There is no human nature or human condition, these are just constructs of what we accept as true and the common sentiment within societies/ human interaction. They are not concrete or absolute. Edited by osibe on 10/30/06 - 12:37 PM
"Live everyday like it's your first"

Sornn
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Posted 10/30/06 - 01:03 PM:	#6
Osibe, thank you for your reply! You beleive that you havto feel pain or pleasure in order to have emotions then? Seing as we feel something and then place emotions over them, would we need to feel something for the first time in our life to be able to put an emotion onto it? I remember hearing that babies have no active nerve system while in the womb(even shortly after being delivered), that or, not very sensible ones. Can a baby not cry then?

osibe
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Posted 10/30/06 - 02:55 PM:	#7
Yea that is the thing, either our minds are constructed with specific a priori characteristics: meaning that a baby would not need to have experiences and memories in order to feel things (both physical and emotional). Or humans are born as a tabula rasa (blank slate) and it is experience, and experience only that grounds their consciousness to existence. And that their genes are merely the potentials revealed through further experience. Personally I believe a little bit of both, though I think emotions are not inherent, they are grounded in our personal relationship with the world and what we "value." What we value is often heavily influenced with how we were raised and the specific society around us. But also experience is the only possible way we con conceive of such a thing as consciousness, let alone a "pre-reflective" state. I think it is impossible for a being to be just a consciousness with zero relation to an outside world, no memories or anything. To be "conscious" you need to be conscious -Of- something. Babies are always conscious of something it seems, though they are not inherently conscious -of- consciousness, it takes a couple months for babies to recognize their own reflection. This is a very odd state, it seems that babies only react to external stimuli and do not know themselves, that they have no subject that we would call "I" in any sense of the word. So its a little bit of both, not completely a priori and not completely ontological or based on experience. We are born into consciousness that is able to create experience but lacks any self-recognition, or the ability to acknowledge consciousness. It is only later when our memory allows us to become fully aware. In my view, babies do experience physical things (like pleasure and pain) but it is not that they are conscious of these experiences and thus are not "in emotion," I equate it to lower animals in a way. Animals (and babies) display reactions to physical stimuli that could be labeled as "emotions" and yet in my belief, dogs do not actually get "sad" in the same way that we do. In the end, beyond emotion we are going to react to physical stimuli of pleasure and pain, and because of this are going to "feel good" or "feel bad" simply because pleasure is just that: pleasing, and pain is the opposite. Only with this base do these subjects become inverted or changed and you can get people that enjoy pain (ie masochists, which I am, partly anyway )
"Live everyday like it's your first"

wuliheron
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Posted 10/31/06 - 07:35 AM:	#8
For me the issue is not so much balance as it is harmony. You might compare it to keeping a car engine well tuned so that everything moves in harmony with each other without overheating or whatever. When we are happy our engine is working at it's best without straining. If we keep stomping on the gas when the engine is cold, turning corners too fast, jamming on the brakes, etc we are not acting in harmony with what is best for our vehicle. Bottom line, stress kills and negative emotions promote stress in our bodies. That is not to say negative emotions are bad, they still serve their purposes such as the fight or flight response, but when they become habitual they become counter productive.

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