Happiness, Health, Wisdom and Wealth ™"The Owner's Manual for Your Life" |
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To Thine Own Self Be TrueIn Hamlet, Act I Scene 3, Polonius is giving fatherly advice to his son who is about to set off on an important journey. He says, "This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou cans't not be false to any man." This will be a recurring theme in our study of happiness. First you must be true to yourself. "Je pense, donc je suis" - Rene Descartes, is seldom quoted in Descartes native French but better known in Latin as, "Cognito, ergo sum" or in English, "I think, therefore I am." Descartes had been engaged in an internal struggle trying to decide what he could prove about existence. He came to the conclusion that he could only prove his own existence. He reasoned that if he could think about his existence that he must exist because something that did not exist could not question its own existence. We would add that since nothing else can be sure to exist, first you must be true to yourself. We will expand this notion just a bit to: "You exist, everything else is faith." You accept the world on faith, the only thing you can be sure of is that you exist in some form. It may not be the form you think of yourself in though. You could be a blue ball of energy floating in empty space, alone in the universe; and all of history and your life as you know it now could be nothing more than a dream, a story you are creating to pass the time. There is absolutely no way to know otherwise. Think of it, all of your experiences, all of the people you have known, everything you think you know could well be nothing more than a construction of your own mind. So, first you must be true to yourself. |
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Ironically, most people spend most of their time extrinsically motivated. That is the derive their motivations from the the outside world, extrinsically. They are motivated by parents, peers, governments, advertising, literature, art and music. The irony is that all these motivators may not actually exist outside the mind of the individual. "Keeping up with the Jones'" is not only unlikely to create happiness but it may well be that the Jones' you are keeping up with are creations of your own mind. Imagine that you are that blue ball of energy floating in space creating rivals that torment you to keep up with them. It might lead to greater happiness if one were to forgo that particular torment. Most people seem to think of themselves as democracies in which everyone around them gets a vote in how the should be. First you must be true to yourself. We will be learning to live more intrinsically; motivated by forces from within rather than outside us. This is not to be confused with selfishness. Paradoxically, you can be totally intrinsic and at the same time generous and altruistic. In fact, intrinsicness leads toward those ends. First, you must be true to yourself. |
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