One Who is Sad in Imagination is Truly Happy

Last night was a good night. Last night there was the comfort of old faces, the aphorisms born out of weed, and the quips born out of alcohol. Last night there was recounting of tales – lived and imagined, shared and unshared, melancholic and merry. Last night I coined the title of this piece, and uncovered the great wisdom in it.

I suppose I speak on behalf of billions of others when I say that a greater part of life is spent on imagination. I can say with even greater confidence that imagination is always, and I mean always, of a rosy future. There is power, success, money, and happiness. No one imagines a sad future. Rosy imagination is a manifestation of life force - a consequence of Maya. One can also term it evolution. Unless one craves a better future, one will simply not be fit enough to survive.

It was while dawdling through this discussion that my former flatmate and I broached the topic of what it takes to be truly happy. There’s way too much commentary on this topic, most of it in the form of self-help books which now spawn an obnoxious industry. But there’s a reason why the happiness industry exists – people really want to know how to be truly happy, and the answer is hard to come by.

The sober me, if asked to hazard a guess at who is truly happy, would probably say one who achieves what he wants. In other words, bridging the gap between imagination and reality is the only way to achieving happiness. Bingo! This would seem acceptable to a sober mind. But thanks, weed, for illuminating what lies beyond human intellect in its sober form.

Nearly all humans have a tendency to bridge the gap between imagination and reality, or gain happiness, by dragging the latter as close to the former as possible. Again, that’s Maya controlling us. But we know by experience that that gap is never bridged. No one is truly happy. That’s just how Maya operates. On the other hand, what if someone took the reverse approach? What if, instead of trying to elevate one’s reality, one was capable of debasing imagination to the level of current reality? That just seems bizarre, doesn’t it? After all, it’s the very antithesis of evolution. It’s the conquest of Maya.

In an online course on Buddhism, I learnt that meditation was often defined as a “rebellion against evolution”.  And it was in a perennially meditative state that one found bliss, or true happiness. Meditation is nothing but waging a war against the senses – which are nothing but agents of Maya – to keep them under control, to not allow them to constantly egg one on to greener pastures. Anything that’s so greatly rewarding can’t come easy, and no wonder deep meditation seems impossible to achieve. Elevating reality to match imagination is hard enough, but the true reward lies in the reverse, much harder approach. To keep one's imagination only as good as the reality seems impossible. That’s what the title captures.

Note that this is just another way of looking at the age-old wisdom ‘be content with what you have.’ Often, it’s derided it as a consolation for the losers, by the losers. It’s not. It goes much deeper than that.

I have never really meditated or experienced what it feels like. Last night I got a conceptual whiff of what it is designed to achieve. Last night was a good night.

The two pictures below should help capture the gist of the discussion.

Worldly route to Bliss

Meditative route to Bliss

The only creepy bit was that Google knew, by the kind of videos being played, what we were up to.