Secrets of Happiness and Why We Are Not Immortal
INTERVIEW
Once, a wise man said that happiness is like a ghost that is much talked of but which hardly anyone has seen. However, realizing this is not a very optimistic opinion, GEORGIA TODAY went along to the Shaqro Grandpa Bookshop on January 9 to attend the book presentation of ‘Happiness from a Scientific Point of View’. We also got a chance to talk to the author, Mikheil Khalvashi, a philosopher from Batumi.
What is happiness? Does it have a gender, age, etc?
As Aristotle said, happiness is manifested in infinite diversity: one earns money and is happy, one is in love and is happy, one is at the table, eating delicious food and is happy. So, it was so diverse that until today, everyone thought that it could have no dialectical regularity, which means that it had to have had some inner essential signs that could be easily explained. Why do we love or why are we fed up? I have always felt and seen this symmetry.
What does this regularity imply?
It implies the general energetic potential of a human being. It comprises all the data of soul and body. The sensation of happiness depends on the variability of this energetic potential and its fluctuation to different sizes. In the center, there is a neutral zone. To the right, there are different zones of pleasure and on the left, there are different zones of torture. If the sensation of misfortune and unhappiness lasts too long, then a human being ceases to exist. When one is overwhelmed from the inside with an oversized negative feeling, unhappiness comes. If a human being overcomes the unhappiness, emptiness will then show up.
But pleasure and happiness usually come not long after the salary is deposited in the bank, or anything else that can generally raise our spirits, even more so if we get more than we expected. The state of Nirvana exceeds all the sizes of happiness. However, it also subordinates our regularity. In my book, there are definitions of religious happiness, as well as that of mystic happiness, idealistic happiness, intellectual happiness, aesthetic happiness and everyday happiness, and these all can be explained with our rules. You are probably interested, as all of us are its servants - what is the basis of love, right?
Yes
Love is provided by the vital energy accumulated by a sweet-heart’s beauty in body and soul. Beautiful is beautiful because it spreads around that sweet-heart more vital energy than there is in the size of the corresponding “shell”. It overfills them and that is how pleasure is felt. It is a divine mercy, cosmic regularity and the more one gives, the more one get, as Laozi says, which is one of the secrets. Love lives while there is a sense of happiness between the partners. If one likes somebody, one should give out life energy for him/her, instead of bad temper, i.e. smile, caress him/her with words, and talk warmly to him/her, etc.
What is ideal happiness?
As Plato says, the supreme idea – God - created the world, but before creation, he created ideas. The human being should reach God via self-knowledge. This happiness is connected to the supreme idea, which Plato depicts as the Sun, the infinite donor of life energy to all. This Sun receives energy from the Creator. So, idealistic happiness means sharing the same regularity. Life would be ceaseless if the Sun gave never-ending energy, but our life also depends on metaphysical things. A person, like everything in this world, is the unity of positive and negative energy, which means that both energies are necessary even for our organic processes, but here we talk about the huge amount of negative energy that can poison the whole body, which causes death, otherwise, we would be immortal. So, the extreme opposite to Nirvana is death.
Maka Lomadze