Image by Alaskan Dude via Flickr
A couple of days ago, in blog-post What Must I Do To Be Happy, we asked the question,
Do you see happiness as something that reflects your condition of spirituality and/or your condition of brain health?
This is not a question we hear every day.
The relationship of happiness and spirituality is heavily weighted in our cultural awareness. We hear about it all the time. “They are connected,” is a reasonable statement.
The separateness of happiness and spirituality is culturally quiet. How often do we think that happiness is about brain health and not our spiritual condition? It may not be reasonable, culturally common or comfortable, but it is still true; they are separate.
Lola Snookers answered our question saying,
No, I do not see happiness and spirituality going hand in hand. Having faith does help me be stronger but no it doesn’t pull me out of sadness. I can be grateful and depressed at the same time. …to say having a closer connection to God will make you happy is crazy. It helps me hang on and push though, it blesses my heart & maybe someday I will look back think how happy I was to have Him in my life (and I am.) However, for me it doesn’t in itself make me happy.
Lola is telling us that happiness and spirituality are related and separate. There is no reason they can’t be both …except for how we reason. For example, I think of Father-Time who left office when the forth-dimension came into discussion. Our reasoning changed and told us that Time is not what we thought.
There is great freedom in the understanding that emotions such as happiness are not always chosen. There is great freedom knowing more about how we intersect with the seen and unseen forces. Freedom in knowing how we connect seems paradoxical doesn’t it? But it isn’t.
We’ve talked about how everything is connected and that knowledge is flat. That includes happiness and spirituality. However, we have also spoken about taking things apart to know their natures better. Knowing how they are separate is knowing how they connect.