Happiness for most people begins with the thought: “This is how things ought to be!” Suffering comes with the opposite thought: “Things ought not to be as they are”.

However, we tend to fall into the habit of thinking that we know already how things ought to be or ought not to be.

We identify happiness with fixity instead of accepting life’s natural flow. We become “psychological antiques” — wanting nothing moved, nothing changed, nothing even improved. The stability comes to mean permanence. Permanence, however, is something the soul can have only in God.

Happiness is bliss outwardly directed towards the senses and their world of relativity and change. Bliss is eternal, but happiness is man’s attempt to project bliss into a fleeting and alien environment. In that projection, he forms attachments to things temporal. Happiness, in its pretence of permanence, becomes simply another counterfeit, like pleasure.

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