X-Ftn-To: Blue Rajah 

"Blue Rajah"  wrote:

>> Perhaps Westerners just want to know.
>
>Perhaps Westerners are conditioned to think of unpleasurable feelings as
>pathologies.  When they don't feel "happy", they think they're sick.

Maybe, but if enlightenment isn't happiness, it must be something
more. After all, I didn't hear a definition of sat-cit-ananda that
would be consistent with pain and suffering. It would thus seem that
the "western" definition of sickness isn't far from the truth. If
there is a problem with happiness, it lies in the shallowness of its
concept in the minds of people, and in the shallow ways of its
supposed achievement - put simply, people want to attain some lower
goal and suffer when they fail, or become frustrated when they attain
it and it leaves them as empty as they were before. The happiness
itself is merely a reduced perspective of the divine state of bliss
and harmony, and if there is any problem with it, it lies in all the
things that prevent people from attaining it, and never in the
happiness itself. The lack of happiness is, therefore, indeed a form
of sickness; a widespread one, I might say.

-- 
Homepage: http://www.danijel.org