It is a self-evident truth that i) everyone seeks happiness and ii) self-fulfillment is an essential part of happiness.

Since self-fulfillment varies from individual to individual, as to be expected, the term covers an enormous spectrum, from raw materialistic gain at one end, to pure spiritual exultation at the other, from complete selfishness to selfless service for others, from simple domestic contentment to public glory.

While for our primordial ancestors, self-fulfillment was no more than the pleasure of food, mate and territory, for modern man it covers every imaginable, seemingly endless need: of the body for sensuous enjoyment,of the mind for intellectual exploration, and of the spirit for emotional, aesthetic or mystic connection.

Hence, while self-fulfillment, in the depth and intensity of emotion experienced, is the same for everybody, it is seen in an astonishing variety of forms, reflecting the diversity of human desires and goals. Its seekers therefore include both a Hugh Hefner and a Mother Teresa, a Gandhi and a Pol Pot, a John Doe and a Mozart, a Bozo the Clown and an Albert Einstein, each of them fulfilled in his or her own way, whether admired or scorned by the world.

Despite its subjectivity, the pleasure experienced in each case must be the same, because Science tells us that it is traceable to the same pleasure centres in the human brain, goes through the same electrical and chemical processes and involves the release of the same ‘pleasure chemicals’ such as endorphin and oxytocin. This means that if Hugh Hefner, on his famous circular water bed that can accommodate himself and at least three of the young Playboy Bunnies he likes to surround himself with, and Mother Teresa, on her visits to the poorest of the poor in the most squalid slums of Calcutta, are subjected to sophisticated PET technology, the images of their respective brains with their respective experiences of happiness would look exactly the same. In Science’s reductionist terms, the world’s most famous playboy and its most famous saint are no different from each other.

Now I find this difficult to believe. How can two such different persons, deriving self-fulfillment from two completely contrasting lives, representing for many of us two extreme ends of the moral spectrum,yet go through the same innermost experience according to hard scientific evidence? How can happiness, the endless subject of countless, inspirational books, be something purely chemical? How can emotion, something purely qualitative, be quantitatively analysed and measured?

And yet, to dispute the evidence of science’s instruments would be to dispute the very technology that has given us the laser, the computer, the electron microscope.

In the future, there is no doubt that instrumental Science will have the power to reduce joy, love, spiritual ecstasy, and all those experiences of the innermost self, to mere chemical data. Though emotionally repugnant, it is something we have to think about dealing with.

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About Vignettes...

A continuing flow of little, readable pieces that will constitute what I feel is an important 'legacy of values' to leave behind. Read more about Vignettes...