Of course I would not need stem cell brain regeneration if only I could be happy with the way things are, and then die smiling happily. After I perused that children's book, Mr. Happy, by Roger Hargreaves, I took the author's childish advice on how to be happy: Hang out with happy people.
I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from the library, and there I saw a friend smiling like a fool while she was looking at cans of beans, so I stopped her and asked her why she looked so happy.
“Hey, Felicia, what are you so happy about? Did you win the lottery?”
“Even better,” she turned to me, smiling broadly, baring her perfect teeth. “I am just happy, that’s all, not happy about anything in particular. I read Marci Shimoff’s book and I signed up for a happiness seminar.
“What book is that?”
“Happy For No Reason.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s a revolutionary technique. I’m on the seventh step of being happy from the Inside out. It really works. There are forty-two-thousand of us now.”
“Unreasonable happiness sounds foolish. Is it a religion?”
“Check out the book and be happy,.” she replied, picked up two cans of baked beans for the price of one, and hurried away.
I later read a few reviews of the book. It seemed to make people quite happy. Quite by coincidence or something rather weird like God's will, I had purchased at the library another book on happiness, a nearly new copy on the Book Sale shelf for $1.
I liked the looks of the woman of Chicken Soup fame on its cover with her millionairess smile, right fist under chin, brown eyes, long brown hair, left eyebrow higher than the other, thin lips, and white upper teeth nicely exposed.
Yes, happily, there it was, Happy For No Reason, Seven Steps to Being Happy From the Inside Out, a New York Times bestseller by Marci Shimoff and Carol Kline, happiness experts. I thumbed through it because I am almost dead already so do not have much time to read everything, The avid reader or the authors themselves may correct my take on the chapters, as follows:
Believe what I say about being happy in my "revolutionary" book and you shall be happy even if you are miserable. "In fact, when you are Happy for No Reason, you can have any emotion--including sadness, fear, anger, or hurt--but you will experience that underlying state of peace and well-being." Remember that life is all about you, and know that Jefferson's Pursuit of Happiness in the Constitution does not mean you should chase after happiness but to just be happy all the time no matter what happens. Cultivate only those relationships that nourish you. Do not forget to think only happy thoughts, and respond happily no matter what happens. Be grateful you are happy and love everybody from the bottom of your heart. Be sure to eat well and to enjoy the natural drugs your body makes. The dalai lama said your purpose is to be happy, so connect yourself with supreme happiness and be inspired by your purpose, that is, to be happy, Subscribe to our free propaganda, attend our seminars, and be coached by certified happiness trainers.
“By following our formula, over 20,000 people have created miracles in every area of their lives: health, relationships, money, business and more. Their joy, success and passion for life have increased exponentially. It truly is miraculous to see what our participants have created for themselves.”
I would be pretty happy too if I had miraculously sold 14 million of my books. Would not that be happiness from the outside in instead of Inside out? No, that would not do. I would have to be so happy Inside for no reason at all to sell so many books about happiness in the first place. My books would sell better because they would be so precious. No one would toss them out although they would pass them along to unhappy relatives and friends until someone just violated the copyright altogether and put the book up on some pirate site so the whole world could be happy together no matter what is happening. Of course that happiness would be outdated. Happiness is a living substance, so thoroughly revised editions would be required to keep the continuing revolution of happiness alive.
Unreasonable happiness is based upon the subjective you, what you want, namely, happiness, not on the objective world including others. In fact you don't need others to be happy. All you need is yourself; at least we might deduce that from the rhetoric. Yet the author does not reduce you to absurdity. to the sound of one hand clapping: On the one hand, she says happiness is irrational and subjective, but on the other hand she speaks of a sense of purpose, and purpose has an objective. She and her co-author know very well that there is no subject without an object, no I without we, no one without more than one, and so on. One without the other would be absurd, yet why not, like Camus, who did not need a god and an afterlife, just be happy with absurdity, the meaningless of existence? Yet then existence must exist to be meaningless. Of course it might make us happy to say the subject does not need an object, and suppose the subject itself is nothing but happiness once free of all objects. Camus laughed at such absurdities, but his surd was not really deaf to the simple things he celebrated on the sand; the Sun, for example, that brings both life and death. So his happiness was neither in being, nor in naked existence for that matter.
Now I am not one to argue against happiness from the Inside out, although I do not believe happiness does not have reasons or causes so no steps need to be taken for happiness, that anyone can just be happy no matter whatever is happening, even if he is being slowly beheaded by jihadists. Indeed, I am most troubled by the happiness experts’ happiness-in-themselves no matter how awful their circumstances may be, say, the horrors of war. Of course one might argue that war advances civilization; therefore, people are happy to wage war and even rejoice in the sight of death for the risk being taken for sake of advancements. War gives people a sense of purpose, does it not? Life is put at risk and realized for what it is: everything. But that is against the argument that one can be happy from the Inside out, for no reason, without any cause, such as the will to live. Maybe the Inside is ambiguous, that it is happy with life or death.
What is the Inside that is happy? Ego or Inside or I or Self or One, it really does not matter what you call It. The Self-in-itself does not really exist, so how can it be happy? What we have unwittingly developed are programs for patterns of behavior. You are not really you. Really, you are not who you think you are. Be happy with that if you please. You could be like Mr. Happy. Read the book, attend the seminars, become a happiness trainer, and please let me know how I can be happy all the time if there is no such thing as unhappiness. In the meantime, I shall look into stem cell brain regeneration. Perhaps one can replace unhappy cells with happy cells.