Happy: beyond good, truth, and beauty
A stone with the word “smile'“ written on it
Why does fully believing in good, truth, and beauty instantly distance you from it?
Believing in good doesn’t make you good immediately. It only makes you more susceptible to feelings of evil and sadness when someone tells you that you’re not good, even if innocuously.
That is why children cry when they hear a friend or a stranger call them self-centered, proud, or mean because they put their own personal needs first. They feel naughty or evil. But in doing so, the child often forgets that humans are selfish creatures. We ultimately motivate ourselves to do things and live life on a daily basis.
But even as adults, we fail to realize that we’re actually biased towards goodness. We believe that humans are mostly good.
This isn’t a good thing, as it only makes us susceptible to constant emotional distress. No one can make us feel sad if we entertain fully the real idea that there are millions of other reasons why that person acted in a rude way that lie outside of our control, or if we acknowledge millions of other incidental reasons to feel happy that inevitably come with life.
As a human being, it is a necessity to prioritize your mental health in all situations by actively choosing to think positively about life.
The same principle applies to truth and beauty. Being a truth seeker doesn’t make you right away an enlightened person. If you believe other people have valid ideas and knowledge to share and learn from, it doesn’t mean you’re enlightened. In fact, it can make you biased towards ideas you perceive as true, which is to say bigoted and insensitive most of the time. In the same vein, believing other people are beautiful because they meet society’s standards of beauty doesn’t necessarily make you also beautiful. But it chains you to beauty.
However, it must be stated that believing in good, truth, and beauty can make a person all those things eventually. But it’s just a slow process and far from being the fastest route. If you want enlightenment and happiness right now, you’re better off starting by observing the world with an open mind.
A sure-fire way to misunderstand a person or any topic is to only ask one other person or read a single article on the internet. In reality, truth in understanding involves asking different people, and reading from different authors with different cultural and political perspectives. To avoid bias and achieve true enlightenment, we must always force ourselves to answer this difficult question: how many ways can you look at a situation/thing?
Just like a person cannot understand who they are by only ever staying lonely, or improve their own house by never leaving the house, so can a person never achieve true enlightenment by being a one-dimensional being.
