Why is happiness so elusive? Part 3 (Leaps of Faith)

Jesus, St. Paul, the I Ching provide some of the core insights about how to live a happy life in this episode. But those guys can be a little boring and obscure so we will also take advantage of the insights from George Lucas' Master Yoda and General Iroh of the Last Airbender's Fire Nation to get a better grip of who we really are and what that means for happiness. One of the main points covered in the episode is that there are two core leaps of faith that we need to make to realize happiness in our own lives. The first leap is that the physical world has certain properties: the physical world is a world of separation and duality (light/dark, yes/no, yin/yang), and in part because of that duality, it is our beliefs that shape our experiences. So this first leap of faith is that we can create a happier life by exploiting the brain's "confirmation bias" and insisting on the belief that life is good, regardless of how things appear in any given moment (a strategy that was wonderfully lampooned by Voltaire in Candide years ago). The second leap of faith is that there is a whole other world that is invisible to our senses and our thinking/emoting selves, existing right here and right now (a belief that has also been hilariously caricatured in movies like Monty Python's The Life of Brian). As much fun as it is to see Candide and Monty Python make fun of these two leaps of faith, and as useful as those satires are at pointing out the ways in which these leaps can be misunderstood or exploited, these humorous takes can unfortunately leave us with the impression that faith in general and these two leaps in particular are worthless. They most certainly are not and this episode explores why making these leaps can be so useful in hacking the mind to create the mental state we call joy or peace or love. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.