wab said:
As a soulless atheist who doesn't even know the meaning of "spiritual," I have to disagree....First, you can find happiness in materialism.... Especially if you explore it in depth...even your neighborhood are wonderfully complex systems that could be studied for a lifetime...Forget "spiritual." The key is immersion and depth of understanding. And play. IMHO.
spirituality can be such a dirty word and in today's extremist society, a dangerous one. i prefer the word introspection which seems to carry less weight yet hold maybe even more water, but probably i mean the same thing and i'm not against using dirty words. though i hardly think that even buddha, who looked inside and saw no soul, no
atma, would be considered nonspiritual. perhaps he was just a soulless spiritualist (or just really good at delving inside).
while you can have happiness in materialism, i.e., one does not require poverty to be happy, happiness, itself, is not found there; but a child's distraction from misery is. a silly smile on a face wiped clean when someone breaks the jester's toy. true happiness shines even when the toys break. but a distraction is just that; it is neither antidote, remedy nor cure.
happiness shines even through the most miserable of times. and so we see both happiness and sadness in both poverty and riches. neither poverty nor riches cause happiness. and without happiness, one is miserable with either.
true that exploration of our outer world can lead to inner understanding though it is sort of like going over the north pole to reach antarctica. i suppose there's nothing wrong with reinventing the wheel as long as you're er'd and have the time. mystics for millennia and hippies since at least the 1960s have been discussing good vibrations way before string theory came along. yes, somethings take outside observation. certainly it solves the what-should-my-hobby-be dilemma.
i certainly agree with your notion of play. just like when puppies chase each other in play what they are really doing is exploring their territory. and if exploring our world makes us happy, then it only goes to follow that when we play with ourselves, we find happiness. q.e.d.
