Okay, time to stick my neck out again. I love talking about things I know nothing about.
It seems that seven different levels of happiness can be identified, and they correspond, or at least it makes a good story that they correspond, to the seven chakras.
The first level of happiness is stasis. The system seems to be working on some level. Something is working right in our life, and we're aware of it. We become aware that something is good in our life and in life in general.
The second level of happiness is the happiness of absorption. Absorption is when we become transfixed with something. The taste of absorption is to be very involved with an experience, like gardening, making love, surfing a wave, pondering an intellectual puzzle, and so on. Many other examples could be given. That intense focus brings us into the present and we become more here and available.
The third level of happiness is the happiness of joy. Joy is when things go our way. We've gotten something we've wanted. We've won, for now. We've been successful, at least for now. Life feels good because, at this moment, things seem to be going our way.
It's worth pointing out that these first three levels of happiness are quite fragile, because they are essentially dependent upon particular types of experience in the external world. Starting with the fourth level, we pass into the realms of happiness that are less and less dependent upon the external world, though they can be very present to it.
The fourth level of happiness is the happiness of love. This is the level, for instance, of falling in love with a partner. This is the dimension where we love our children, or our mother and father, or whomever it might be that we revere. As profound as it is, and it is profound, it is still a love that is addressed. Therefore it gives a taste, but only a taste, of something grander still.
The fifth level of happiness is that of rapture. Rapture is when we fall in love with God or the infinite or the ungraspable mystery or whatever we want to call it. We look around and we're in love with more or less everything, because we see our "love partner" everywhere, in everything. All is one, and It's revealed everywhere, in both the sun and rain, the good and bad, the right and wrong, the summer and winter. Now we're falling in love in a more general way.
The sixth level of happiness is compassion. Everything that was there in the previous level is still there, including a deep understanding that everything has to be exactly the way it is (until it isn't), and yet there's an almost unbearable desire to give and contribute and make a difference in any way possible. This is the level of the bodhisattva, pausing at the doorway of freedom to endeavor to bring all others to freedom.
The seventh level of happiness is no-mind or silence. In silence all knowing has ceased. There is no knowing of anything. We could say that absolute idiocy has been achieved, because even the separate identity is no longer known. One no longer knows where one is going or why, or even that one exists separately at all, and yet there is a constant falling, like a waterfall, of just being present with what is, grateful with it, available to itself however itself shows up.
But all this is just a metaphor, a fantasy, a hallucination really, because of course there aren't any levels at all and all is equal, like glowing jewels in a matrix.
—jim sloman, for 8/2/01
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