Happiness is a subject of a recurring concern in our times, a few days ago was interviewed a young mother and actress. They asked her what she wanted for her young son, and without doubt she said: “To raise him happy”. Although, we seldom reflect about the idea of happiness, there are colloquial approaches to the subject, as for example: Everyone has to be happy in his/her way, or the one which sustains that happiness is given at times, in pieces, that’s why happiness is just a passing moment.

 

My intention in the following lines is to review how the culture has taken the theme of happiness, since Christ until today, in order to address it, if it is possible, in a society focused in the personality and to become happy.

 

But, while Greek philosophy had an idea of the happiness as a couple with the virtue and Epicurus, was more modest than what we actually think, with the purpose of simplify the image that I want to transfer, I had heard the happiness analysis during the classic Greece, in order to proceed to divide happiness in three (3) big periods, the first two; retrospectives; to know: The era of the Lamb and the time of the owl, as a premonition, the time of the Unicorn.

 

The era of the Lamb.

 

This stage of the humanities’ history is represented by the Christianize. The Christianize is a doctrine of the noblest goodness that we have elaborated as race; I don’t think that we are able to reach another system that exceed it, but what we care about it in here is to define how the humanity perceived the happiness in that era called of the Lamb.

 

For the Christians, salvation is obtained from over there, at the eternal life, after an existence of pain, suffer, quitting and humiliations. This is the history presented by “Perpetua and Felicita”, martyrs at the Christianize beginnings. Perpetua was a roman woman of good position with a husband and son to breast-feed and Felicita was one of her slaves. At the prosecution made by the emperor in order to eradicate the first Christian groups; Perpetua and Felicitas, were caught to be given to the beasts, but they were able to be forgive if they simply tribute the emperor, denying their Christian condition, even the father of Perpetua visited her at jail and as a Father of a Roman family implored her to deny her Christian condition because of her son and the rest of the family. Although, Perpetua maintains firm and said her father that it was the “God Will”. The people who saw the Christian faces condemned to the beasts described that their faces had lights,  their bodies plain of happiness, because the superior expression of the divine goodness was the martyr, the earth suffering guarantied the eternal life,  they had to imitate the Christ Passion, in other words, as much it is suffered and suffered from earth, it is a biggest possibility to ensure a little piece of heaven, “It is easiest for a camel to enter inside the needle of a spire, than a rich enters at the Kingdom of Heaven”. The suffering was like a capitalization way in order to obtain a future profit; the divine grace is received from heaven.

 

In our contemporary culture the mothers would be aghast at the action of Perpetua, to abandon her child happy to surrender to death, but here it becomes clear the mandate of Matthew 10: 37, "He who loves his father or mother more than Me is not worthy of me, and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of me."

 

For the early Christians the way to become happy, it was through suffering in earthly life, to move to the grace of eternal life in the hereafter, there was an ordeal to regain Eden, a paradise lost. This view is reflected in Matthew 5: 11: "Blessed are you when they are insulted and persecuted, and when they are maligned in every way because of me."

 

It is easy to see why I named this period of lamb, being had a conception of human happiness based on the renunciation and suffering, was a spiritual grace impotent as it was based on an imaginary happiness after death. The faithful were subjected languid, victims of fate, as lambs to the slaughter, all the happiness was based on a hope of complacency after death.

 

The time of the Owl

 

Over the centuries, and as normally happens in the story, when one wants to defend an idea to the hilt its proponents discover the shortcomings of trying to preserve. The doctrine presents Christianity as a weakness, an Achilles heel, which brings me back to them very briefly.

 

 As noted above, the promise of eternal life after earthly life is represented by the satisfaction of sensual desires, the Christian doctrine promises his followers that in the past will no longer be hungry, thirsty and not have all hopes they will be filled. The treasure promised after death, so it was conceivable by human beings, had to be assimilated to sensations that could be perceived by the senses of human beings of flesh and blood and appealed to images of full sensory satisfaction, such as satiety food and drink and the fulfillment of all desires.

 

We must remember that until the late Middle Ages, there was a struggle from day to day, shortages, plagues, wars, slavery, were placed at risk conditions preened life, life was a matter of daily survival, hence most formidable were the rewards of frugality in food and drink and the satisfaction of desires.

 

Tomas de Aquino intended to maintain the Christianize and for that, he resort to the “Aristotle’s philosophy”, remember that Aristotle is the base of the scientific and systematic knowledge. Tomas de Aquino, separated two kinds of happiness, a perfect happiness at Heaven and happiness at earth not perfect, in this time it is not necessary to die for reach the happiness, as it was to Perpetua and Felicitas, it is possible to go up by a perfection stair in the life at earth, with the goal to pretend to be half happy during the life at “the here”, through a human and limited happiness, which assimilate the power, richness, the satisfied appetite as ways to supreme aims, divines and celestials. Tomas de Aquino, without noticing, introduced the scientific element in the Christianize and also, he intended to move forward the promised Heaven to the earth, which means, to take down the Heaven to the Earth is possible through a life of chastity, poorness, sacrifice and quitting, to enjoy in a medium way, of many pleasures that life puts in our lives, to extend our hand and enjoy the gifts offered by God, and that doesn’t put us out of the possibility to go to Heaven.

 

The inside of “the Time of the Owl” is represented by two men Rene Descartes, with his “I think and then I exist”, which means, first I reason, then I feel; first I know, then I live, and Isaac Newton, with his laws of Mechanics.

 

Lets pretend to be at the shoes of men and women, when were made the most important scientific discovers and is possible to calculate the speed of an object fall, the rotation of planets at its own shaft, the conduction of electricity, the treatment and cure of ills more extent involved with the human specie, our society became a society of owls, we think that through science and technology every of our problems will be solved. We supposed with Hegel and Marx that we would be able to decipher the future behavior of the members of our society, because we thought in a feverous way, in an ascendant progress, symmetrical and mathematical covered by dialectics, we put our faith on the reason and the science as an absolute fount of all the knowledge and we bet for a perfect community where all of us will be happy, the major sum of possible happiness, for the largest amount of possible people, that was the headword of the illustration.

 

The illustration took the metaphor of Plato at the cave and believed that we are bad because we are ignorant, if the light of the knowledge bights to us as a lamp on the way of existence, then, we will be good, that is what in the next speeches will be named “To take consciousness”, after the knowledge will bright over us, we can’t choose bad, because of the application of the common sense.

 

The project of the illustration felt down when the Siecle XX entered, with the consummation of the two world wars, with concentration fields in Germany and Russia and the launch of two atomically bombs by the United Stated of America, these facts put at the end, the illusion showed at the illustration, according to which, the knowledge represented by the logic of the scientific knowledge would put at the end, every harm of the humanity.

 

The happiness at the Time of the Owl takes the work as the only possible way to be realized, the consciousness privates the living thing and in this way, the work is took as religion, the savings and systematization of life with mathematical formulas are the north of existence.

 

The accomplishment before these things, duties and obligations were imposed as the perfect consciousness, before the validation of the spiritual world and the sense expression of the organism. The Time of the owl makes men and women as robots who sacrifice their welfare in order to satisfy the asking and demands of society and other people, which is translated in petitions of the deductive reason.

 

At the time of the Owl the most important thing is in the same level than that ordered by the consciousness, at the reasonable aims of senses.

 

At the end of these times, the consciousness imposes over Love, the use of sensuality and the accomplishment of the right over the current spiritual character of the internal world. Here, it is not possible the spirituality, this one is non realizable.

 

The sense happiness at the end of the Time of Owl, is this: If we accomplish the exigencies of the “Logical” in a future we will be in a better place, because we progress. So, first the duty of illusion, a better thing for everyone forced us to bet for a hard work of today (realization and dignity just for the work), for construct a better world, and if we all take into account that, the peace and solidarity will be on our lives.

 

The time of the Unicorn

 

I have marked many names without pretending a scientific dilapidation, nor academic, just as icon references, in the same way I must precise that in these times they flap and influence one to other. Right now, we must aboard the Unicorn Times, were we refer to the premonition of the spiritual destiny which belong to the human beings in the middle of postmodernist.

 

The Foundation rock of the Unicorn Time is represented by “Juan Jacobo Rousseau” and the description that he made at the island of Saint-Pierre in a Switzerland’s lake, this description gives validity and supremacy to the interior world, in the same way to the sensitive expression of the sense as a base of a new spirituality which combines the sense with the imagination, as follows:

 

“…that the soul can find a place to rest, a place sure to set up and focus all its own in him, without the need of remember the past or go through the future, where the time means nothing, where the present runs without ending but its duration is not notice, without signs of the time and without any other feeling of privation or entertainment, of pleasure or pain, with no wish or scare hat was another than being, a sensation which completely plains the soul and that, while it last, we can say that we are happy, not with a poor happiness, non complete and relative as that given for the pleasures of life, but a sufficiently complete happiness and perfect that doesn’t leave any empty at the soul. That was the stage that I use to experience at the Island of Saint-Pierre…”

(Las Ensoñaciones del Paseante Solitario. Madrid-Alianza 1983).

 

The ideas of John Locke and those from the English utilitarists, were summarized in that we search for pleasure and we avoid pain, the human beings live searching for the happiness which is represented in the searching or persecution of the satisfaction of a wish, it is like a frenetically career without ending and that always keep in movement, the individuals of a society, in an infinite fluid. Locke supports his ideas in the Newton physics as biller balls that transmit the movement to exemplify that permanent state of anxiety for new goals. As it happens with the try of money and it “is never enough”, each goal reached begins a new one superior and more ambitious, with a never arrived to a vital and spiritual goal.

 

After finished the hedonists aims of pleasure represented by the Marquis of Sade and of the satisfaction of escape desire, represented by Locke and the utilitarists, the human beings have a sensation of absence, of emptiness, of proposal lost, although the winning of money, the give of themselves to the pleasures of body and the accomplishment of our desires, we didn’t have a sensation of plenitude or spiritual peace. The answer is given because the Time of the own has as main characteristic to fulfill all our intellectual capacity with the logical-deductive aspect and for that it finished the friability or recognition of the importance of the imaginative process,  that constitutes an elemental pillar of the constitution as human beings, because the imaginary faculty, as well has as start point the lived experience by the perception of our senses, it means, the imagination is an explosion or potentiating of living experiences.

 

From there, the already named nihilism (lost of existence propose) denounced by the existentialists as Sartre and Camus, as well as the firsts thoughts by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which doesn’t correspond to our natural constitution. In other words, the nihilism is an artificial condition product of the rational thought and it isn’t inherent to our condition as human beings, the journey of the illusion and imaginative capacity that is because of the rational thought, without thinking in our nature capacity of perceive the reality and the vital thing, have made us to fail in the nihilist dissipation, the emptiness, nausea and vertigo. This is the most important announce that open the Time of the Unicorn, the nihilism is false, it doesn’t exist, the nihilism is a dessert sowed as a consequence of the movement of the spirit’s imagination of the human beings, whose put all their confidence in the reason and in the scientific thinking, resituating their sensual capacity, of sublimation of an instant and the acceptation of the possibility of spiritual elevation transferred by senses.

 

Science does not make us more human; a graduate of Harvard put bombs to kill their fellows (Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski). What characterizes the Age of the Unicorn is that human beings have to concentrate a spiritual force that has never in the history of mankind, the spiritual strength to regain the ability to dream, illusion and imagination, knowing that they are not totally real, coming from his psyche, his inner world, which is summarized in the words of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: "Dreaming dreams knowing that." So this time is the Unicorn, it has many recognizable elements on a horse (existing real entity can see and touch) and imaginary elements, such as a horn. Each one of us must make our existence in the desert that put rational thought, to restore its spiritual aspect, when the man recovers his ability to daydream, retrieves a lost natural look and is able to look inside for creating a world of its own, with this peaceful, becomes more human, more sublime, recover the dignity that gives it its sensuality, intuition and the world that he can only see part of it because of its subjectivity, their experiences, their memories, their imaginative development.

 

In the same way that the faces of Perpetua and Felicita the beasts were full of happiness and exuberance, they were fully forward to your future encounter with God in the afterlife, in the same way the revolutionary Henri Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, called utopian socialists, are excited because they would arrive at the perfect community in which each man would work for the other selflessly and reign peace and happiness to all, today the spiritual challenge is huge because we have to be knowing power to delude ourselves that this is an illusion, never in the history of humanity when chasing heaven in the hereafter, or when it came down heaven to earth, through utopian socialism, men and women thought that their convictions were an unattainable illusion, almost could bite, smell and feel their hopes and their actions were guided by the full conviction of the materialization of their dreams. Today we know that dreams are dreams, but they are ours. Rousseau has given us a starting point, with descriptions of the sublime the soul on the island of Saint-Pierre.

 

The twentieth century Surrealist invites us to regain the ability to dream, but as a race we be able to respect that imaginative element that makes us and is the exclusive bridge or through a spiritual life and therefore a full and happy life?

 

Men and women immerse in our post-moderns societies are expecting the new “Advertizing spot” to know what they want and to be happy, or the new acquisition of their neighbor to recognize their new wish, life is now a supermarket, where the things impose what we are, in a career where we substitute a vehicle for another one, and IPod for another one, a house for another one, this chain doesn’t have an end and always keep us in the same start point, the reason as foundation grows the dessert and eliminates the possibility of being happy. The supremacy of vanity and self in a world more fragmentized each time where the eclecticism is imposed as an all for being nothing, the furtive persecution of happiness erode us without an entire satisfaction, just the rescue of a spiritual world with the intervention of the imagination and the senses, which open the doors of a state of peace that we can call Happiness, by the consumption of the irresistible will.

 

The answer of the question is if we can be happy? This is the view, we cannot be happy because it can’t be by be under the conditions of the logical thought, it will be always better to prosecute; always a goal without reach; always a feeling of uncomfortable because of what we cant have, we live in a state to go under installed at the soul which put us away of the serenity to embrace that simple happiness, sublime and peaceful which came from the spiritual state and intimate satisfaction, deep and with dignity.