By Abdu Rafiu
It is inherent in all human beings to desire happiness and to ardently long for it. We pray and strive to attain happiness. We seek it in several ways. Some look for it in the woods; many on mountain tops. A great many still by the seaside, on beaches. Yet many pursue it in gambling. Thousands throng prayer houses in search of happiness. Many invoke powers unseen to rain fire and brimstone on their enemies believing that once the enemies, seen or imagined, are out of the way, happiness descending to the souls is a foregone conclusion. Of course, many believe in the power of money. Once poverty is banished and with good things of life which only money can fetch available, happiness enters the home unhindered. It is common knowledge that where there is no money there is strife. The search for money becomes the foundational, motive-driven struggle of daily life. Children are told to work hard because in hard work lies success and in success lies money, Adults are admonished in their age of idealism to go for money; it is the antidote for poverty and the gate to El Dorado. Success is epitomized in mansions dotting the landscape. With a fleet of limousines, a yacht and private jets to boot, there is joy and happiness. But then we are told the rich also cry, confirming the perception of Socrates when he said that “happiness flows not from physical or external conditions such as bodily pleasure or wealth but from living a life that’s right for your soul, your deepest good.” Plato and Aristotle hammer on cultivation of highest virtues within oneself.”
What I am getting at is that because the search for happiness is endless philosophers have had to grapple with the concept of it and substance that makes happiness for ages. What is the content of happiness? For centuries poets have occupied themselves with it without ceasing. Are they any nearer finding the answer to attaining happiness? Plato believes that virtues are the requisite skills and dispositions needed to attain happiness. In his argument, “Happiness or wellbeing ….is the highest aim of moral thought and conduct.” Thinking along the same line, Aristotle saw happiness as the highest desire and ambition of all human beings and it is in the cultivation of virtues. But Blogger Mark Manson has an interesting perspective to what happiness is. He says “Happiness comes from solving problems… To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it’s an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you.” He continues: “Happiness is a constant work in progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in progress…True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.” A great many are bound to disagree with Mark Manson. Does happiness for example flow from subduing an enemy on the battle field? This should indicate that mankind cannot agree on what happiness is and the source of it. If we do not know what happiness is, then we can’t find it, yet everyone longs for it, he feels the need for it to his finger tips. Can happiness be total or it is only to a certain degree of it? Thus in our world today, happiness remains elusive.
Happiness can be felt but cannot be touched or quantified and therefore it is unlike energy or work performed by energy. It is a tangibility of a consistency with its radiations manifesting in powerful waves. These waves of the experiencing give rise to warmth of the soul; and also impinge on the physical body thereby making the body to glow. It is a tangibility of a consistency other than material, but spiritual content experienced in the spiritual core of man. This will of necessity bring us to the origin of man and the mechanisms that govern life of which man is a product. The mechanisms contain guidelines for orderliness, adherence to which engenders happiness in varying degrees correspondent to the extent of conformity. These mechanisms are the Laws of Nature also referred to as the Laws of Creation or Divine Laws. Issuing out of Life and bearing Creative Will, the Laws are self- enforcing, bringing happiness or sorrow. There need not have been turbulence, hate, envy and conflict and, increasingly perplexing the world, armed conflict. Swaths of Nigerian lands have been turned into unconscionable killing fields. Nature is always right and through it everything on earth issued, atom, element, molecule, compound, beasts, the planetary systems, or the gigantic galaxies. And come to think of it, the greatness of the Most High; consider the vastness of Creation in which our planet earth is no more than the tip of a fountain pen, indeed a speck of dust. It is only a planet in the solar system, that is a system scientists have found is built around the sun, which itself is only one of billions of stars in our galaxy known as Milky Way. The Milky Way is itself one of the billions of galaxies in our Universe which is Ephesus, and there are seven universes all listed in the Book of Revelation. In all these designs, order reigns. And in all these designs the semblance of the smallest is to be found in the greatest and vice versa such that the end flows into the beginning in the unceasing opening and closing of cycles as evidence of order. All the Work of the Holy Spirit Who created in the Name of His Father and maintains all that has been created through His Power and radiations of His Power, radiations splitting into living Laws, He as the Will and Justice of God, the Almighty.
There is unhappiness, there is distress; there are pains and hopelessness. Questions must necessarily arise as to what has brought all these about. What is the cause? Is there no-one to stop the conflicts, the disappointments and distress of the world? Is the world sorrow and disaster bound? Is the world, borrowing the apt phrase of eminent scholar, Stanley Macebuh, “bound to violence”? How can we banish sorrow and enthrone joy and happiness, peace and prosperity? Why are children, women and elderly spared in the orgy of violence ravaging the North East, Southern Kaduna and Zamfara inflicted by terrorists and bandits? As it was in the old, so is it now: Leaders in politics and religion, scholars, international organizations as well as individuals preoccupy themselves with the foregoing questions wherever upheavals, callousness, unfeeling, wars and mindless killings have occurred or are on-going. The search for the answers has, in fact, today been intensified in the face of unhappiness and hopelessness and ensuing collapse staring the world in the face, growing sorrow in nations and families.
The increased restlessness manifests in the population of displaced people, millions seeking relief in political leaders, those seeking support from charitable organizations and those thronging prayer houses leaders. And to compound matters, there is the jolt of the emergence of coronavirus pandemic which has swept through more than 200 countries of the world and has claimed more than one million lives. Only an insignificant few, it would appear, are seeking to know the truth of it all. Is it true, for instance that there is no justice in the world? If there is, where is it and what is its nature? Since there is such all pervading unhappiness, sorrow and hopelessness, is it not possible that in spite of all efforts, within national frontiers and international organizations, the world has still not found the true causes and the right answers? If the self-enforcing mechanisms ensure order and happiness in all spheres of Creation, it ought not take much for us mankind to recognize that In the Light of Truth, in the enlightenment which only truth can shed, mankind have deviated tragically from the way shown in the ordinance, to peace, joy and happiness and I am referring to the Laws of Creation that govern all existence.
NEXT WEEK: WHAT IS THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER?
ENHEARTENING NEWS FROM THE REPS.
It is such good news that Members of the House of Representatives have withdrawn the controversial National Water Resources Bill 2020. They say the Bill which has generated untoward reactions from across the land was being returned to the executive to show that the House is not a rubber stamp. House spokesman told newsmen that the House was being painted as a rubber stamp but that the House is always attentive to gaps created by the executive. “Many have said that the House is a rubber stamp but we have had to battle with the Executive on issues that concern Nigerians.” He pledged that the Reps would always remain on the side of Nigerians, making it plain that the House “is the people’s parliament that will continue to work in the interest of the citizenry. We are committed to ensuring that all we set to pursue are in the interest of Nigerians and they will be pursued in the interest of Nigerians. It is not everything that the Executive sends to us that will sail through.” He mentioned the Water Bill as an example. It is praise-worthy that the Representatives have recognized how very sensitive and divisive the Bill is in a land already dangerously polarized along sectional lines and burdened by sectarian trust deficit.
Water is important in the spiritual and cultural lives in wide areas of the country aside from their total dependence on it for their economic activities. In the South West, the elemental being, Nixies or Water Sprite, regarded as water goddess and called “Yemoja”, is worshipped in practically all major towns and villages in the Zone. There is the yearly Osun Festival in Osogbo. Some ethnic groups in Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers and Ondo in riverine areas generally, live permanently on water, their houses; pathways are on water and so on. Upon alighting from their canoes, they enter their homes on stilt across the river or lagoons. It is beyond someone with little or no understanding of ways of life of such communities to sit in Abuja and give directives or issue licence on their traditional ways of life, the use to which they put their water, for domestic, economic or spiritual purposes. White garment clerics lead their congregants to rivers regularly for one activity or the other. Any such law from Abuja is unacceptable.
The passage of the Bill was also flawed as it was not taken through the necessary legislative procedures of the House. It was not gazetted as required by the House Rule. What the government ought to consider as priority for now is education. The out-of-school children of yester years will likely be mostly the bandits of today and those of today in large numbers out of 13 million, will be the terrorists of tomorrow.
The Guardian
