David Hume's supreme Happiness

"As [Hume] told Hugh Blair, “reading and sauntering and lownging and dozing, which I call thinking, is my supreme Happiness."

Hume held that “friendship is the chief joy of human life,” and Smith proclaimed that the esteem and affection of one's friends constitutes “the chief part of human happiness. 5

...a person of refined taste is able to “place his happiness on such objects chiefly as depend upon himself. 27

Sustainable happiness

What sorts of communities help provide their citizens opportunities for long-term happiness? Are current urban planning methods fostering sustainable happiness? “The new science of happiness indicates that authentic happiness, ...

Aristotle

	Aeon (@aeonmag)
6/8/18, 3:00 PM According to Aristotle, happiness can be found through doing good for others, loving yourself, and is possible for anyone – even those who feel they have lost everything. Last week’s most read: ow.ly/o3wH30kdNNk pic.twitter.com/lijEH3K8UK

"Nature and the Serious Business of Joy"

...A century and a half after Thoreau extolled nature as a form of prayer and an antidote to the smallening of spirit amid the ego-maelstrom we call society — “In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean,” he lamented in his journal — Michael McCarthy considers the role of the transcendent feelings nature can stir in us in a secular world:

They are surely very old, these feelings. They are lodged deep in our tissues and emerge to surprise us. For we forget our origins; in our towns and cities, staring into our screens, we need constantly reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for five hundred generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps fifty thousand or more, living with the natural world as part of it as we evolved, and the legacy cannot be done away with.

brainpickings 

More connection, less self-preoccupation

...All of which suggests that the Buddhist ideal of ego suppression is grounded in neurochemical reality, for the brains of experienced meditators and people undergoing a psychedelic trip display striking commonalities. The more connected we feel to what’s around us, and the less we obsess about ourselves, the happier we are likely to be.

Happiness, it turns out, is not that profound, but then it doesn’t have to be. Pollan describes one intellectual — a professor of philosophy — coming out of his first trip during a clinical trial and summing it up with three timeless words: “Love conquers all.” And here’s how a smoker explained his decision to ditch nicotine after a particularly potent trip: “Because I found it irrelevant.”

In the most moving section of the book, Pollan describes a dying cancer patient named Patrick Mettes, who sat up during his psychedelic treatment and said, “Everyone deserves to have this experience.” Mettes’s widow later described to Pollan the scene at her husband’s deathbed: “He was consoling me.” A 2016 study showed that 80 percent of cancer patients responded positively to psychedelic treatment — and the more intense their trip, the more positive and long-lasting the benefits. “If it gives them peace,” one psychedelic researcher tells Pollan, “I don’t care if it’s real or an illusion.”

Human consciousness is one of the greatest puzzles of existence, and will likely remain so, no matter what psychedelic enthusiasts might promise. In that sense, it probably doesn’t matter whether the doorway to heaven is in the dirt, among the fungi, or whether psychedelic visions are merely the churn of a poisoned brain. That’s the problem with psychedelics. They’re hard to talk about without sounding like an aspiring guru or credulous dolt. Michael Pollan, somehow predictably, does the impossible: He makes losing your mind sound like the sanest thing a person could do.

Tom Bissell reviewing HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
By Michael Pollan

nyt