Happiness

Degrees of satisfaction with one's actual experience compared to desired experience vary from acceptance of what is less-than-desirable, to contentment, joy and ecstatic bliss. Satisfaction involves a state of critical awareness of a standard or norm for experience. There is acceptance and a feeling of comfort with one's self. This experience may be personal and simple, on the physiological and sense levels, up through the emotional, rational, aesthetic, imaginative and other functions; or it may be personal and complex involving the ego in several dimensions, so that happiness as an ego state of awareness may take in unconscious and sub-conscious conditions as well as conscious. Experience may also involve awareness of the states of others, and of society. Dissatisfaction may result if the values or standards held as normative for others and for society are not met. In as much as there may be an innate sense of what is normative for others as there is for oneself (viz freedom from meaningless and unnecessary pain and suffering) human happiness in its fullest development may depend on conscious satisfaction not only with personal experience, but with interpersonal experience and the conditions of societal life as a whole.

The feeling of well-being is currently becoming more important in medicine as the holistic approach gains in popularity and as the interaction between body and mind is starting to be understood. Children suffering from cancer get sent on holidays where they can choose exactly what they want to do and frequently experience an improvement in their physical condition. In the hospice movement, the dying are treated for their symptoms, not with the aim of necessarily curing the condition but in order to make them more comfortable. More care is being taken in preparing pleasant, healthy food and in designing pleasant surroundings, whether for the well or the sick. In general, health is beginning to be seen not just as freedom from disease but as a positive quality where physical, emotional, mental and spiritual states are in harmony.