Happiness vs Peace

When i started my journey of Life, the notion which I was made to believe is that 'Happiness" is what you seek and try and attain. However in the course of my journey I have slowly got convinced that Peace is the ethereal thing which is more significant than happiness.

Definitions: 

As per Oxford dictionary

Peace:

Freedom from disturbance; tranquillity:
Mental or emotional calm:

Happiness:

The state of being happy (Feeling or showing pleasure or contentment): 

The difference in meaning between these 2 words took me quite some journey to understand. 

If you look at the definitions I guess the key difference is that Peace is about internal calm and tranquility and happiness is that upward curve or blip which comes and passes away. 

Happiness

Happiness is the state of mind which one reaches post an event which brings some degree of pleasure to ones senses. A good meal, a beautiful scenery, good wine, an event in life which beats expectations or meets expectations like a promotion or a significant salary hike.... etc can lead to happiness. 

But since this is an event driven state of mind, to me this cannot be sustained. The event would come and go....and thus you would be running after one event to another through which you would try and sustain your state of mind and thus try and be Happy.

The extreme manifestation of the 'search for Happiness' is possibly consuming drugs or alcohol which leads to the temporary state of being Happy. But to extend this analogy, you need more and more to stay Happy, and this becomes an unending cycle which finally results in death or rehabilitation. 

Second significant point is Happiness in many cases is an External stimuli. It too some extent is dependent on an injected event from outside over which you have less control. 

Peace

Peace is the trying to achieve a steady state of your mind. It is very internal... though off course external events tend to have a significant bearing on that state. The critical part of achieving Peace, is to be able to slowly cut out the external noise which tends to impact your peace. Make the internal state as much as insulated from external events, especially the negative events which cause the balance to tilt onto the other side. 

This does not mean loosing your emotions or your natural reactions to external events which are significant to you. But slowly try build a resilience layer within you, which acts as a wave breaker, so that the external events does not cause significant disturbing ripples within your internal being. 

Our Vedic chants always end with "Om Shanti".... Peace... Many of the vedic prayers are incantations for attaining or praying for Peace with various elements of the Universe. Peace is central to our religion and the fourth stage of life was to be dedicated for meditation which is an instrument of attaining peace.

Peace is:

More Stable

You can slowly try and take control of your internal state, thus can control your peace

Slowly make choices which help you in enhancing your peace and keep away from events which would negatively impact your state of peace

How to Attain Peace

This would be a subject of a separate blog.... would keep this musing pending for sometime. 

Finally Peace and Happiness

Peace and Happiness will cross paths in many cases. Sometimes peace is enhanced or deepened by an Happy event. The other way is also possible where your peace may be impacted by an unhappy incidence. Death of a near ones, causes unhappiness and in turn may impact your peace and stability to a great extent. 

There are some choices which we get to make at different points of life. Understand anything which can bring you a lot of happiness, on the other hand can bring in lot of unhappiness also. My personal choice would be to avoid making a choice which can be one hand make me happy, but on the other hand can make me unhappy. Faced with such a choice, I would de-risk my peace.....i.e. rather sacrifice on becoming happy against the something which can impact peace. I have made some of these choices, and I am happy that I have being able to protect my frail peace. 

While wishing someone -- I wish for their peace rather than for their happiness.... I think it is also linked to one's nature... possibly a risk taker would gamble for happiness and win at that... but being basically risk averse, I would play for the safer bet of lower stake and go for peace. Not having happiness does not mean that I am unhappy... to explain mathematically, I am on the X axis, or zero happiness, where negative means unhappiness. I am sure there are many people who are both happy and are at peace. They are not mutually exclusive .... but for me it has not worked that way, so I feel "Pursuit of happiness" is better avoided in my case. I guess this is also related to age as well, when you are relatively young, you are more of risk taker, and thus you are at that time pursuing happiness....

Funnily enough when I was getting into my adulthood one of my favourite books was Bertrand Russel's 'The Conquest of Happiness' , and reflecting back at that point I was in a pursuit of happiness - but in course of life, I discovered that it is better to leave it unconquered and strive for something which is more conquerable. But if you go through the great philosopher's work, you would conclude the Conquest of Happiness in many ways leads to the path of Peace. My conclusion is slightly different, for peace, happiness is not mandatory. We definitely strive for events which leads to us being happy, but as a constant quest I would try and walk the path which brings peace. Happiness can be incidental in that path...

There is a philosophical side of happiness and peace..... you can be happy, very happy at a point of 'Mokhsha' when you have nothing more to attain. At that point both happiness and peace meet at the same point. Now again bringing back the mathematical graph... 'Mokhsha' for a normal human being is very difficult to attain... or attained at Infinity..... peace and happiness are hyperbola which meets in Infinity. This is a permanent state of peace and happiness,,, and it is so stable, theoretically it cannot be de-stablized. It is a state we all can strive to gain... and I think in some cases it is possible to gain in your life span.

Intense meditation is said to provide both happiness and calmness (read peace) atleast for some period of time. So many yogis or Gurus who spend larger part of their time in meditation may have reached the infinite state. But this is all conjectural. All I can say is that meditation leads to a peace of extreme serenity for a brief period of time - atleast what I have being able to achieve. One out of ten times I meditate, I feel for a very brief moment that the mind has being freed, and thus you feel a momentary rush of happiness and serenity. As the moment passes away, you are left with a feeling of calmness (peace) which relaxes you, and releases a lot of stress. I would describe the moments that follow as of being at peace (rather of intense happiness).

Surely with practise, and more time spend on this exercise, you can increase the time period (which is now momentary)..... but would that be everlasting 'Moksha' --  I am not so sure.