From the Stacks of Desmond Morris!

Desmond Morris has been and continues to be one of the much-sought-after, delightful reads of all time!

Some of his lovelyyy reads are real unputdownables for ages!

How can one forget his best-seller-ready-reckoner on Body Language, titled, Peoplewatching: The Desmond Morris Guide to Body Language, which still continues to inspire, influence and impact millions of professionals from all walks of life!

Well, there’s yet another book from the pen of Desmond Morris, on ‘Happiness’ that quite attracted my attention, after Prof. Thomas Kuzhivelil George, Deva Madha College, Pala, had recommended it to me big-time!

Prof. Thomas is one avid reader, who’s been giving me such lovelyyy reads over email for quite many years now! And his enthusiasm for books is so soo awe-inspiring and catches up on us quick!

So yess! I’ve started reading the book quite earnestly for the past two days!

It’s titled, The Nature of Happiness and it give us a fascinating insight into What exactly is happiness?

Does it lie in the first sight of a newborn child?

Or the fulfilment of a longed-for ambition?

In The Nature of Happiness, Desmond Morris tackles the question head-on, in his own, inimitable wayyy!

To Desmond, the people who run classes in 'increasing your chances of lasting happiness' might well be surprised by questions such as:

'Why does cocaine make a drug-addict happy?'

'Why does blowing people to bits bring a state of blissful happiness to a suicide-bomber?'

or 'Why does inflicting pain create a surge of happiness in a sadist?'

And yet these are all valid queries if one is to understand the true nature of happiness.

Every kind of happiness must be considered — even those that most of us view as repulsive, anti-social or dangerous.

Only when we scan the whole range of possibilities can we hope to get to grips with the truth of this complex phenomenon.

He offers a thought-provoking exploration of the various myths and realities of all kinds of happiness — from the blissful state of the lover, to the sensual happiness of the hedonist and even the high reached by the drug taker.

The insights in this book will enable you to understand the importance of contentment in your life.

Having read through the first twenty odd pages of this lovelyyy book, I thought of sharing with y’all, some excerpts I loved from this little yet mightily impactful read!

So here goes –

The true nature of happiness is frequently misunderstood. It is often confused with contentment, satisfaction or peace of mind.

The best way to explain the difference is to describe contentment as the mood when life is good, while happiness is the sensation we experience when life suddenly gets better.

At the very moment when something wonderful happens to us, there is a surge of emotion, a sensation of intense pleasure, an explosion of sheer delight — and this is the moment when we are truly happy. Sadly, it does not last very long. Intense happiness is a transient, fleeting sensation.

We may continue to feel good for quite a while, but the joyful elation is quickly lost.

As one cynic put it: life is prolonged misery interrupted by brief moments of happiness.

So what causes these brief interludes?

To find the answer we have to look back at the way our species evolved over a million years.

Our remote ancestors were tree-dwellers feeding mostly on fruits, nuts and insects. Like other monkeys, they did not experience many peak moments in their day-to-day lives.

But then they took a new evolutionary route, away from that of their close relatives.

They abandoned the more gentle, repetitive, fruit-picking way of life in the trees and took to the more strenuous, demanding lifestyle of pack-hunters on die plains. This switch demanded a new mental attitude. There had to be an increase in cooperation, communication, intelligence, courage, and the ability to concentrate for long periods of time on a specific goal.

The cooperation was needed to defeat powerful prey animals. Communication was needed to plan hunting strategies and organize the tactics of die chase and kill. Courage was required; for a puny primate to attempt to become a lethal predator required serious risk-taking of a kind alien to our monkey forebears. At the first sign of danger, the typical reaction of a monkey is to flee up into die safety of the trees. Our ancestors had to repress those panic responses and face up to the hazards of hunting in an entirely new way.

Concentration was needed because, compared with picking a fruit, killing prey is a long-term activity. Our ancestors had to develop concerted, focused persistence of a kind also new to primates.

In order to carry out this dangerous new feeding pattern successfully, we also had to become much more athletic: hungry for vigorous physical activity. Once triumphant, another new element had to be introduced into our social life — we had to develop food-sharing. For some reason best known to their personal therapists, Hollywood film producers always seem to want to portray prehistoric man as a viciously competitive, savagely violent being, forever clubbing his companions over the head in eternal tribal squabbles. Of course, such incidents occasionally took place, and still do, but if they had been the order of the day we could never have survived as a species in the earliest phase of our evolution. Violence within the group had to be the exception to the rule, or there would have been chaos. The dominant mood must have been one of mutual aid, cooperation and sharing. Without it, we could never have prospered.

Reading our newspapers today and watching our television screens, we get the impression that we live in brutal, violent times. But this is a distortion of the truth almost as great as that of the Hollywood producers who gave us the ug-ug, thump-thump version of our primeval ancestors.

If we take into account the population levels we have attained and the extreme level of over-crowding to which we are now exposed, we are really an astonishingly peaceful, amicable species. If you doubt this, try counting the thousands of millions of human beings who woke up this morning and made it through the day without punching someone in the face.

Luckily for our species, most people are like that. Luckily for the newscasters, there is a tiny minority of the 6,000 million of us who do, on rare occasions, throw a brick or explode a bomb — enough, at any rate, to keep the newscast filled.

But we must never lose sight of the fact that the vast majority of us, for most of the time, are much more concerned with the quest for happiness rather than indulging in some kind of cruelty.

Another consequence of our switch to a hunting way of life was a dramatic increase in our curiosity. We developed an almost obsessional urge to explore and investigate the world around us. One sees this in the playfulness of young monkeys, but by the time they are adults it starts to fade. We, on the other hand, extend this childhood playfulness into adult life where it matures into an urge to analyze and classify the elements of our environment. Only in this way could we have developed the necessary knowledge of our tribal hunting grounds and the behaviour of our prey species. As a bonus, our intense curiosity led to inventiveness, our inventions led to innovations, and our innovations led to technological advances.

In our long hunting phase we had made an important biological shift towards pair-bonding. In other words, our ancestors became programmed to fall in love. This was a vital step in the protection of the slow-growing young — especially when you recall that the males were away for long periods of time on the hunt and had to be tightly bonded to their females in order to return to the home base to feed and care for them and their offspring.

In the new urban structure, with specialization and division of labour having led to trading and bargaining as a way of life, it was inevitable that family ties would also become a matter of business rather than love. Arranged marriages became a new trading device. Love bonds that did not suit them were ruthlessly suppressed. More unhappiness spread in this important realm of intimate personal relations.

But the human animal is amazingly resilient. Every time new social trends began to pull us away from the central themes of our biological inheritance, some inner strength in our human nature helped to tug us back again. And the surprising feature of the last ten thousand years of the human story is that it has been a long struggle to return to a social condition similar to that in which we had existed in prehistoric times. Similar, but not, of course, the same. Each new technical advance has meant that we have had to find a new way of playing the game of being human.

to be contd...