Kabbalah - What Will Make Us Happy?

Jer Van Netta

Are you happy? Oh, no, not this again.. Most of us would probably like to answer "yes" - and many of us do. We may cite such reasons as having a warm home, a family, a job, food on the table - something not everyone on this planet can claim- and since there are people much worse off than us, then surely we must be happy.

For some, happiness may not be in the picture. They may have given up the notion of happiness, from despair or perhaps to make other people happy- their children, parents, fellow countrymen, and so on.

For optimists, happiness may be just around the corner - just as soon as we finish that degree, get that dream job, get married- then definitely we will become happy.

We may finally get those things, and surely there are great pleasures that come with them, but sometimes it seems that there is still something missing, something we just can't get our hands on.

Perhaps what would really make us happy is the answer to "life, the universe, and everything," as it was put in Douglas Adams' series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where a super powerful computer Deep Thought was designed to answer just that. It took 7½ million years for it to compute the answer, which came out "42" - a perfect example of the GIGO phenomenon (Garbage In Garbage Out), meaning that the Ultimate Question was itself not known in order to be asked, hence the nonsense answer 42.

How can we ever begin to put the question about "life, the universe, and everything" into an answerable question about what will make us happy? Perhaps we can turn to Abraham Maslow, a psychologist, whose famous theory is still being used today to motivate people to do things - and be happy doing them.

The theory he came up with is called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, a pyramid of increasing levels of needs that humans satisfy one after another. From the most basic to the most complex, the needs go like this: physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self actualization needs. The lowest needs must be satisfied in order for the higher need to be triggered into action.

So, it works something like this - once we have satisfied our desire to have food and water (the physiological needs), we will wish to satisfy our safety needs. These may be physical or interpersonal, such as having a stable job. Once that is achieved, we will want to satisfy our social needs for love, affection, and belongingness. After that, we will be interested in gaining the respect and recognition of others, the esteem needs. And finally, the highest need we can get to is the self- actualization need, the need to be fulfilled, to grow, to use our abilities to the fullest.

Looking at this theory we might conclude that in order to be happy we simply have to climb up the needs ladder and satisfy the highest need we can have - the self actualization need. Then we'll simply run out of needs to fulfill and therefore be happy. However, even with so many successful, smart, and powerful people in the world, few if any of them seem to run out of needs and become completely happy. Where else can we look?

The ancient wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us that we can never become completely fulfilled by the corporeal pleasures in Maslow's Hierarchy. To become happy we do have to fulfill our desires, because we are, in essence, a desire - a desire to receive pleasure. Many of the desires Kabbalists talk about can be found in Maslow's hierarchy: physical desires, wealth, power, fame, and knowledge. Kabbalists tell us, however, that there is another desire that Maslow does not include- the desire for spirituality.

What is "spirituality"? It is a force that creates, influences and cares for all aspects of life. According to Kabbalah, it already exists inside of us, but is hidden and dormant. When it begins to awaken, we are no longer satisfied by the rungs of Maslow's ladder. We are then driven to seek spirituality, the meaning of life. To understand and sense it, we must transform our very nature. Only then will we fulfill the purpose of Creation.

So are we happy? Based on the teachings of Kabbalah, the answer is no. And we will not be truly happy until we stop searching in the material world and start searching within. In other words, happiness will come when we completely attain the answer to "life, the universe, and everything", which, fortunately, will not take us 7½ million years to achieve.