A stone is happier than a man.

The other day I had cause to wonder if “ignorance is bliss”, and it turned out to be a tough subject. A fellow who has always gone “under the radar” of the system – ie, never having held a job, not caring about a pension plan, with no savings, no money, no success stories to tell, but has always managed to survive somehow, not without some brushes with the authorities, even from landlords! – was labelled as “living happily”, and I was of another opinion about this. If such happiness is offset by worries, concerns and complaints half the time, then it cancels out and cannot be called much of any kind of “happiness”. And then I wondered where “happy” came from, and “feliz” in Spanish as well. It turns out that it simply comes from “hap-“, meaning “chance, fortune, luck”, so “having good fortune”. “Feliz” even comes from felare, which means suckling from the bosom of nature herself, like little calves drinking from their mothers' udders, and whence fellation is derived of course, also known to be quite pleasant, at least for the receiver! But when the suckling is finished and hunger pangs set in again, happiness goes out the window. Basing one’s existence on that kind of happiness is just expecting desires to be satisfied, and we all know this cannot always happen, so that cannot be real happiness. It may seem to some that our non-conformist friend has happily gone through more than half his life now without working, even receiving handouts from others to keep him fed, but this cannot make him into a 100% happy individual. Maybe 50%, but as I say, that gets cancelled out by the -50% of stress, strain and tension at not being happy all the time. In fact, such moments of unhappiness may even be more intense than those few moments of pure joy. After all, a felicitous climax only lasts a few seconds. Then the dull dwell period sets in until the next happy event! Personally, I am more interested in the 90 to 99.99% span of happiness, joy and bliss. That’s the range that really counts. Even a 60% happiness-over-time ratio is good, because of that 10% accrual to your happiness account after subtracting the negative. So, if we are smart fellahs and gals, with intelligent characters and life philosophies, what we go for is something called “joy” or “bliss”, not just happiness as simply a question of good fortune, because that is merely a conditioned human interpretation of an event as being "fortunate" or not. Happiness in this sense can arise from complete stupidity – yes, blissful ignorance – or from an event that simply appears to the mind to be good fortune, and there are hundreds of teaching stories indicating that not all “good luck” is good nor all “bad luck” bad; it all depends on your viewpoint at the time, and what may happen next. 
Yet a stone knows no other way to be, it just rests in its position, resisting and enduring. It has the fortune, fate or lot, to do that, and nothing else. So it is much happier or fortunate than a man, because it complies with and fully accepts its fortune, fate or lot 100% of the time! Man is so mutable that happiness is never completely there; it’s always just round the bend, on the other side of the fence, about to come with another “if” or “when”, or perhaps lost in the mind’s memory of the good ole days, when we were young and innocent... So, busy thoughts keep that happiness in the future or buried in the past. Only stillness can make it appear in the Now, and that comes from deeper down. So Bobby McFerrin was right in singing Don’t Worry, Be Happy. He was quoting the 20th-C Indian mystic Meher Baba (1894-1969). So just by not using thinking, one can start being happy. But to continue on to joy and bliss, more is needed if we don’t want to be just hapless stones…