Lao Tzu's View On Happiness And The Paradoxical Nature Of Happiness

Decent Essays
Welcome back! I hope you have gotten a sense of what the course is going to be. What we 're going to get into before we dive into before we get to the science of happiness is how have the great thinkers thought about happiness and the meaningful life over history. This is really one of the oldest questions that humans have been grappling with, which is how do I lead a meaningful life? What is happiness? How do I cultivate the happiness of people around me? Scientists have gotten into this game relatively late and there have been great thinkers for quite some time who have really grappled with this fundamental question: what is happiness?
I 'm going to give you a quick survey of some of the great thinkers. I 'm sure you have sort of encountered
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The meaning of life may not be necessarily grasped by your rational mind, you have to experience it, let it unfold. I love this quote from the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu that brings into focus the paradoxical nature of happiness and meaning and some counterintuitive notions. In this quote Lao Tzu writes "When man is born he is tender and weak. At death he is stiff and hard. All things, as well as the grass and the trees, tender and subtle while alive, when dead, withered and dried. Therefore, the tender and the weak are the companions of life and the stiff and the hard are companions of death." It 's a little bit paradoxical: weakness and tenderness may be the pathway to life and the Tao and the mysterious force of life. And again, challenging us to put aside preconceptions to find happiness.
Let 's shift continents if you will and move to yet other thinkings 2500 years ago. There was a lot of discussion about what happiness and the meaningful life is. In Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and others beginning 2500 years ago.
One of my favorite approaches to the meaningful life and happiness is offered by the great
Greek philosopher 2500 years ago, Aristotle. In his book Nicomachean Ethics was kind

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