Attainment

January 18, 2010, 3:54 pm • Tags: , ,

icon_30Contentment is the experience of satisfaction and being at ease in one’s situation. The source of all mentally created dissatisfaction appears to stem from the ability to compare and contrast experience and find reality as one is living it to be less than ideal. The solution is to seek out ways to either make experienced reality conform to the ideal or to lower expectations to the level of the experience. When one can live in the moment with expectations in harmony with experience, one has achieved the greatest mental contentment possible.

In a Buddhist sense, contentment is the freedom from anxiety, want or need. Buddha’s task was to find the solution to this never ending descent into dissatisfaction or Dukkha. The Buddhist faith is based on the belief that he succeeded. In yoga practice, movement or positions, breathing practices, and concentration can contribute to a physical state of contentment.

Contentment is the goal behind all goals, because once achieved there is nothing to seek until it is lost. A living system cannot maintain contentment for very long as complete balance and harmony of forces means death. Living systems are a complex dance of forces which find a stability far from balance. Any attainment of balance is quickly met by rising pain which ends the momentary experience of satisfaction or contentment achieved.

The American philosopher, Robert Bruce Raup wrote a book Complacency: The Foundation of Human Behavior in which he claimed that the human need for inner tranquility was the hidden spring of human behavior. Dr. Raup made this the basis of his pedagogical theory, which he later used in his severe criticisms of the American Education system of the 1930s.