It is generally believed that source of happiness is connected with more. The more you have the happier you are. Unhappiness flows from having less. More and less both are invariably measured in terms of material acquisition i.e. possessions. That is the reason that individuals, groups and nations constantly search resources in an aggressive manner to appropriate them through means fair and foul in the name of private and public good. This notion is premised on a false assumption that got popularised with the advent of industrial age which glorifies man as a raison d’etre of universe and his planet as the centre of universe. The corollary that follows such a postulate is that the planet man lives on has infinite resources, manifest and hidden. The slogan of limitless resources was incessantly propagated in the 19th and 20th century with a motive to promote the unrestrained consumption of large production, a result of industrialisation. A change in the mode of production gave unprecedented boost to the manufacturing of goods which in turn required a big market. Big market could only be sustained by big sale. Big sale was not possible without creating an insatiable thirst for consumption. Once the careless consumption became a way of habit, it was taken as something natural, something innate, something embedded in human psyche. Consumption thus touted as the benchmark of human worth in the new scheme of things. Conspicuous consumption by ruling classes set the bar on being cultured. The practice was projected as human enrichment to be emulated by the hoi polloi in a race to be accepted as being civilised.

This was not absolutely a new phenomenon. Possessions/consumption has always been a sign of socio-economic status and cultural refinement for the right or wrong reasons. What was new this time was the scale and the penetration of the idea as well as that of practice. Transition from pre-modern to modern era was heavily underpinned by worldview of the new ruling elites that with the induction of machine in the process of production glimpsed the opening up of whole new vistas which held the promise of kind of profit never imagined before. Ideal of happiness somehow has been linked with material possessions and consumption due to historical sense of insecurity man as a species has been suffering from. Sages and wise men in the pre-modern era had the nous to create a countervailing ideal based on the discreet use of resources, sharing the production and avoidance of wasteful consumption.They unambiguously show through their thought and practice that happiness is not a windfall of what a man consumes but rather fruit of wholesome relationships he develops with himself, his fellow beings and nature which sustain totality of life through a vast network of interconnections.

What we see shared by Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Muslims and Sikh mystics is their respect for nature, minimal use of resources and rejection of possessions. They reject possession or private property in the sense of its being used as a tool of exploitation. Exploitation creates inequality which contradicts highly significant component of the vision of mystics by considering individuals of affluent class worthier than others. Possession, they believe, cannot be the yardstick of human worth because all beings and phenomena that constitute life in the widest sense reflect rays of divinity. Remember the encounter between Alexander and “the Indian sages” in Punjab? “On the appearance of Alexander and his army these venerable men stamped with their feet...” writes Greek author Arrian. “Alexander asked them… what they meant by this odd behaviour, and they replied: ’King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us… Ah well. You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of this earth as will suffice to bury you”.

Relevance of mystic wisdom is being discovered at a time when the practice of unbridled consumption has wreaked havoc on nature and its resources increasingly making our planet less liveable. How can we continue to sustain the notion of infinite consumption on a planet which is finite? How can we ensure the flow of unlimited resources in a world that is limited?

Advertisement

The man of modern era is not happier than the man of pre-modern age though he possesses much more in terms of material things. “More” is what poses a serious threat to contemporary life. Modern man in search of “more” makes himself unhappier. In order to have more he has to work more. More work, alienating and alienated, on the one hand dehumanises him and on the other devastates the nature. Aim of working is to have time for leisure pursuits but work leaves modern man little time to have leisure. Man needs to redefine the concepts and relationships he has developed in the course of evolution. Nature of man’s relationships will determine human happiness or its absence, not his increased possessions. Remember “Small is beautiful”? E. F. Schumacher borrowed this phrase from Leopold Kohr, his teacher, to counter the narrative that glorified “big” in the 1970s. Now is the time for us to aver: less is more. If man is content with the less, he will have relaxed society and bountiful nature. Man’s lust for more renders it less by treating more as less in a society driven by unfettered consumerism. Happiness is an ensemble of humanising and humanised relationships carefully nurtured by man.

If you feel experiences of the mystics are airy-fairy stuff, how you would react to what Albert Einstein, one of the greatest scientific minds of all times, says on the issue in question.“A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy”, declares the man of science. Secret of human happiness in our times lies in the recognition of emergent reality that more is less and less is more. — soofi01@hotmail.com