Poking at the ideas of happiness and pleasure

 Happiness is elusive and often conflated in the mind with pleasure. Why elusive? It has to do with a certain mode of thought that I can slip into at some times, which goes something like this: "If I could just have X, then I'd be happy." A thought of lack, of want. Now-- is it wrong to want things? I don't think so. It's natural to want things, to get things, enjoy things-- and by things I mean not just possessions, but experiences with people, viewing wonderful sights, etc. 'Things' can be intangible.

How conflated? I define pleasure as that temporary positive state. Eating a chocolate is a solid, material example. I eat it, then it's gone. Later I may experience a craving for more-- this can solidify into a feeling of lack, or of deserving another chocolate, or into wanting a chocolate. Happiness is a state of pleasure that is more independent of things. I can be happy both while eating and not eating a chocolate-- the cause is less material in it's root nature.

But wait-- if happiness is just a sort of pleasure that is longer lasting, and less anchored to specific things, then are not happiness and pleasure more gradients of the same thing, rather than distinct things? Hmm. I seem to have written myself into a corner with that.

I don't have direct answers: but these thoughts tell me something about my own thinking. 1. That I rate happiness higher than pleasure. 2. because happiness is also a term for pleasure that is less dependent on circumstance, that I've been using the word happiness imprecisely, to refer to multiple adjacent things(not a problem in my day to day, unless I try and explain myself, as I attempted to do here >.< ) and 3. The point most clear to me from this is that I value that pleasure that is more independent of time and circumstance.

And all things equal, who wouldn't?

But all things are not equal-- a pleasure less dependent is possibly a pleasure with a more intangible (or spiritual) basis. The whole explanation in fact relies on the sketchy dichotomy that things of the 'spirit'(toward intangible) and things of the 'material'(toward tangible) are in fact separate categories. This may be a useful mental action: having the distinct buckets of spiritual and material, but I know this to be a distinction formed in the mind. With a change of perspective, even the most mundane actions become spiritual. Even the most 'lofty' and spiritual practices have a material component.(prayer usually implies a change in posture, or at least the mouthing of words? Even in a spiritual practice with no outward sign, changes in the brain have recently been measured. See Matthieu Ricard's participation in being hooked to a brainscan while doing buddhist mediation.)

The spiritual and material are actually closely linked. Linked but not the same. There is a fuzziness. Refined states of pleasure, or 'spiritual bliss' requires awareness of both ends of the stick.

There is love and there is fear... expansion and contraction... each entity moving in one way, the other way, or pulling both ways...

The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment explains this further.