Sacramento Homeless blog

What is the meaning of life? To be happy and useful. - Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama At the end of his highly-regarded (by critics) and uber-mightily highly-regarded (by me) book in 2006, The Happiness Hypothesis , Jonathan Haidt [pronounced "hite," not "hate," btw. Who'd want to read a book on happiness by a guy named hate?, I ask you.] addresses the ultimate question:  What is the meaning of life, and answers it. A prime area of my recent homeless studies relate to happiness and meaning:  Two things that homeless folk have in short supply.  Because the book is four years old, I think it is OK to, sort of, give away the ending.  Indeed, since the book has been around (but is not dated!), I think it might re-arouse interest in the book to give away the ending.  The ending is in context of the chapters previous, so I've included links and footnotes to explain what Haidt is aluding to here and there. So, here it is, from near the end of The Happiness ...

I don't know what life is, but I do hope that quickly after death we will each find out. An answer you can find in old movies [for example, " Heaven Can Wait " or " The Horn Blows at Midnight "] is that after life you are on a cloud, in a long line, waiting for Angel Gabriel to let you in the gate – or not. Another possiblity is that you are deleted. There is less than nothing after life; you are as much not around as the memory you don't have of yourself before you were born. It can be that you pass through the Bardo , a spooky old place, dream-like and filled with potential terrors, on your way to a next birth, as a human or some other sentient being on this or some other planet or somewhere or somehow in some other universe that you could never imagine. And it can be, that your reborn self comes tagged with lessons that you need to learn from all your prior lives, bringing you pains and pleasures that you deserve. Many of us Buddhists pull out tex...