From TheBlaze.com:
Spitzer, author of the new book, “Finding True Happiness,
” has been on a journey to explore a multitude of psychological, philosophical and theological theories about human happiness, telling TheBlaze in an interview this week that it’s essential for people to consider his conclusions.
“We have four fundamental set of desires in us,” he explained, describing the first two levels of happiness as being too focused on the self. “No good end will ever come from level one and level two happiness, if those are the two things that really matter to us.”
The first of these desires is physical in nature and is what Spitzer calls “external material happiness” — a form of contentedness that people experience from eating a delicious bowl of pasta, or from acquiring material possessions.
“There’s a perfectly legitimate form of level one happiness that we all need,” Spitzer said. “Every once in a while a guy ought to have a good bowl of linguine.”
But Spitzer said that problems emerge when people get stuck at level one happiness, where they assume that these material possessions and immediate gratifications are all that there is to finding success and joy. It is then that the priest said that “significant problems will emerge.”
“It’s not enough,” Spitzer said. “You’ve got these other desires in you.” ...
“About 70 percent of our young people will be ego comparative dominance by the time they finish high school,” he said. “If they’re not on top, the feelings of inferiority, judgement, despair [take root], but the winners are no better off. They can never let their true selves be exposed.”
If one ends up stuck at this happiness phase, Spitzer said that he or she isn’t considering, ‘What does God think of me?’”
It’s when one ends up in the third and fourth level, though, that the paradigm shifts quite a bit, Spitzer said, calling the third phase “contributive” and referring to the fourth as “transcendence.”
And:
He said that denying a higher power would mean denying perfect justice, truth, love and beauty — but that’s not all.
“It’s a denial not just of God, it’s a denial of transcendence. You deny transcendent fulfillment,” he said, noting that he believes God has placed a desire in everyone’s heart to seek him out. “We are desperately in need of being in contact with God. God has been in contact with people since the beginning.”
Read the entire article at TheBlaze.com.
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